Commentary

Email Tries Hard: How Teams Manage Their Workflows

Here’s some good news for email teams. 

Email is by far seen as the most effective marketing channel: 41% of marketeers say so, versus 16% apiece for social media and paid search, according to the 2023 State of Email Workflows Report. 

Of course, the respondents are email marketers themselves, so they may be biased. Still, 30% say they will spend up to 15% more to integrate email with other channels this year.  

And give them credit: they are coping with several bottlenecks in the email process, including:

  • Building — 41% 
  • Designing — 40%
  • Testing — 39%
  • Collecting feedback — 35%
  • Content creation — 34% 
  • Stakeholder buy-in — 32% 

Litmus surveyed 440 email marketers worldwide. These respondents describe their email marketing responsibilities as follows: 

  • Email legal and compliance — 2% 
  • No experience or involvement with email marketing — 2% 
  • Email Deliverability — 4% 
  • Digital marketing with some oversight/involvement with email — 6% 
  • Email operations — 7%
  • Email design — 8%
  • Email content and copywriting — 9%
  • Email program management — 9%
  • Email development — 10%
  • Email strategy and planning — 11%
  • All of the above — 22% 

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This study shows that most email chores require a great deal of thoughtful work.  

Take onboarding. Companies acquire email subscriptions in several ways, placing forms in the following spots: 

  • Home page — 37% 
  • Social media pages — 33%
  • Other pages on website — 33% 

And they are applying automation to these tasks: 

  • Onboarding or post-purchase emails — 55%
  • Customer reactivation or winback — 31% 
  • Subscriber reengagement — 32%

In addition, brands are likely to automate:

  • Birthday, anniversary, or other milestone — 48% 
  • Subscriber reengagement — 34% 
  • Rating, review or net promoter score (NPS)—31%
  • How do companies gauge success? The top three email marketing KPIs (or goals) are: 
  • Grow sales/revenue — 41% 
  • Boost customer retention — 41%
  • Generate MQL or SQL — 40% 

Looking forward, the respondents say these are their marketing priorities for the next 12 months:

  • Expand how you use personalization — 55% 
  • Automate more aspects of your email program — 48%
  • Refine testing email measurement/performance — 44%
  • Improve ROI of email program — 38%
  • Improve/better understand deliverability — 37%
  • Streamline workflows/approvals — 36% 
  • Improve data management — 36%
  • Implement design systems — 22% 
  • Invest in new email tools — 19% 


The survey apparently was conducted before AI became a universal topic.

However, Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection doesn’t seem to be much of a concern: Only 20% have invested in an analytics tool to track the impact, and 60% don’t intend to bother.

 

 

 

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