When Email Marketing Campaigns Are Just Mailing It In
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When Email Marketing Campaigns Are Just Mailing It In
Most businesses lack a consistent way of maintaining their email database or incorporating personalization techniques into their email campaigns. -
Exchange Errors
33% of survey respondents do not know how flawed their customer-focused emails are. On average, they believe 20% of their email database is invalid or inaccurate. -
Red Flags
37% said spam "trap hits" are a sign of customer-focused email deliverability issues, while 29% cite having difficulties reaching the inbox. -
Biggest Consequences of Poor Email Deliverability
Inability to communicate with the subscriber: 41%, Poor customer service: 24%, Regulatory hurdles: 22%, Unnecessary costs: 22%, Lost revenue: 15% -
Email Oversight, Part I
55% of survey respondents said their company validates new email addresses to manage email databases, and 45% engage in reactivation campaigns for inactive subscribers to do so. -
Email Oversight, Part II
41% remove "hard bounces" from email databases to manage them, and 39% suppress inactive email subscribers to do so. -
Sanitization Plan
21% conduct daily batch processing to pursue data cleansing, and 20% do so in real-time at the point of capture. -
Personal Issue
52% are concerned about customer privacy control with respect to customer email management. -
Augmented Experience
50% said increasing the personalization of emails would be a great way to improve these interactions with subscribers, while 43% said having better customer intelligence would do so. -
Success Factors
46% said they measure an email campaign's success by tracking the number of leads/opportunities created from the effort, while 45% monitor revenue generated from the campaign. -
Most Popular Channels Used to Collect Email Addresses
Point of sale: 70%, Website: 70%, Events: 42%, Mobile apps/sites: 41%, Call center: 36%
Despite the surge of business-to-consumer interactivity in social media, organizations still vastly depend on email to connect with customers. However, a large portion of customer-focused email databases are believed to be either invalid or inaccurate, according to a recent survey from Experian Data Quality. Findings reveal an abundance of "improvement areas" which require the attention of both CIOs and their company's digital marketing teams: There are too many "spam hits" and failed attempts to reach consumers' inboxes—common email deliverability issues that can result in poor customer service, unnecessary expenses and even regulatory fallout. Customer privacy control, of course, remains a key area of concern. Beyond the pain points, CIOs can also work closely with marketing to deliver new ways to improve the personalization of the email customer experience—which is now considered a must have to ensure the success of these efforts. "Companies continue to rely on email to communicate with customers in a meaningful way and drive business," said Thomas Schutz, senior vice president and general manager of Experian Data Quality. "However, the majority of businesses are not maximizing this channel … (Most) do not have a consistent way of maintaining their email database or incorporating personalization techniques into their emails. That means they are facing deliverability challenges and a smaller number of customers interacting with their messages. By making simple changes to data quality practices, email marketers can have not only a better email database to send messages to, but also better analytics for segmentation and personalization." More than 200 U.S. business professionals took part in research.