3 stats that will force you to re-examine your email marketing strategy

I have here some piping hot statistics on email marketing. Econsultancy recently released their 10th Annual Email Marketing Industry Census and overall, the report is quite on the up and up for email marketing. Even though the report is quite expansive and exhaustive with 80+ pages of insights, I’m going to focus on three very crucial email marketing statistics that will force you to re-examine your email marketing campaign and shake things up a bit.

So without further ado, here are the three stats for you to consider:

1. Email yet again brings the highest ROI

Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat take a backseat, email yet again rules the roost with 27 percent marketers reporting excellent ROI and 46 percent reporting good ROI from their email marketing campaigns. That’s a total of 73 percent happy marketers. Twenty two percent reported they saw average results from their campaign and only 5% were not happy with their email marketing ROI. This means 95 percent marketers are satisfied with email marketing ROI.

Compare this with paid search – only 59 percent marketers are happy with the outcome of their paid search campaigns. Online display advertising fared worst with only 34 percent marketers happy with it.

To all those who spoke and wrote about the death of email marketing, please take a moment to remember what Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, had to say about computers in 1943:

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."

Oh and yes, one more minor detail, the number of respondents happy with their email marketing ROI went up to 66 percent. So basically the sun is shining more than usual on email marketing.

2. Marketers are still investing the least of their marketing budget in email

Email marketing has been time and again proven to be one of the best weapons in the online marketing arsenal. Nevertheless, marketers are still not fully appreciative of its potential. This year the marketing budget allocated for email marketing is just 15 percent even though email accounts for 23 percent of sales.

The reasons for sidelining email marketing could by myriad. One reason could be businesses assuming that millennials prefer communication via social media or other fancier platforms to emails. However, this has been proven wrong time and again. 

Another reason deterring companies might be the time taken to put together an email newsletter compared to time taken to create a social media post. It takes 6-8 hours to create an email or a newsletter campaign.

But this is no longer a problem – today, the market is quite literally saturated with email creation and sending tools. There are many tools to help you create emails in a jiffy with readymade templates, customizable newsletters and stock images. However, a complete email marketing solution such as GetResponse goes a step ahead and also allows you to create highly-convertible landing pages. This takes the pain and guesswork out of email marketing and makes your campaigns look like they have been created by a professional designer.

Actually, there’s no real reason for marketers to not invest more in email marketing.

3. Automation and personalization are the two largest areas of marketers’focus

 When marketers were asked what their main areas of focus were when it comes to email marketing, the top five answers were unsurprisingly automation, analytics, planning, segmentation and personalization. Of these, automation and personalization saw the highest jump of 5 percent from last year; 34 percent marketers said they will focus on automation as compared to 29 percent last year and 22 percent named personalization as opposed to 17 percent last year. Nineteen percent of marketers will also focus on campaign optimization and testing.

It is no secret that many campaigns have seen outstanding outcomes from automation, personalization, and testing. Email automation improves productivity and reduces error, personalization increases open rates and A/B behavioral testing improves your overall campaign performance. Basically, they are the foundations on which you can lay your email marketing campaign and get stalwart results. A well-developed email marketing tool should take care of all your emailing needs including mobile-friendly layouts, auto-responding, scheduling and frequency, list quality, segmentation, analytics and behavioral response tracking. If you are not using one, start doing it now!

What does your email marketing plan look like?

The census report contains responses from over a thousand marketers who shared their plans for the year 2016. Compare these figures with your own marketing campaign. Have you allocated appropriate budget for email marketing? Are you focusing on automation and personalization? How many hours are you dedicating to email creation and analytics? If the answer is less than satisfactory, try allocating more budget to email marketing and stirring things up a little.

According to Tim Watson, Email Marketing Consultant at Zettasphere, “combining automation and broadcast, and using behavior to drive both, is the current gold standard for email.” This indirectly means that marketers who don’t pay attention to the current standard will slowly perish. The writing on the wall is clear. The future for you is golden only if you focus on personalization, automation and behavioral emails. So make sure you focus on all three and improve your email campaigns.