New Research Finds Majority Of Marketers Not Maximizing Customer Data
- Written by Demand Gen Report Team
- Published in DemandGen Reports
As marketers continue to adopt a variety of interactive tools to mix up campaign initiatives, new research has found that the significance of email is continuing to grow. Marketers, however, are not fully leveraging email’s most powerful capabilities, according to recently research from Emailvision, a software as a service (SaaS) company specializing in email, mobile and social marketing.
The findings were based on a survey of more than 700 online marketing managers globally, a vast majority of whom (89%) declared that email remains the same or more important to their overall marketing strategy versus two years ago. Positive ROI implications aside, marketers still find a disconnect between the collection and usage of customer data, which, according to the report, remains an untapped source of opportunity for their online marketing.
Other report highlights include:
- Nearly all (97%) of respondents believe that sending well-targeted, personalized emails is an important or very important factor in achieving the best response rates;
- Only 20% of respondents said they were personalizing all of the emails they send.
- More than 85% of marketers recognize they are not fully utilizing the available customer data provided by their email-based campaigns;
- Just more than half (55%) of responders said they were satisfied with their ability to segment and target their customers by basic demographic data, purchase behavior, relationship to the brand or response rates.
According to Emailvision Director of Product Marketing, Leah Anathan, marketers who use customer intelligence report upwards of 30% increases to their campaign open rates.
“Marketers understand the importance of customer data in email marketing, yet many campaigns are created with little to no segmentation simply because marketers lack the resources needed for proper data analysis,” Anathan told DemandGen Report. “We believe that ‘Customer Intelligence’ technology is solving this long standing challenge by enabling online marketers to easily and rapidly cross reference large amounts of customer data based on purchase behavior, spend amount, product preference, recent purchases and digital engagement.”
When marketers are armed with this information, they are able to create targeted segments with offers designed for the customers that are most likely to respond.
“When it comes to multichannel online marketing, email is really acting as the ‘marketing glue’ between these channels,” Anathan noted. “It’s the offer that sends a customer to the company’s online store. It’s the invitation that sends someone to the organization’s event page. It’s the daily digest and alert that notifies someone about recent network activities and reconnects to them to the social network. It’s the infrastructure for social account creation and social account management. It’s the text message with a special promotion code. In effect, email is connecting all of the campaign elements in the online marketing plan.”
Emailvision conducted the research in November 2011 across 700 organizations from 10 countries, including the U.S, UK, Germany, Spain and Italy.