Contact list management: The Achilles heel of email marketing

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More than 70% of European retailers use email marketing to market their products, making it the most common tool, surpassing display media with 66% and search engine marketing, according to a recent Forrester study of more than 250 interactive marketing professionals.

But if there is one important thing we can learn from this research, it is that the deficiencies in the practices used are harming the ROI in email marketing, more specifically in contact list management, its great Achilles heel.

In the UK, where the budget allocated to email marketing is higher compared to other countries, they use user segmentation tactics based on geographic data (42%) and demographics (41%), although the coordination of emails with online display ads and web content, each with 42%, are two other widely used techniques.

French marketers lead the hygiene charts when it comes to email africa email list marketing, with 37% of users cleaning up their email lists from recovered addresses, and 34% of users segmenting and targeting based on the products and services they request information about.

Germany, for its part, is the country that gives its recipients the most control over content, with 40% of Germans using email marketing as a strategy, which allows users to select what they find interesting when registering.

One of the most common shortcomings, however, is the unsophisticated segmentation and targeting of their emails. Only a quarter of marketers surveyed conducted segmentation on consumer behavior following interactions with recent messages. Most do not use basic segmentation, such as targeting users based on their location, and even fewer integrate email marketing with other channels.

This simple integration could significantly increase the performance of a campaign. For example, someone who performs email marketing by analyzing the behavior of social media consumers to perform segmentation will have an opening rate of 33% and a conversion rate of over 7%.

Poorly maintained email lists are another common problem, with only 15% of marketers cleaning up emails from users who have not opened or clicked on recent messages.

Email marketing should not only apply segmentation tactics to ensure that its messages are of real interest to the user, but it should also tackle an even more serious problem, which is, as we mentioned in the title, list management, in order to improve its campaigns.