Litmus published five reports and six whitepapers during 2018, covering a wide range of email marketing topics from analytics to email service providers and interactive emails to email’s return on investment.
Much of that research was powered by our 2018 State of Email Survey. If you’re one of the 3,000 marketers who completed that survey, thank you from the bottoms of our hearts!
Whether you participated in last year’s survey or not, we hope that you will all take the 2019 State of Email Survey, which is now live. This research wouldn’t be possible without you!
The reports and whitepapers we released during 2018 include:
- 2018 State of Email Analytics
- 2018 State of Email Service Providers
- 2018 State of Email Workflows
- 2018 State of Email Report
- How to Recover from Email Marketing Mistakes
- Interactive Emails: Understanding the Hottest Trend in Email Marketing
- Why a Lack of Email Marketing Mistakes Is a Red Flag
- Email Marketing ROI: The Factors that Lead to Better Returns
- How to Improve Email Review Cycles and Email Approvals
- Email Marketing Staffing & Resourcing for Success
- How to Overcome the Biggest Email Marketing Challenges of 2018
That’s a lot of content. More than 135 pages of email marketing insights! (And those are just the reports. We also did webinars, infographics, and blog posts based on this research.)
Of course, we think every one of those reports is worth your time, but in case you’d like some guidance on which ones to read first, we’ve asked members of our marketing team for their top picks.
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Jason Rodriguez’ Pick:
Why a Lack of Email Marketing Mistakes Is a Red Flag
My favorite report of the year was Why a Lack of Email Marketing Mistakes Is a Red Flag because it highlights such a common, and serious, issue in email marketing.
As the industry has matured, there’s been a trend toward caution when it comes to strategy and design. Instead of embracing newer techniques like email interactivity and hyper-personalization (among others), marketers tend to wait around to hear about other people’s successes with cutting-edge solutions. Their fear of mistakes and failure often set them up for lackluster campaigns and performance.
By embracing mistakes, and using them as the learning tools that they are, email marketers can push the boundaries of what’s possible in email and forge new paths to valuable subscriber relationships. Mistakes are scary, but don’t fool yourself into thinking that a lack of them means you’re doing everything in email right.
Bettina Specht’s Pick:
Email Marketing Staffing & Resourcing for Success
Under-resourcing and under-staffing email teams is a major, persistent problem in marketing departments. 43% of marketers say their email program is under-resourced or very under-resourced, according to our Email Marketing Staffing and Resourcing for Success report.
That whitepaper looks at this issue in detail. Using data from Litmus’ State of Email Survey of 3,000 marketers worldwide, we provide data-driven insights into the staffing and resourcing levels of successful email teams, help determine the appropriate number of email marketing staffers to have at your business, and show which tools and processes improve email program effectiveness.
If you’re among the marketers who don’t have the resources to do their best work, but are struggling to get buy-in for further investment in your email team, this research might be the most powerful piece of content you’ll find. It provides the insights you need to benchmark your resourcing levels, and helps you make the case to invest in the people and tools you need to make your email program more successful.
Jaina Mistry’s Pick:
2018 State of Email Workflows
Every email marketer understands that there’s no such thing as “just sending an email,” which the State of Email Workflows perfectly highlights. This report covers every single step of the email workflow—even the ones you might not have known existed—and highlights some insightful data that can help you benchmark and improve your own email workflow.
It was surprising to learn that more than a quarter of marketers don’t use a pre-send checklist to QA emails before they send. With everything that goes into an email, there are a lot of things that have the potential to go wrong if not checked. Other professions use pre-send checklists—pilots, doctors—and marketers should, too! Checklists act as a reminder to all those things we may forget because we repeat a certain task so much and help to remind us of those details we may miss. We’re only human after all.
Chad S. White’s Pick:
Email Marketing ROI: The Factors that Lead to Better Returns
In an omnichannel world, it’s not a question of which channel is better than another. Brands need to use all the channels that are effective at reaching their audience.
However, it’s reassuring to know that email marketing’s ROI is 38:1 on average—that it, for every $1 brands invest in their email marketing program, they generate $38 in return. Generally speaking, this is about twice as much as you can expect from other digital channels like SEO or keyword ads, and multifold better than what you can expect from traditional media channels like catalogs or TV ads.
Besides the comfort of knowing that investments in email are extremely sound, our research into email marketing’s ROI also examined how various email program and company characteristics correlated with ROIs. A couple of the more interesting findings are that:
- Companies in the more highly regulated European market had slightly higher email ROIs than companies in the US, which as lax email and privacy regulations.
- Companies that primarily use a double opt-in process have dramatically higher email ROIs than companies using primarily a single opt-in process.
Both of those findings should make brands a lot less anxious about GDPR and the California Consumer Privacy Act, which is likely to bring GDPR-like rules to the US.
More Litmus Picks for 2018
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Join 300,000 marketers who rely on Litmus for the latest email industry news, advice, and research, like the reports we discussed in this post.
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