Are your email personalization efforts making a difference?

Email has a tremendous ROI: a return of $38 for every $1 spent, according to VB Insight’s research.

Yet at the same time, consumers are blocking marketers out — by blocking cookies and ads, turning off notifications, and yes, unsubscribing from emails. How can today’s marketers get the most out of email?

In a word, personalization.

VB Insight is studying how marketers are personalizing email today, aiming to answer questions like:

• Are predictive capabilities worth the investment?
• What data is most useful?
• How much are open rates and CTR increasing?
• What vendors are being used?

In a recent report, we found that email is the top channel for personalized content, yet is often limited to dynamic field insertion (e.g. “Dear John”).

Econsultancy has similarly found that less than a third of marketers are using personalization beyond just a name, and that fewer than a fifth of companies are using behavioral targeting in email marketing.

This means that, although personalization has been shown to have clear ROI, it remains largely unadopted by email marketers.

Why is that?

In the absence of many benchmarks and with a wide variety of approaches, lack of clarity is a substantial challenge. These are still early days for personalization, and many early-adopter marketers are still experimenting. A majority report seeing increases in open and click-through rates, yet many say it’s still too early to tell.

VB Insight’s survey on email personalization is open now. Share your input and we’ll share the data with you.