Email marketing service provider Pure360 has released a new statistical report building upon its work in defining a “maturity model” for email marketing sophistication. This report, endorsed by Dave Chaffey of Smart Insights, finds that most businesses are failing to establish clear, bankable facts about customer personalities and preferences.
By interviewing 205 large and medium-sized UK companies, Pure360 has found that 90% of all email marketing fits into the first four stages of their six stage model. The report finds several compelling reasons for companies failing to reach later, more effective stages of the model. Across all business sizes, reduced resources and increased responsibilities are preventing marketers from taking their email offering to the next level.
Interestingly, marketers rate their email marketing approach low in terms of sophistication, but high in terms of effectiveness. They find themselves stuck in the middle of Pure360’s model: 39% are “segmenters” and 38% are “recommenders”. Discussing the email habits of these groups, Nicola Webster, Product Marketing Manager at Pure360, notes, “Many marketers simply do not have the time, resource or skill to analyse complex data sets, meaning that much of it goes unused, or is only utilised at a fairly superficial level.”
Nicola suggests that the jump beyond “recommender” to “predictor” status is a particularly difficult one, “[requiring] best in class integration, data and technology, capital investment and specialist data analysts.” Only 1% of companies surveyed can be considered “interactors” – the most mature of the stages in the model.
The report finds significant variation between industries, as a result of different information gathering habits and systemic differences. Professional services companies gather their information offline (and therefore struggle to maintain CRM systems), whereas manufacturing firms are stuck with old systems and place little emphasis on digital channels, for instance. The retail and financial services industries are generally more mature, arguably because retailers have more digital touch points and finance is built around lead generation and data analysis.
In the full document, these barriers to email marketing maturity are broken down and the case for how each stage brings improved results is made visually and in extended discussions with Pure360’s experts. Discover this advice by downloading the full report on Pure360’s website.
