Virtually all marketers face some challenges with their email marketing, according to a study from Return Path and Demand Metric. The survey indicates that marketers – who use email primarily to communicate with customers and prospects and to build brand awareness – are struggling most with the competition for attention in the inbox.
This challenge is unlikely to recede: one analysis forecasts daily business email volume to grow by 4% annually from 2017 through 2021.
But while marketers are tasked with standing out in the inbox, few are employing competitive intelligence as a means to gain an advantage. In fact, fewer than half of respondents have visibility into any of the following advanced intelligence data points: the days of the week that are busiest for their subscribers; which other brands are emailing their subscribers; and their competitors’ campaign metrics.
Many also fail to monitor their competitors’ efforts. Fully two-thirds (65%) of respondents with below-average open rates don’t monitor such efforts, and about half (47%) of those with above-average open rates also fail to do so.
The most common way of checking up on the competition is by subscribing to their lists using an alias, a method employed by 30% of respondents that enjoy above-average open rates. (Previous research has likewise found this to be the most common tactic for monitoring the competition, as well as being judged the most important.) Read the rest at MarketingCharts.
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