Special Offer: Email Marketing Toolkit Bundle - Save $685

MarketingSherpa's 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report

Research and insights for engaging email subscribers (a $397 value)

The 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report includes: 170 charts and tables 2,735 companies surveyed Top email marketing challenges for 2012 Special sections on email tactics, list growth, relevancy, deliverablity, and metrics Testing and optimization methods for 2012 and much more Success Stories: Tales from the email marketing trenches

Learn How to Effectively Engage Your Email Subscribers

Navigating through an overcrowded inbox to find a relevant message is a difficult task for any marketer, let alone a motivated purchaser ready to buy. In this “it’s all about me” consumer climate, engaging content is crucial to your brand’s success.

Even though email marketing is a tried and true marketing tactic, practitioners are still finding difficulty sending relevant communications. Only 28% of marketers reported that their messages contained relevant content, sent on time to a segmentation of subscribers and had a clear conversion goal. In order to be successful, companies need to become even more strategic in email campaign implementation, to deliver value on subscriber’s terms.

To accomplish this goal, email marketers must:

1. Exceed the rising expectations of email subscribers and ISPs
2. Speak to their unique interests and communication preferences
3. Implementing engagement metrics to determine both access and placement inside a subscriber’s inbox

What's New? Revelations Critical to Your Email Success

Last year’s benchmark focused on the maturity of organizations email marketing program as a whole. In the all-new 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report we took a step further and investigated the maturity level of several email communication processes. We examined the barriers that exist from 2,730 B2B and B2C marketers in preventing subscriber engagement and the best practices to increase the accuracy and velocity of email communications.

For the ninth consecutive year, MarketingSherpa has conducted one of the most extensive studies in the industry, to help email marketers make better decisions based on their fellow marketers’ insights and data. More than 2,700 email marketers shared their valuable knowledge and experience of what is working (and what’s not) in email marketing today.

This comprehensive report enables you to benchmark your organization’s practices against the industry and gives you a starting point to begin to optimize your team’s email marketing performance.
 

2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report Chart and Data Highlights

• 69% of marketers report delivering highly relevant content is a top objective for their organizations email marketing processes in the next 12 months (pg. 52)
• Only 39% of marketers cite delivering highly relevant content is a barrier to their email marketing success (pg.62)
• Only 30% of marketers find that their biggest barrier to email marketing success is the inability to manufacture content on a consistent and predictable basis (pg. 68)
• Chart: Data integration provides the biggest challenge for email marketers (pg. 62)
• Chart: The accuracy of email subscriber data (Only 19% of marketers feel more than 90 percent their email marketing subscriber data is correct and current) (pg.108)
• Chart: Majority of companies can segment subscriber data based on purchase history (pg.109)
• Chart: Triggered emails top the list of most effective relevancy improvement tactics (pg. 96)
• Chart: Automated messages make up on average, 22% of organizations overall email volume (pg. 101)

Benchmark Data from Multiple Viewpoints, Organized for Quick Reference

The 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report is an all-inclusive reference guide, containing more than 170 charts with analytical commentary, hundreds of informative insights from your peers, several abridged case studies of real-life social marketing success stories, and more. To help you quickly locate the information most relevant to your team’s situation, we have segmented data throughout this report by:

• Average of all respondents
• Primary sales channel
• Key industry sectors
• Organization size
• Phases of email marketing process maturity

Summary of Contents:

Chapter 1. The State of Email Marketing (pg. 8-15)

• Email marketing maturity
• State of sending relevant email communications

Chapter 2. CMO Perspectives on Email’s Business Objectives, Budgets and ROI (pg. 16-49)

• Top email marketing business objectives
• Top business objectives CMOs find email is effective at achieving
• Top trends to impact email marketing
• Email marketer insights on new email marketing trends
• The perception of email marketing is driving investment
• The factors CMOs use to determine the business value of email
• A method for quantifying ROI
• Email marketing ROI benchmarks
• Substantial email marketing budget increases projected for 2012

Chapter 3. Email Process Priorities, Challenges and Barriers to Success (pg. 50-73)

• What email marketers are really trying to achieve
• Email marketing processes priorities
• Email marketer insights on priorities
• Email marketing needs for improvement
• Email marketing process challenges
• Email marketer insights on challenges
• Barriers to email marketing success
• Email marketer insights on barriers to success

Chapter 4. Developing an Engaged Email List (pg. 74-91)

• The state of email list growth
• Popularity of email list growth tactics
• The time, effort and expense required of list growth tactics
• The effectiveness of email list growth tactics
• Email marketing list growth process benchmarks

Chapter 5. Crafting Relevant Content (pg. 92-113)

• Relevant emails rely on content, segmentation and timing
• Top tactics to deliver relevant and engaging content
• The time, effort and expense required of relevancy improvement tactics
• Email marketer insights on challenges in developing relevant content
• The effectiveness of relevancy improvement tactics Automated messages accelerate performance
• Relevant communications start with segmentation Organizations ability to segment data

Chapter 6. Competing in an Overcrowded Inbox (pg. 114-131)

• The state of email deliverability metrics
• Top deliverability improvement tactics
• Deliverability tactics used
• The time, effort and expense required for deliverability tactics
• The effectiveness of deliverability tactics

Chapter 7. Lifting Customer Relationships with Lifecycle Campaigns (pg. 132-145)

• Lifecycle email campaigns used
• The time, effort and expense required for lifecycle email campaigns
• The effectiveness of lifecycle email campaigns
• The state of e-newsletters
• Percentage of promotional copy in transactional messages

Chapter 8. Integrating Email into the Marketing Mix (pg. 146-163)

• Top marketing tactics to integrate with email
• Chief channels to incorporate with email
• The time, effort and expense required for channel integration
• The effectiveness of channels integrated with email
• Email readership on mobile phones
• Mobile makeover in anticipation of mass adoption

Chapter 9. Testing Drives Innovation (pg. 164-181)

• Current state of email marketing testing and optimization practices
• Email testing and optimization budgets
• Resource allocation dedicated to email testing and optimization
• Testing practices most routinely implemented
• Top email elements to test
• Most routinely tested email elements
• The time, effort and expense required for email elements tested
• Effectiveness of email testing and optimization elements