• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, June 10, 2022

Email marketers sent more email last year than the year before, and most achieved better results. But they faced hurdles -- many of them process-related, according to the 2022 Email Marketing Benchmark Report from Knak. 

Of the companies polled, 71% sent more emails than the prior year, versus 60% that had increased volume in 2020.  

The average deliverability rate was 93%, down 3.2% from the prior year. But medium-sized firms reported a 94% rate, versus 93% for large companies and 92.5% for small ones. Overall, 37% saw their delivery rates rise.  

In addition, 51% saw their open rate increase, with an average of an increase of 3% to 24%. The impact of Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection, which took effect in September, is unclear. 

And, 44% pulled a higher click-through rate. The average click-through was 10% -- a 4.4% hike over the prior year. But 19% saw their click-through rates decline. Large firms generated 11%, and for smaller firms the rate was  9%.  

Unsubscribe rates remained flat at 0.3%. Larger firms had a higher rate -- 0.5% -- perhaps because they send more email. 

All that said, marketing teams faced many challenges in getting their emails out the door: 

• Creating and implementing new designs — 45% 
• Focusing on strategic operations — 40% 
• Speed — 24% 
• Approvals — 32%
• Collaboration — 26% 
• Decentralizing campaign execution — 18%
• Maintaining brand standards — 18% 
• Rendering — 16%
• Managing agency spend — 5%

And, teams were daunted by these obstacles to email creativity: 

• Limited design resources — 43% 
• Lack of in-house skills — 30%
• Difficulty of coding — 26% 
• None of the above — 23% 
• Approval process — 18% 
• Copywriting — 17%
• Agency process — 7% 

How are marketers creating emails? Mostly templates:  

• Templates — 56%
• Email creation platform — 25%
• Code emails by hand in-house — 12%
• Agencies/Consultancies — 7%

The features used in emails include:

• Personalization — 59%
• Background images — 50% 
• Custom Fonts — 37% 
• Dynamic Content — 35%
• Emojis — 29% 
• Animated GIFs — 27% 
• Interactive Emails — 12%
• CSS Animations — 8%
• AMP Script — 6% 
• Artificial Intelligence — 4%

In another finding, 35% switched their marketing automation platform in the last two years or are looking at a new one. They are using: 

• HubSpot — 57.8% 
• Salesforce Pardot — 16.2% 
• Adobe Marketo Engage — 9.4% 
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud — 6.9% 
• Oracle Eloqua — 5.6%
• Acoustic — 1.1% 
• Adobe Campaign — 0.94% 
• Oracle Responsys — 0.42%

Meanwhile, 50% built more landing pages for their emails last year, averaging 20. But 69% rarely create landing pages, and 23% rely on their web teams to do so, which prevents a personal marketing touch. 

As for speed, 44% can get emails to market in hours, 39% in days, 11% within minutes and 6% in weeks.  

For landing pages, 45% say they can get them to market in hours, 33% in days, 14% in minutes and 6% in weeks. 

Canada-based Knak surveyed 200 marketing professionals, including operations leaders and specialists (40%), digital marketers (7%), marketing generalists (29%) and marketing executives (!0%). 

Of this sample, 63% work in B2B, 29% in a bybrid of B2B and B2C and 8% in B2C exclusively. And 17% work at companies with 100 employees or less, 41% in firms with 101-1,000 employees, and 32% in organizations with 1,001-10,000+.