Only 38% of email marketing executives surveyed by Epsilon and The Relevancy Group could say their marketing departments had common goals, a finding that formed a striking corollary to another stat uncovered in the study: Just 37% are succeeding in executing integrated multichannel campaigns.
“If organizations can’t bring their people or their data together, they won’t be successful,” says Pam McAtee, SVP of digital solutions at Epsilon. “Just 29 percent of marketers stated that they have centralized their data across channels. Couple that with the fact that only 25 percent practice measurement and attribution across channels and it’s clear that silos need to be torn down to effect multichannel efforts.”
The survey found two thirds of marketers continuing to field the most basic types of segmented email campaigns, though 50% were dabbling with integrated executions such as coupling an email with a push notification to app users. The little more than a third employing several channels were trying such integrations as email, mobile, and display retargeting. One quarter reported using real-time data to unite email, social, mobile, and display.
“Marketers prioritize resources based on what drives revenue and, for many, email is still the largest driver of revenue compared to some other channels like SMS or push,” McAtee says. “Of course, they often don’t have the same opt-in consumer base for SMS or push that they do for email. It takes resources and centralized data to build integrated campaigns.”
The payoff on investing in such resources can be significant, according to intelligence gathered from the marketers surveyed. Monthly revenues of those using real-time data to implement multichannel campaigns were 18% higher than those using just one source of segmentation and 57% higher than those not using real-time data.
