EmailStatCenter.com recently released findings from a survey they conducted in September and October of this year on the State of Email Metrics. The survey consisted of 345 respondents, with 55% coming from client side marketers and the remaining 45% coming from agencies and ESPs.

The study provides some decent insight into the challenges that marketers are facing today.  List development, time constraints (which can also be interpreted as resource constraints), and strategy/planning are all areas highlighted both as challenges and as areas for near term focus. 

All of these are critical areas.  We continue to test new list development strategies and will be providing some updates on this topic soon.  Time and resource constraints... building out metrics and making the business case for getting email the attention it requires is a critical first step. Beyond that, recruiting experienced talent in this area is tough.  Strategy and planning is near to my own heart, so I'm glad to see this on the list.  It also makes sense given the considerable growth of our Strategic Services practice in the past two years which focuses the vast majority of its attention on strategy and planning.

Interestingly, another area many indicated as an important near term focus was “metrics and measurement”.  Not that this is interesting in itself, but it puzzles me a bit to see this as the second highest near term focus area (behind list development) and then to see testing ranked lowest in near-term focus.  There are three explanations I have thought of for this:

1) Marketers do not want to start testing until they have better metrics and measurement in place.  If that is the case, I applaud that effort.  The stronger the metrics and the more closely aligned to bottom line business goals those metrics are, the better a program can be optimized through testing.

2) Testing simply is not that appealing.  Given the focus on strategy, planning, and metrics, this does not make sense.  Even with the best plans in place, those plans need to be verified (see my recent post of Marketers Intuition). Moreover, metrics are only good for two things: a) convincing management that we are doing a good job and, b) improving the program—which requires testing new concepts.

3) Past testing has not resulted in the promised results.  Let me be the first to admit that this does happen.  Marketers run tests all the time that do not result in huge gains.  I have run many AB subject line tests during my email marketing career that left little to be desired.  I have also run tests that have blown the doors off a business.  Sometimes it takes 4 or 5 tests to get the knockout, case-study worthy test results.  Not every idea is a good one, but we can't get the huge improvements unless we are willing to fail now and then.  That is precisely why we test!