Email Revenue Still Strong, Data Access Not So Much

Amberly Dressler
by Amberly Dressler 27 Jun, 2016
Email Revenue Still Strong, Data Access Not So Much

Despite display, social and mobile accounting for many digital clicks for a company, email still generates the highest revenue of all marketing channels according to a 2016 survey from MessageGears.

Respondents - the majority of which hold director of marketing positions for enterprises - report that email has the highest revenue for them followed by display, social and mobile. Of the email technology being deployed by enterprise and executive-level marketers, 46 percent are using a software-as-a-service (SaaS) or hosted email service provider (ESP).

Further, the majority (57 percent) of respondents sending more than 100 million messages per month use a SaaS solution. These offerings are provided on a subscription basis and are accessible via a Web interface. A commercial, on-premise ESP was the second most used at 39 percent. 

There is room for improvement across all providers; when asked how satisfied companies were with various aspects of their email marketing program, most respondents were "fairly satisfied" with their email marketing vendor technology but less satisfied with the ease of data utilizing. In fact, "Not able to leverage all data" is the top email performance challenge according to 30 percent of respondents followed by too much IT involvement (21 percent). 

Despite some grievances with their access to data, almost half of respondents currently utilize behavior, location and context data in their email programs, while there remains a strong desire for using context, attitude and real-time data among marketers.

Amberly Dressler
Amberly Dressler
Head of analyst relations, public relations, customer advocacy (People Heroes), customer community, content marketing (full funnel/lifecycle), content operations and optimization, reputation management and social media. Leads a team of nine superstars to exceed our goals multi-fold.