Mailjet has released a 2015 email marketing practices and outlook infographic. It includes results from a survey conducted by Mailjet with 300 marketing experts from mid-sized and large businesses. The questions posed included the marketers concerns for 2015, how social savvy they were, whether they conduct A/B testing in their email marketing practices and whether they use personalization.
The findings:
- Primary requirement when selecting an ESP: reducing spam (80%)
- 90% of US marketers think of themselves as social savvy, compared to 78% of EU marketers
- 93% of US companies have used A/B testing, compared to only 77% of German and 80% of French companies
- 29% of German companies use personalization, followed by 17% percent of US companies and 13% of French companies
The full graphic (click for larger version):
The fact that so few companies apply personalization is actually shocking. The great advantage of email marketing is that personalization is very easy to accomplish. All the subscriber data just needs to be as complete and correct as possible, imported into the email marketing software platform and it’s ready to use.
Some might say this has to do with privacy, but the advantage of email marketing is that you can ask people for their information in exchange for something helpful (how-to’s), funny (video’s, cartoons) or nice (free workshops, content, discount codes). That way, the people are more willing to part with their personal information and when informed correctly, they will know what happens with that information.
When you as a marketer use that information correctly to provide relevant content to those subscribers and address them in a personal way, they will appreciate it. Anything is better than ‘Hi there’ or ‘Dear subscriber’. But don’t forget to take out that placeholder personalization field: just recently I received an abandoned cart email from an online fashion store. The first line was: ‘Dear <<subscriber first name>>’. Horrifying, and easy to prevent.
In any case, collect that data correctly, use it wisely for personalization, and you’ll be doing a lot better than the few companies in the survey above who do personalization.
Be sure to have a look at the 2015 state of email report by Litmus as well, with info about email clients, email design and deliverability.
