SendGrid, a leading delivery platform for customer communication that drives engagement and growth, today released a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of SendGrid called Elevate Your Email Marketing With A Customized Approach. The study examines the adoption of integrated email marketing platforms and highlights opportunities that exist for businesses looking to create personalized, digital conversations with their customers.

The study, conducted in March 2017, surveyed 200 organizations across industries in the US and Canada to evaluate the challenges, successes and opportunities involved in implementing custom campaign management solutions for their email marketing needs. The study found:

• There are a host of data and personalization challenges that impede one-to-one digital customer communication.
  • 50 percent of businesses feel that consolidating data from different sources and channels is their biggest challenge and 50 percent also feel that the ability to personalize experiences across channels and customer touch-points is the biggest challenge.
  • 34 percent of respondents said adding contextualized, relevant content to email messages is challenging while creating personalized experiences via email is a challenge for 40 percent of businesses.
  • While these marketers are attempting to reach their customers in meaningful ways, they continuously struggle with ways to make those messages relevant and meaningful.

• Access to customer data isn’t the problem for marketers. Marketers are challenged with transforming data into truly meaningful action.
  • Though many marketers have completed integrations to ensure visibility into customer data, that data access hasn’t yet resulted in personalized email content.
  • Two-thirds of respondents say data from their sales, marketing, and service applications is fully integrated with their email systems and yet, only 37 percent of respondents said personalized content is fully integrated and only half said the data is highly influential.

• The study identifies an emerging—but small—group of forward-thinking marketers who have managed to decrease the insight-to-action gap to achieve contextually relevant email content.
  • 18 percent of survey respondents said they integrated both vendor and in-house capabilities to craft their own custom email marketing solutions.
  • 22 percent of respondents who already use these tools, say that this method allows them a higher level of customization and flexibility than an email service provider alone can provide.
  • SendGrid believes these marketers are leading the industry toward true email personalization and contextually relevant emails by combining their own data and business logic with the capabilities of a leading email platform.

“Email is the most commonly used marketing channel according to 82 percent of respondents, but it’s not yet being used to its full potential,” said Scott Heimes, Chief Marketing Officer at SendGrid. “Marketers crave a solution that enables personalized and contextually relevant customer experiences that better serves their customers to drive engagement and business growth.”

SendGrid is a leader in email infrastructure and is committed to helping marketers realize the benefits of email personalization. For businesses that send high volumes of email, require fine-grained personalization to enhance their customers’ experience, and are interested in developing their own application layer on top of SendGrid’s flexible APIs, contact SendGrid here.

The Forrester commissioned study is available for download here.

SendGrid CMO Scott Heimes will be delivering a keynote at theTraction Conference in Vancouver on Thursday, June 1. His keynote will highlight findings from the study with keys for building an effective email program using customer examples and data insights.

About SendGrid:
SendGrid is a proven, cloud-based customer communication platform that drives engagement and business growth. A leader in email deliverability, SendGrid sends over 30 billion emails each month for Internet and mobile-based customers like Airbnb, Pandora, HubSpot, Spotify, Uber and FourSquare as well as more traditional enterprises like Intuit and Costco. For more information, visit www.sendgrid.com.