Survey: Improving Email Engagement Is Top Marketing Priority

Marketers are still invested in utilizing email to reach out to their target audience, but new research suggests that they are struggling to engage their prospects.

Ascend2 recently published results from their “Email Marketing Engagement” survey, which explored how marketers are using email to achieve key objectives. The research found that the top priority for marketers is currently to improve email engagement (55 percent). This is followed by increasing sales revenue (48 percent) and improving the quality of leads (45 percent).

In terms of achieving these top objectives, the majority of respondents (79 percent) indicated they have been at least “somewhat successful.” One-third considered their efforts “best-in-class”.

Lead quality (45 percent) was considered to be the top barrier to email marketing success. This was followed by improving email engagement (43 percent) and increasing conversion rates (43 percent).

Marketers Continue to Struggle with Engagement Rates

In a previous survey conducted by Ascend2, statistics indicated that marketers have been struggling with engagement rate, meaning it is not a new problem.

In the “Email Marketing Strategy” survey published by Ascend2 in 2016, 54 percent of respondents stated that they wanted to increase their engagement rate. This was followed by raising customer acquisition (48 percent) and improving email personalization (43 percent).

When it came to top challenges, 43 percent of marketers said that boosting engagement was their number one obstacle. Improving email personalization (39 percent) and enriching content data quality (51 percent) were also on the list.