Email marketers top priority is revealed

Chart of the day: Marketers are most concerned with improving email engagement

New research has found that improving email engagement, followed by increasing sales revenue as well as increasing the number of subscribers are the top priorities businesses have for email.

Top priorities have moved from wanting the most subscribers possible to increasing engagement to retain those subscribers and earn revenue from them. Improving the quality of subscribers was also important for just under 4 in 10 participants of the research (38%).

Most businesses said they were successful in achieving their strategic aims for email marketing, the vast majority rated themselves either very or somewhat successful.

The biggest barrier to their success was found to be improving the quality of subscribers, marketers want to make sure they have the most relevant subscribers for the services and products they offer. For example, B2B marketers who sell email marketing platforms or services would need to make sure their subscribers work both in email marketing and are a buyer of such services. An email database could be huge but they may not be the right people and marketers fully recognise this, it's quality over quantity, as long term this will lead to higher engagement, higher revenues and higher email marketing ROI. The other biggest challenging barrier was found to be increasing conversion rates, which is a long-term challenge for all marketing channels.

So to summarise, the biggest barrier is increasing quality of subscribers and their biggest priority is increasing engagement - marketers want highly engaged, highly relevant subscribers but they have some work to do to achieve this.

• Source: Enterprise Email Priorities by Ascend2 and MessageGears
• Sample: Marketers from over 66 countries with 500 employees or more
• Recommended resource: Email Marketing Playbook