I’ve got some interesting statistics here that could lead you to reshape your marketing priorities. Econsultancy recently published their 10th Annual Email Marketing Industry Census, and things are looking positive. The report is probably longer than you want to read (over 80 pages of insights), so we’ve listed three key points for you take away with you.
1. Email Brings the Highest ROI
Platforms such as Facebook may have huge, growing user bases, but email marketing topped this list with 27 percent of marketers reporting excellent ROI and 46 reporting good ROI from their campaigns. Together, that makes up a sizeable majority of happy marketers.
Twenty-two percent reported average results and just 5 percent were unhappy with their campaigns. All in all, that’s 95 percent satisfied in their campaign performance.
This figure gains weight in comparison to paid search campaigns; only 59 percent of marketers were happy with the outcome of their marketing efforts. Online display performed even worse, with only 34 percent satisfied with results.
2. Marketers still invest the least of their budget on email
For years, email marketing has proved to be among the most useful weapons in an online marketer’s arsenal. However, most marketers still do not make effective use of it. This year, average marketing budget allocated for email is just 15 percent, even though email makes up 23 percent of sales.
The average marketer spends just 15 percent of their marketing budget on email.
The could be several reasons for this underuse of email marketing. One reason could be an increased focus on social media marketing to target the millennial market. Another reason might be the relative time is takes to compose a marketing email when compared to a post on a social network. It can easily take 6-8 hours to set up an email campaign.
The time taken to put together a marketing email is becoming a less-important factor, thanks to the intuitive email marketing platforms that are available today.
3. Marketers focussing on automation and personalization
When surveyed marketers were asked where they would be focussing their efforts within email marketing, the top five answers were what you might expect: automation, analytics, planning, personalization and segmentation. Of these areas, personalization and segmentation saw the largest year-on-year jump; both up five percent. Up from 22 percent last year, 34 percent of marketers said automation will take most of their focus, while 22 percent named personalization as their key area of focus, an increase from 17 percent in 2015.
Personalization emails leads to increased open rates.
There’s no denying email campaigns have had huge success implementing automation, personalization and testing. Automation improves productivity and keeps the process free of errors, personalization helps to increase open rates, and A/B testing improves your campaign’s overall performance. Take care of these core ingredients and you can expect a successful campaign.
How does your email marketing campaign compare?
Over 1000 marketers contributed to the trends identified in the census report. How does your email campaign compare to these figures? Are you focussing on the same key areas? If you think you’re not doing enough in this area, you might want to consider increasing your email budget to allow for more time spent on personalization, automation and testing. Focus on each of them and you’ll achieve better results.