Report: Marketers Still Being Challenged to Create More Engaging Email

Email marketing is still a focus for many organizations, but a new report from Epsilon found that the business product and service industry is still struggling to resonate with email recipients.

The “Q4 2015 Email Trends and Benchmarks” report revealed that 41 percent of engaged subscribers fall into the “napper” category, meaning they clicked and opened an email more than three months ago. About 35 percent were considered to be “dormant,” indicating that they’ve been inactive for at least 12 months.

Just 13 percent of individuals who received emails from the business product and service industry could be categorized as “superstars,” meaning they are subscribers who have opened and clicked on an email within the past three months.

“Today, it is all about creating experiences in the inbox – like integrating animation and interactive content – to engage new subscribers early and leverage the channel to drive loyalty,” wrote the authors of the report. “Email was once a static channel used to push subscribers to the web or in-store but now the email channel has a very important role to play as part of your overall customer experience.”

How Successful Marketers Focus on the Customer Experience

Recent research has discovered that mapping out the customer journey is helping marketers find more success. The “2016 State of Marketing” report from Salesforce shows that high-performing marketing teams are 8.8 times more likely to adapt a customer journey strategy than underperforming teams.

Furthermore, high-performing marketing teams are 7.7 times more inclined to lead customer experience initiatives than their counterparts.

Budget focus appears to be shifting as well. About 72 percent of top-performing marketers say they intend to increase spending on marketing technology to help them reach their goals in these initiatives within the next two years.