While email may not be changing as rapidly as some other digital disciplines, it evolves nevertheless. Gone are the days when a best-in-class marketer could rely on batch-and-blast techniques, whereby 100% of a brand’s email distribution list received emails that were 100% identical. Opportunities abound particularly in the realms of personalization and testing.
For years, marketing departments have consistently undervalued the lever that offers them the most consistent ROI. We spoke with a broad range of marketers to understand what they consider makes an email program highly successful. A broad analysis of the market suggests that many email marketing departments may experience the Dunning-Kruger effect, a cognitive bias where people incorrectly overestimate their acumen in a specific discipline. As a result, many email professionals rank their own programs as more sophisticated than they actually are.
In creating our framework for evaluating email marketing as a whole, we factored in what is considered best in class today versus what is moving from best in class to standard customer expectation. The following are the five cornerstones of our framework which any email marketer can use to judge their own program:
