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.