• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, October 27, 2022

Enterprise firms are prolific email marketers. And they’re good at it, judging by Email Marketing: New Research for the Enterprise Marketer, a study from Outward Media (OMI) conducted by Ascend2.  

Of the enterprise marketers polled, 94% agree that executing an effective email program is critical to their overall marketing strategy, with 53% saying they strongly concur.

And 95% say they’re successful at it, 28% very much so, or best in class. Only 5% rate themselves as unsuccessful. This is a higher success rate than those seen in some other disciplines.  

But, as usual, challenges abound. The greatest ones are:

• Increasing engagement — 58% 
• Measuring performance/ROI — 47% 
• Integrating email data with other data — 36%
• Improving deliverability — 33%
• Creating overall strategy — 27%
• Improving accessibility — 26% 
• Complying with regulatory/compliance requirements — 23% 

Challenges aside, marketers plan to leverage these trends in their email program in the year ahead:

• Email marketing automation — 64% 
• Mobile-friendly design — 58% 
• Personalization (beyond the name) — 54%
• Interactive content — 52%
• Privacy/security features  —41%
• Revamping metrics/KPI/attribution to track — 38% 
• Accessible design — 35% 
• Use of AI — 24%

Do marketing tech stacks allow measurement of email’s impact? To some degree:

• Extensively — 36% 
• Partially — 52% 
• Very little — 9% 
• Not at all — 2%

Continual A/B testing allows marketers to see what is working—and what isn’t—in an email program. Here are the most important elements to test: 

• Personalization (beyond the name) — 38% 
• Timing and frequency — 38%
• Calls-to-action (CTAs) — 36%
• Content (short/long, plain text/HTML, etc.) — 33% 
• Message (e.g. greeting, body copy, closing) — 32% 
• Subject line  —28% 
• Layout & images — 26% 
• Interactive content — 20%
• Landing pages — 20%

Can AI be useful in email marketing? Yes, in these ways:

• Email retargeting — 39% 
• Understand customer life cycle — 39%
• Improve deliverability — 34% 
• Craft personalized newsletters — 32%
• Optimize the sending time — 28%
• Clean email list — 27% 
• Automate email copy — 26%
• Create subject lines — 22% 
• Make segmentations — 20%

And how do they measure the success of their email programs? They do it through:

• Click-through-Rate — 46%
• Return-on-investment — 42%
• Conversion rate — 36%
• Click-to-open rate — 34%
• Deliverability rate — 26%
• List growth rate — 24%
• Open rate — 20%
• Unsubscribe rate — 19% 
• Bounce rate — 14%

Ascend2 surveyed 133 marketers who work for companies with 500 or more employees.

The full survey can be found here.