Email: Still the brightest star in the marketing sky

Over the last 2 years, the marketing technology landscape has been shaken by several innovations and media-mix strategies, which have opened new opportunities to contact and engage with customers.

The 2018 Email Marketing Industry Census, published by Econsultancy and Adestra, is based on more than seven hundred marketers’ opinions, as well as insights from leading email marketing experts based in both Europe and North America.

Once again, email marketing has emerged as the most highly-rated marketing channel: indeed, 74% of client-side marketers rated email as either an “excellent” or a “good” tool to drive ROI.

Email is a port in the storm of the latest turbulence seen recently by marketers: “During a period of change for many in the marketing industry… It’s reassuring to see that email remains the central strand for any multichannel marketing campaign” said Rachel Aldighieri, Managing Director at DMA.

But the game is getting harder: competition is more intense and more marketers than last year have rated the performance of their company’s email campaigns as “average” or even “poor”. Revenue is also down three percentage points on last year to 19%.

Is this perception correct? Are marketers looking at the right metrics? The answer seems to be negative.

The data suggests that many companies rely solely on the most easily available reference points for performance, click-through rate (91%) and open rate (78%), which are not able to show the bigger commercial picture: “When marketers were asked about measuring the success of their campaigns, just one in five are able to equate earnings and, therefore, an accurate value of the returns email can generate” as Rachel Aldighieri emphasised.

Fortunately, marketers are now starting to pay closer attention to conversion rate (67%), as well as earnings per email (25%) – both metrics that are directly related to commercial uplift.

As highlighted by Jenna Tiffany, Founder and Strategy Director at Let’s Talk Strategy, it is important to note that marketers are “able to demonstrate the value that we all know email provides as a revenue-generating digital marketing channel [as this] will ensure that email gets the budget it deserves to optimise the channel truly”.

However, research from the DMA suggests there are still challenges to effective email marketing. Rachel Aldighieri concludes: “Email is and continues to be a key touchpoint and the universal identifier for any marketer. There are, however, barriers to effective use of email. For example, many of those surveyed agreed with our Marketer email tracker 2018 report published earlier this year that resource, time and technological limitations are key barriers to getting the most out of the channel”.

To read more about the research from Econsultancy and Adestra, visit: https://econsultancy.com/reports/email-census

Moreover, if you are interested in receiving a rapid orientation of the key elements of successful and compliant email marketing, visit the latest DMA’s Email Guide.