Email marketers face numerous challenges, many of which are different today than they have been in past years. Let's take a look at a broad overview of the email marketing world in 2015, based on a recent Relevancy Group survey of email marketing executives, as well as hot areas in which email marketers intend to focus their energy.
Email marketing's complete opportunity remains untapped
Although there has been much progress over the last decade and a half since the inception of commercial email marketing solutions, marketers have yet to fully embrace the opportunity that this channel presents. Businesses know that email marketing is profitable. However the benefits gained from email marketing do not come without some challenges. Marketers are not using all of the tools that are available to them. Organizational dysfunction and data integration challenges get in the way of tapping into all of the features and functions in leading ESP solutions.
Many marketers still deploy ill-equipped homegrown solutions
The gap between those who do email marketing very well and those who just do email marketing remains as wide as ever. Much of this difference is driven by the divide in the tools that marketers are using to deploy email campaigns. An estimated 47 percent of companies are still deploying emails via homegrown email solutions. These in-house solutions are typically so customized that they do not offer the functionality necessary to optimize marketing programs and meet stake-holder needs. And they are often "frozen in time," having been built years earlier and left alone since that time.
However, the majority of marketers use an ESP in some fashion. Some marketers use these ESPs' SaaS/cloud solutions in combination with on-premise applications, and others use multiple ESP solutions. Over the course of time, however, more marketers are turning to SaaS/cloud based ESPs to meet their email marketing needs.
Use of ESP services is high among email marketers
Marketers' utilization of value-added services is strong and expected to grow over the next 12 months. Of course a heavy reliance on email production services is to be expected, but there's growing use of services like creative and strategy. Sixty-seven percent of marketers are currently using creative services, and another 23 percent expect to do so in the next 12 months. The increased use of creative services is in part due to the responsive design and mobile marketing formats that marketers must increasingly use. A growing reliance on strategic services is driven by email marketing's complexity as marketers aspire to centralize customer data to optimize mailings and improve message relevancy.
Marketers that shun ESP services feel that they have adequate resources
The majority of marketers not looking to their ESPs to provide services believe that they can do these things better themselves. Thirty-five percent stated that they know their market better than an external provider. Twenty-six percent cited in-house staff and knowledgeable resources as a reason not to leverage the resources at their email partners. Additionally, marketers look to ESPs to demonstrate specific industry knowledge in order to win their business. This criteria surfaces time and again when marketers are asked about their overall criteria when selecting an ESP.
Marketers are challenged to coordinate across channels
Email marketers' challenges go beyond how they are (or are not) using available data to better segment their email campaigns. Our survey revealed that the other challenges fall into three broad buckets: having enough people and the right people, coping with inadequate multichannel and campaign coordination, and finding budget to fund initiatives. The No. 1 challenge -- creative content development -- can be the fall-out from all of these areas.
None of these challenges is impossible to address on your own; however, partnering with the right ESP can make resolving them that much faster and easier. But doing so requires money -- a challenge for 22 percent of the survey respondents. But in email marketing, it's still true that you need to spend money to make money. Your program will make you more money if you invest in one of the leading EPSs and use it to help solve these problems.
You can download a full free copy of The Relevancy Group's 2015 ESP buyer's guide, featuring a deeper dive into the above survey results, here and here.
Chris Marriott is the vice president of services and principal consultant at The Relevancy Group.
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