There’s a lot going on for marketers right now.
The massive shift to digital marketing caused by the pandemic has led to more demands on marketing teams to create more emails and landing pages than ever before — but they’re having a hard time keeping up.
The current labor shortage is making it increasingly difficult to hire people with the right skills to produce emails and landing pages with traditional methods, and that means the old way needs to change.
At the same time, teams are becoming increasingly decentralized — they’re not just spread out physically, they’re also operating across various functions. This is also prompting an exciting shift in how creativity is distributed across teams. Marketers are taking back some creative ownership, and we love to see it.
So, with all this change going on, how are marketers still able to win at email? That’s what we looked at in the latest and greatest Knak Email Marketing Benchmark Report.
This year, in our fourth edition of the annual report, we interviewed over 200 marketing professionals from various sectors and industries. Based on their responses, we’ve packed the report with tons of email performance benchmark data, including average delivery (93%) and click-through rates (10%) for the year. We’ve also taken things a step further and uncovered a number of key insights that showcase what marketing teams are up to, how they’re tackling email, and what their teams look like.
Here’s a quick rundown of the findings — but you’ll want to read the full report for the whole picture!
Email is an increasingly important marketing tool. Of the marketers we spoke to, 71% sent more emails in 2021 than they had the year prior. As their email volume increases, marketers are also optimistic about how they’re performing across key metrics like open, click-through, and unsubscribe rates.
Now is the time to stand out.
Today’s customers expect the world from their brands — and that includes personalized, engaging, and responsive emails. Meeting these expectations can be a challenge. Other challenges our marketers face? Implementing new design (45%), prioritizing strategic operations (40%), speed to market (34%), and approval processes (32%).
More and more, marketing teams are shifting away from a centralized model. In fact, 34% of our respondents indicated that their team became more decentralized in the last year — and this impacts email and landing page creation. As our teams become more distributed, they need tools that help drive consistency and collaboration.
Alongside decentralization, there’s also a shift happening where marketers are empowering more people to be creative. Within email marketing specifically, 51% of marketing teams design their emails themselves. However, as teams are strapped for resources, they’re relying on tools to help them stay creative and collaborative.
Despite their many obstacles, marketing teams are finding ways to accelerate the timeline between ideation and execution. Today, 55% of marketers get their emails out to market in minutes or hours, and 39% say the same about their landing page process. While this is great, there’s still room for improvement, particularly in the back and forth of approval processes.
Marketers built an average 20 landing pages last year, and for 50% of them, that’s more than they did in 2020. However, despite their growing popularity, there’s still 69% of marketers who rarely create landing pages for their email campaigns, and 23% that rely on their web team to build them. As such, there’s room for marketing teams to take more ownership of their landing pages and create seamless marketing experiences.
If there’s any one thing we’ve learned from this year’s benchmark report, it’s that there’s a lot of change happening in marketing — but that’s a good thing.
At Knak, we get the awesome opportunity to see the impact of these changes first hand as we work with hundreds of teams on our platform. The teams that continue to win are the ones that are agile and adaptable. They empower all of their people to be creative and decentralize their creative functions. Plus, they are giving themselves the space and time to test and optimize their emails.
Want to find out more about what we learned? Get your hands on all the benchmark data and our detailed insights in the full report.
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