40% of Email Marketers Still Only Using Basic Targeting Demographics
According to findings presented by eMarketer, many email marketers aren’t taking advantage of the more advanced targeting demographics available to today’s campaigns. In fact, data shows about 40 percent are mainly focusing on geographic targeting, as opposed to more specific metrics, such as customer spending, frequency of purchase, and customer profitability.
As seen in the graph above, the four lowest reported metrics used (all used by only 27 percent of email marketers polled) were: transaction activity/purchase behavior, open rate on email marketing offers, acquisition source, and website clickstream analysis.
Managing Customer Data
In addition, eMarketer asserts that many marketers aren’t managing and segmenting their data to its highest potential. Many email marketers only use an email address to identify the customer, which sometimes leads to incorrect or outdated data.
Some of the other most popular metrics used to keep track of customer accounts included utilizing a central client data repository and measuring lifetime customer value.
Email Marketing Still Needs Improvement
Based on these findings above, eMarketer claims that email marketing still has a way to go when it comes to taking advantage of all the available targeting and metric/customer data tracking abilities offered by many email marketing platforms today.
This finding is further emphasized by a news story on an Adobe study that was covered by KoMarketing in February 2015, where it was reported that 66 percent of marketers weren’t satisfied with the outcome of their email marketing efforts. In that study, it was cited:
41 percent said that a lack of ability to automate entire email campaigns was their top challenge, while 38 percent cited inefficient integration with other tools, such as analytics.
As email marketing continues to develop, marketers should take more advantage of available options and tools.
Featured image via Pixabay. Other images via cited eMarketer article.