Email, Email, Everywhere

Email, email, every where,

And all the responses did shrink;

Email , email , every where,

Nor any drop to drink.

With over 10% of marketing budgets being devoted to email in 2014, and 2015, email marketing is not going away anytime soon. In nearly every industry, email marketing is nearly always the big channel of choice in the mix of multichannel marketing projects. The marketing vendor landscape is filled with “Marketing Clouds” or platforms that are built on the foundations of email marketing. There is good reasons for this. Email marketing is scalable, spurs demand generation, promotes engagement, drives transactions and aids in customer retention. Email marketing offers one of the most efficient, effective and measurable ways to connect with customers, making it high on the priority list for multichannel marketers.

Yet, marketers admit they have much room to grow with just the basic fundamentals of email. In our Multichannel Marketing survey, Multichannel Marketing Survey Results 2015: Marketers Double Down on Real-Time Strategies, over 70% percent of marketers admitted they were sending tired “batch and blast” messaging and finding that it was declining in effectiveness. Every e-mail a marketer sends needs to rise above the noise level of every single other e-mail in a customer’s inbox; permission based, spam, mom or otherwise. To do this, marketers need have to have some purpose in mind, some context, not just the companies purpose – we need to sell these hot tubs by month end so let’s email everyone on our list to see if they want a hot tub- but rather, we sell hot tubs, and we have been “listening” in areas that show these customers are now interested in hot tubs and we can respond.

This means there has been a new level of investment for email marketing and its moving in the right direction: A/B and and multivariate testing testing for the marketer to learn and take action on what is working with whom, event-triggering techniques, predictive analytics and dynamic and changing content-content in the email that is aware of current state and can make contextual changes at the time the customer opens it, personalized to them, even after the email has been sent.

There is a sustained effort from marketers to make e-mail marketing better and the technology is becoming accessible. Email marketing will be moving to a new plateau of productivity.

This week, Gartner for Marketing Leaders takes on email marketing, shows its path from batch and blast, to event-triggered to real time personalization along with examples of who is doing it right.