KUALA LUMPUR (Nov 12): Email marketing is a fundamental touchpoint, but marketers lost their grip on email personalisation amid the customer churn and rapidly changing habits due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

In its recent Digital IQ: Email Benchmarks for 2021 report. technology research and consulting firm Gartner Inc said only 47% of marketing leaders cited email marketing as the most effective channel for driving sales conversion.

The most effective channels at conversion to sales were led by social marketing (65%), digital advertising (63%), influencer marketing (58%), mobile marketing (57%) and websites (56%).

It said facing cross-industry challenges, digital marketing leaders can no longer afford to compare their email marketing efforts to just a small subset of competitors.

Instead, it said digital marketing teams should look to leaders inside and outside of their industry to glean insights into how leading brands are engaging and converting audiences with highly targeted email campaigns.

Among the key findings of the report were that retail is the top-performing industry overall, while financial services are the leader in open rates.

Brands from these industries comprise nine of  the top 10 brands out of nearly 1,200.

Secondly, top-performing brands and industries in the benchmark are committed to scaling targeted campaigns.

Financial services, for example, send emails to just 4.7% of subscribers on average — representing the most customised messaging of any analysed industry — and have the highest weighted average open rate at 27.1%.

Brands with acute segmentation create virtuous cycles of customer data collection to continually improve performance.

Meanwhile, leading brands thread personalisation into their email content strategies, synchronising longer subject lines with more narrow targeting.

Gartner said longer, more detailed subject lines with more than 70 characters perform as competitively as those with 11 to 20 characters due to more sophisticated audience segmentation.

The firm said an average of 44% of marketers across industries used email marketing to support their digital marketing strategy over the past 12 months.

It said this makes sense considering an email address is a valuable piece of first-party data that enables mid- to lower-funnel engagement opportunities.

This allows email to earn its share of marketers’ attention against sophisticated third-party channels like digital advertising and social media.