• by Ray Schultz , September 26, 2018

Retailers are lagging in providing a superior email experience, according to Customer Experience - Email Marketing, a study by Holistic Email Marketing, co-sponsored by Liveclicker.

On average, retailers generated scores of 3.46/9 for helpfulness, 2.08/9 for personalization and 2.60/9 for being customer focused. A perfect score would have been 9/9.

The results show that “brands have a long way to go to orient their emails to customer service rather than customer selling,” writes author Kath Pay, a consultant with Holistic Email Marketing.

Holistic studied hundreds of email messages sent to UK residents in an effort to determine the level of Customer Experience Email (CX Email Marketing), an approach that it says helps customers achieve their goals. It studied three emails from each brand.

On helpfulness, 54% of the brands scored between 0-3, 41% between 4-6 and 5% between 7-8

If anything, they fared even worse on personalization with 74% of the brands scoring from 0-3,  20% from 4-6 and 6% between 7-9.

And for customer-focused results, 67% scored from 0-3, 29% from4-6 and 4% from 7-9.

“We were encouraged to see that helpfulness ranks the highest among these three factors, although the lower score for customer-focused tells us that marketers might still be couching their helpful content in feature-driven terms rather than by explaining benefits,” Pay continues.

None of the 82 brands scored consistent rates for each campaign, reflecting a marketing program that includes both broadcast messages and triggered emails that reflect customer behavior.

In addition, 67% of those with higher read rates posted increases between 102% and 468%.