Dart’s data: the email marketing issue

Email marketing is a vital component in your marketing arsenal, which can be used to build loyalty, trust and brand awareness. Yet despite this, a recent study has found that 40 percent of marketers do not have analytics in place to determine inbox placement rates, while another report says only 17 percent of online retailers implement a basket abandonment email.

Email intelligence provider Return Path, in conjunction with The Relevancy Group, surveyed more than 300 senior marketing executives and found that more than 40 percent of them do not have analytics in place to determine inbox placement rates for their email campaigns. This means that two-fifths of marketers have no idea what happens to their email after they hit send. The report also found that less than a quarter of marketers (23 percent) analyse competitors’ email marketing campaign performance, despite research indicating that doing so increases overall revenue from a campaign by 25 percent or more.

Of the marketers surveyed, 65 percent said that access to the right data is a challenge for their organisations with nearly a third stating that they do not know how to access data when it’s time to evaluate a campaign.

Further, although it’s widely acknowledged that relevancy rules, more than half of those surveyed (55 percent) are unable to perform any audience segmentation meaning they blast the same message to every subscriber, regardless of their previous purchases.

Staying with the email marketing trend, behavioural email provider RedEye in its fifth Behavioural Email Benchmark Study shows marketers are missing an opportunity to engage with users to improve conversion. The study researched the pre-purchase email communication used by of the likes of Amazon.co.uk, Play.com, Miss Selfridge, H&M and Homebase. It found that 19 percent of the top online retailers in the UK don’t allow precheckout registration, of which 9 percent don’t allow any type of prepurchase email communication. From those retailers allowing prepurchase registration, 78 percent sent a specific welcome email with 13 percent of these firms implementing a full welcome programme consisting of more than one trigger.

RedEye also discovered that among its clients that implement a basket abandonment programme, emails achieve an average conversion rate of 17 percent. Those marketers using a basket abandonment follow-up email convert, on average, an additional 14 percent of users. Surprisingly though, the survey found that only 17 percent of online retailers currently made use of a basket abandonment email.--JD