Report: Email Marketing Usage Remains Dominant, but Impersonal

Email is a marketing staple, but new research indicates that marketers are not tailoring their efforts to fully tap into the potential of this tactic.

The “Elevate Your Email Marketing With a Customized Approach” report from SendGrid and Forrester found that email is the most commonly used marketing channel, with 82 percent of marketers saying they use it. However, the most commonly sent types of email are those that align with the marketing team’s promotional schedule – they are not tailored to how customers are interacting with the brand.

About 63 percent of marketers said they send promotional emails and newsletters, neither of which are usually contextualized or 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,” explain the authors of the report.

Over the next 12 months, marketers intend to increase the level of personalization in acquisition, promotional, and triggered emails. Most respondents also said that they are going to add more contextual relevance to loyalty, acquisition and triggered emails.

“This is a move in the right direction if brands want to create ongoing relationships with their customers instead of just doing regular marketing pushes,” wrote the authors of the report.

The Struggle to Deliver Personalized Marketing Email

This is not the first report to shed light on the challenges marketers are facing when it comes to personalizing email efforts.

The “Mapping out the Customer Journey: Expectations Versus Reality for the Modern Marketer” report from Boxever discovered that although 81 percent of marketers use personalization for email marketing, just 3 percent describe their emails as “personalized.”

And although 62 percent believe that their marketing emails are informative, 27 percent of them think they are irrelevant.