Research Reveals: Marketers Face Significant Obstacles to Email Marketing Success in 2011

Email plays a vital role in achieving a wide range of marketing objectives. When integrated with emerging marketing channels such as social media, email appears to have unlimited potential especially when combined with multiple improvement tactics. The purpose of this report is to help you understand which email marketing tactics will be most effective in helping you overcome significant obstacles for 2011 in email marketing such as: relevancy, quantifying ROI, deliverability, opt-ins, and a lack of an effective marketing strategy.

The all-new 2011 Email Marketing Benchmark Report provides the most up-to-date research, benchmark data, and analysis on new email marketing tactics, email marketing maturity, and the state of email from a strategic standpoint. In this report you’ll also gain a deeper knowledge of the key issues from the most comprehensive study on email marketing available including:

• Impact of email marketing maturity
• Three dimensional views of email tactics
• All new metrics and benchmarks

The 198-page 2011 Email Marketing Benchmark Report includes a broad range of all components of email marketing with details on the significant new obstacles to email marketing success, email budgets and bottom lines, and top tactics for delivering relevant content, email list growth, and social media.

In short, this comprehensive study provides insight on what works – and what doesn’t – in email marketing today.

2011 Email Marketing Benchmark Report (Excerpt)

Top 10 Questions Answered in the 2011 Email Marketing Benchmark Report

1. What are the new significant obstacles to email marketing success?
2. What are email marketers really trying to achieve?
3. What are the three phases of email marketing maturity?
4. What is an effective method for quantifying ROI?
5. What are the top tactics for delivering relevant content?
6. How does email personalization tactics increase conversions?
7. How is social media being used as list growth tactic?
8. What are the new key performance metrics for email?
9. What is the new benchmark date for email newsletter performance?
10. What are the methods typically used to test email campaigns?

In the 2011 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, you’ll receive all the benchmark data you need to make informed campaign decisions, face new challenges with real research and marketing insight, and forecast email budgets for the upcoming year. Highlights from the new report include:

• Primary research survey results, providing the collective wisdom of 1100 email marketers
• 152 charts and tables with analytical commentary
• 50 benchmarks on Email marketing tactics, research, budgets, and ROI
• 7 marketing sections with hundreds of insights from your peers on email challenges, relevancy, list growth and more

Special Sections: Highlighting Email Marketing Insights, Tactics, and Charts

The 2011 Email Marketing Benchmark Report is more than just data. This all-new report gives you analysis and insight on topics critical to the future success of email marketers:

• Most difficult email challenges, objectives, tactics for the upcoming year
• Email marketing maturity – a key indicator of success
• Changing marketing budget landscape for 2011
• The time, effort, and expense required of relevancy tactics
• Top tactics for driving email list growth
• Solutions and providers for sending house email list
• Effectiveness of deliverability tactics and trends
• Using metrics to improve email performance
• New email testing and optimizing methods for 2011

3 Dimensional Views of Email Tactics

In the 2011 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, we found that marketers are more likely to use fast and easy to implement email tactics, instead of those which are most effective. The three dimensional views are:

• Effectiveness
• Difficulty
• Use

By incorporating and analyzing the three sets of data above from the study on some of email marketing’s most significant challenges, marketers are able to correct their course of actions and improve performance.

What Others Have Said about MarketingSherpa’s Email Marketing Benchmark Report?

“Year after year, MarketingSherpa’s Email Benchmark Report proves to be an amazing source of insight, inspiration, and ideas for email marketing professionals. The new Report is no exception as it documents, yet again, that there’s still plenty of ROI gold in email marketing’s hills for those who eschew “burn & churn” tactics in favor of efforts that facilitate long-term, mutually-beneficial relationships with customers and prospects.”

-Jeffrey K. Rohrs, VP Marketing, Exact Target

“The Email Marketing Benchmark Report has been extremely helpful to my electronic marketing staff. It helped us pinpoint areas that needed improvement because we were able to see the results from other B-2-B and B-2-C marketers. I’m sure our campaigns will be much more effective because of what we learned.” “

-Denise Elliott, Vice President, Sales and Marketing, Kiplinger

“MarketingSherpa’s Email Benchmark Report is one of the best resources out there for email marketers. I especially like the fact that it is full of stats and charts that I can use to compare my own results with. The insights that you get from this guide are very useful in the day-to-day life of an email marketer.”

-Tamara Gielen, OgilvyOne

“If your email marketing program is moderate to aggressive, this is a “must have.” The amount of quality data contained in this report will eliminate any time spent searching the web for that exact statistic needed. Purchasing this guide will give you access to what others are doing, specific statistics for various industries, and much, much more!”

-Erica DeWolf, CEO & eMarketing Strategist, DeWolf eMarketing & Design

2011 Email Marketing Benchmark Report Summary Table of Contents:

Chapter 1: The State of Email Marketing (p. 9-31)

• Facing significant new obstacles to email marketing success
• Marketer insights on their most difficult email marketing challenge
• What email marketers are really trying to achieve
• Marketer insights on their most important objectives for the coming year
• Objectives email marketers are achieving most effectively
• Email marketing maturity – a key indicator of success

Chapter 2: Email Budgets and Bottom lines (p. 32-58)

• The perception of ROI drives email marketing investment
• A method for quantifying ROI
• Email marketing ROI benchmarks
• The changing marketing budget landscape
• Online’s share of the marketing budget
• Email’s share of the online marketing budget
• Substantial email marketing budget increases projected for 2011

Chapter 3: Getting Relevant by Being Personal (p. 59-83)

• Top tactics for delivering relevant content
• Relevancy tactics used
• The time, effort and expense required of relevancy tactics
• The effectiveness of relevancy tactics
• Marketer insights on the most effective relevancy and personalization tactics
• Satisfying subscriber preferences
• What it takes to personalize email
• Case briefing: Personalization tactics increase conversions

Chapter 4: Driving Email List Growth (p. 84-111)

• Top tactics for increasing subscriber lists
• Email list growth tactics used
• The time, effort and expense required of list growth tactics
• The effectiveness of list growth tactics
• Marketer insights on their most effective list growth tactics
• Social media as a list growth tactic
• Trends in email list growth
• Case briefing:
• Solutions and providers for sending house email list

Chapter 5: Making it Into the Inbox (p. 112-127)

• Top tactics for improving email deliverability
• Deliverability tactics used
• The time, effort and expense required of deliverability tactics
• The effectiveness of deliverability tactics
• Trends in deliverability issues
• Marketer insights on the state of deliverability and tactics for improving it

Chapter 6: Metrics that Matter Most (p. 128-163)

• Measuring email marketing performance
• A year of change in key performance metric
• Marketer insights on using metrics to improve email performance
• How marketers measure emails delivered
• How marketers measure emails opened
• How marketers measure emails converted
• Benchmarking email newsletter performance
• Benchmarking email (other than newsletter) performance

Chapter 7: Putting Email to the Test (p. 164-174)

• Testing and optimizing email marketing performance
• Campaign elements tested
• Marketer insights on methods typically used to test email campaigns
• Methodology for email testing and optimization

Appendix: Benchmark Survey Demographics (p. 175-198)

• Glossary
• Research Partner