The State of Email Approaching 2021

Roughly 75% of marketers note that personalization increases engagement. One wild fact was, birthday emails generate 3.42 times more revenue than standard emails. This means more, however, than having an algorithm that inserts someone’s name into the email. It means looking at consumer behaviors, determining what they would most want from your company, and tweaking the body of the email to reflect that.

Less than 25% of marketers believed their company measured email ROI well. 45% went as far as to say measurement is “poor, very poor, or non-existent.” Yikes. This section gets pretty in-depth, but essentially says resources need to be devoted exclusively to measurement. That means using a basic ROI formula, accurately assessing costs of the email marketing campaign, and biting the bullet by ditching old tracking methods (even though they work “alright” and are a pain to change).

Won’t dive too deep into this one, because “duh.” This pandemic spurred a massive cultural shift where brands need to be empathic, and need to pay attention to the needs of their customers beyond ROI (try to connect with them personally, and be genuinely invested in their wellbeing as humans).

As more businesses devote resources to email marketing, more people are getting involved and wanting to sign off on things. Currently, 60% of companies have 4 or more people involved in email review and approvals (in 2019 that was 52%). That’s likely a bit too much—this is a tough thing to get prescriptive with, as your review process is your own, but it’s worth noting that more often than not people overvalue having multiple sets of eyes reviewing things. In creative collaboration (which is a big part of messaging, which is a big part of email marketing), at a certain point you can really get diminishing marginal returns by having multiple people tweaking messaging. Put simply: try to avoid the “too many cooks in the kitchen” dilemma. Hire folks you trust enough that you don’t need a whole team devoted to over-managing/reviewing their work.

That one makes a lot of sense. In-person sales efforts are down, emails are pretty cheap to send, and marketers are looking for ways to shave budgets, it’s a form of communication that plays well with WFH—I could go on. More email is fine, but it isn’t necessarily good. I’m a big quality over quantity person, as you may know. If I get 5 bad emails from a company, I’m more likely to say “Wow, this company sure is annoying” than “let me ask them for more info.” Focus on quality first. 1 great, personal email that provides real value and offers a natural route towards your product helping someone will always be better than some canned campaign getting blasted out to a bunch of folks.