Over half of email marketers fail to segment email lists

Scary, isn't it? Even in today's data-fuelled marketing environment 55% of 300 senior marketing executives surveyed by Return Path and The Relevancy Group were unable to perform any customer segmentation.

It gets worse. Four out of ten of the marketers surveyed had no idea of their inbox placement rate.

The study, released to coincide with Return Path's launch of a new suite of email products, concludes that there is an "innate need for email intelligence, a unique combination of email data, analytics and insight, and found that email marketers lack the capabilities to compare campaign effectiveness against competitor benchmarks and to even understand their own performance after they hit send."

Other findings from the study include:

- Only 23% of email marketers analyze competitors' email marketing campaign performance, despite research indicating a 25% uplift in revenues by doing so.

- 65% of email marketers say access to the right data is a challenge, although almost a third does not know where to access that data for campaign evaluation purposes.

"Knowledge truly is power, and having access to analytics tools that gauge email effectiveness enables companies to build deeper relationships with subscribers and, ultimately, drive greater sales," says David Daniels, CEO and co-founder of The Relevancy Group.

Return Path's newest tools are Inbox Insight and Inbox Monitor.

Tags: data analytics, email marketing, email segmentation, email targeting, inbox placement, Return Path