• by Ray Schultz , May 31, 2019

Email remains the top marketing channel, and also the easiest one in which to conduct personalization, according to Cross Channel Messaging And Today’s Marketer, a study by MessageGears.

Of the companies polled, 83% send marketing messages via email. And 44% use email for more than half of those communications. In addition, 34% attribute more than half their revenue to email.

Social is the second most widely used channel, cited by 65.7%,. Third is direct mail (52.9%), and fourth is SMS (43.%).

Moreover, 75% say that creating personalized messages in email is easy. In contrast, 54% say SMS is not easy in this regard, and 53% feel the same way about push.

Email personalization is seen as easy by firms that send 200 million emails a month, and is viewed that way by 71% of those that send 10-50 million. 

However, nearly identical numbers feel that the channels are frustrating for building campaigns -- 29.4% for email, 28.4% for social and 24.5% for push.

And there are challenges within companies, such as siloization.

Of the marketers polled, 74% say their cross-channel teams are mostly siloed. And 100% of those who consider personalization difficult are also siloed.

To conduct this research, MessageGears spoke with firms that send 10 million or more emails per month.