• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, July 28, 2022

Email marketers lack confidence. Only 18% rate themselves as best-in-class, while 69% say they’re somewhat successful and 13% say they are failing at it, according to Email Marketing Strategies, Tactics & Trends, a study by Ascend2.

But they have every reason to improve: 84% agree that email will be critical to the success of their overall marketing strategy in the coming year, and 35% strongly concur. 

In line with that, they plan to leverage these trends:

• Mobile-friendly design — 53% 
• Personalization (beyond the name) — 53% 
• Email marketing automation — 50%
• Interactive content — 39% 
• Privacy/security features — 33%
• Accessible design — 26%
• Revamping of metrics/KPIs/Attribution to track performance — 25% 
• Use of AI — 16% 

Despite those ambitious plans, email marketers face these challenges:

• Increasing engagement — 63% 
• Measuring performance/ROI — 44% 
• Creating overall strategy — 38% 
• Integrating email data with other data — 29%
• Improving deliverability — 22% 
• Improving accessibility — 17% 
• Complying with regulatory requirements — 10% 

In addition, only 17% say their current stack allows them to measure the impact of email on their overall marketing performance. And 51% indicate they have partial capability. But 23% have very little, and 9% none at all. 

Here are the KPIs that will most effectively measure performance in the year ahead:

• Return-on-investment (ROI) — 38% 
• Conversion rate — 36% 
• Click-through rate (CTR) — 35%
• Click-to-open rate (CTOR) — 34%
• Deliverability rate — 25% 
• Open rate — 24%
• List growth rate — 19% 
• Unsubscribe rate — 14% 
• Bounce rate — 9%

What will they test? 

• Message (e.g. greeting, body, closing) — 40%
• Subject line — 36% 
• Content (short/long, plain text/html, etc.) — 31% 
• Personalization (beyond the name) — 30% 
• Timing and frequency — 30% 
• Calls-to-action (CTAs) — 30% 
• Layout & images — 27% 
• Landing pages — 24% 
• Interactive content — 20% 

In the end, it may call come down to AI. Here are the most useful ways to use this tool:

Email retargeting — 36%

Craft personalized newsletters — 36%

Understand customer lifecycle — 31%

Improve deliverability — 31%

Clean email list — 28% 

Automate email copy — 26%

Optimize the sending time — 20%

Create subject lines — 20%

Make recommendations — 17%

Ascend2 surveyed 404 marketers during the week of July 17 - 25, 2022. Of those, 30% work in B2B companies, 45% in B2C and 25% in B2B and B2C equally. In addition, 14% are in firms with more than 500 employees, 20% in outfits with 50 to 500 and 66% in those with fewer than 50.