The State of Email in Retail [Infographic]

James Glover — January 17, 2018 Follow @coherentpath

— January 17, 2018

Despite the hype around new marketing channels like social media and tactics like search engine optimization (SEO), email continues to be one of the longest standing and most powerful marketing tools across all industries. In fact, research from SmartDataCollective found that 95% of professionals incorporate email in their marketing efforts, which makes sense, considering 92% of (online) adults use email, with 61% using it on an average day, according to Pew Research.

For retailers especially, email remains one of the most reliable tools in their arsenal. Most retailers can also tell you that if they stop sending emails, their sales will drop, and most watch their subscriber churn rates very closely. But beyond these measures, there hasn’t truly been a way to dive more deeply into the general practices that can make or break a retailer’s email strategy, until now.

This is what RSR Research and Coherent Path set out to discover in their new report, “Measuring Email’s Effectiveness,” which explores how top retailers are faring when it comes to email marketing. Analyzing nearly 140 top retailers and using publicly available email tracking tools, such as MailCharts, the research breaks down specific email elements that could be measured objectively across retailers to identify what’s working, and what’s not. Specifically, the report highlights the areas in which retailers are over-investing in their subscriber list, and where retailers may be under-investing in their list, and ultimately leaving money on the table.

The report found that while there are email tactics where retailers are implementing healthy practices – such as putting a menu of categories at the top of every email, thereby providing more opportunities to entice a consumer to click through – there are many more tactics where retailers are lagging behind – such as not optimizing emails for mobile delivery.

The research focuses on well-known brands from the following segments: Apparel (including Accessories & Jewelry, as well as Shoes), Big Box Specialty, Department Stores, Health & Beauty, Home Goods and Sporting Goods. By acquiring every email each of these retailers sent to a new or generic user (not a member of any loyalty program, and without registering any click-throughs or preferences) from March 2016 to March 2017, the research drills down on three essential components of any successful email campaign:

• Email Frequency: The balance between the need to engage an audience vs. spamming and driving them away.
• Catalog Exposure: The ability to turn a subscriber into an engaged shopper by identifying the topics or categories that are most relevant and interesting to them.
• Email Content: The harmony of email length, the subject line and creative, to the discounts and promotions within.

This article first appeared in MarTech Advisor.

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