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Movable Ink

Weekend Reading: Only 50% of Email Marketers Like Their ESPs

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Happy Friday! It’s been another busy week at Movable Ink. We recently published our guide, “10 Responsive Design Hacks” to help email marketers find a straightforward resource when they’re working on designing responsive emails that look great on mobile devices.

We’re also prepping three great pieces on the UK email market: an infographic about the state of mobile commerce in the UK, a research report about the state of email and device preferences, and a UK-specific Inkredible 5 lookbook.

Email has very much been in the spotlight recently. VentureBeat discussed how many brands are challenged when it comes to finding an ESP that meets all their needs and eMarketer published a new survey about the leading challenges in 2015.

Here’s a breakdown of those stories and more for your weekend reading:

1. Only 50% of Email Marketers Say Their ESP Meets Their Needs.

VentureBeat Insight found that 84% of marketers think that email is important or critically important for loyalty, as well as retaining customers, sales, and lead generation.

But that doesn’t mean marketers are totally happy. Nearly a third of enterprises don’t have the technology for device detection and 29 percent aren’t tracking revenue from email.

Only 50 percent of email marketers said that their platform offers enough features to meet their objectives.

2. 28% of Time Spent Online is on Social Networking.

Lately, we’ve talked about how to creatively integrate social media and email marketing in your campaigns. No matter what, though, it’s important for marketers to keep in mind that email ROI is far higher than social ROI.

That said, GlobalWebIndex recently polled 170,000 Internet users 28% of time spent online is on social networking sites. In 2014, the average Internet user spent 1.72 hours per day on social media, up from 1.66 hours in 2013.

The best tactic for marketers is to find a way to match the engagement of social with the ROI of email. And that means thinking about how to integrate the channels in day-to-day strategies and data governance.

3. The Leading Challenges of Email Marketing in 2015

A May study by Ascend2 discovered that the top email marketing challenge is much the same as in years past – click-through rates. More than half (53%) of marketers cited low clickthrough rates as the leading challenge for the year, above lack of an effective strategy (41%) and lack of quality content (32%).

Of course, the top three challenges all follow one another. Without content or strategy, emails will be less engaging and, consequently, see fewer clicks.

To overcome these challenges, marketers need to rethink how email is used to communicate with customers. Nickelodeon did this with contextual content, boosting click-throughs by 75% with personalized, relevant content that created an experience instead of trying to create a sale.

The Renaissance of Email

We’ve noticed an increasing interest in the new potential for email marketing. Brands have always known the channel to be powerful, but now that contextual marketing technology and data analytics have become more sophisticated, the opportunities for innovation are increasing dramatically.

As we discussed last week, marketing is becoming media. And that philosophy should inform every email and social channel today.

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