Data Shows CTR and Open Rates Rise Despite Email Marketing Challenges

New research suggests that email and personalization remain prominent marketing tactics, but marketers still face obstacles in execution.

In the “Return on Email Personalization” white paper from OneSpot and The Relevancy Group, statistics showed that marketers were seeing an increase in click-through rates and open rates for their emails in the second quarter of 2017, compared to the same quarter of 2016. Open rates for Q2 2017 hovered around 27 percent, a two percentage point leap from 2016. CTR rates also jumped two percentage points from 14 percent to 16 percent.

digital marketing, email marketing

About 78 percent of respondents said that they were using email recipients’ first names in their email marketing campaigns for personalization purposes. Fifty-nine percent were personalizing emails based on real-time data, and 48 percent were using human-curated product personalization in their emails.

However, 44 percent of respondents said that a lack of internal buy-in from stakeholders was holding back their email personalization efforts. More than a quarter (26.3 percent) stated that it is not a priority in their budget, and 22.3 percent claimed that they do not have high confidence that it would be better than their manual efforts.

Personalization Challenges and Email Marketing

Previous data has indicated that marketers are still struggling to integrate personalization tactics into their email marketing strategies.

The “Elevate Your Email Marketing With a Customized Approach” report from Sendgrid and Forrester found that 82 percent of marketers use email, making it one of the most widely used marketing tactics. However, these messages are not always tailored to how customers are interacting with the brand. Approximately 63 percent of marketers claim that they typically send promotional emails and newsletters, neither of which are typically personalized.

“These types of emails are mostly intended to push out marketing messages dictated by the brand’s strategy, not by customer journeys or personal data,” wrote the authors of the report.

“I worked with KoMarketing during my time at Pongo in a variety of roles. At first, they were doing the work for us, but in the end, they trained my growing team on Search Engine Marketing (SEM). Their education of the importance of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) led to us launching a job search blog, over 30 learning center articles, and a social media campaign. I would not hesitate to recommend the KoMarketing team for any size project you may have.”

— Jodi Coverly, Marketing Manager, Pongo LLC

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