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The UK's retailers are actually getting worse at email marketing, as many are failing to follow best practice guidelines, according to a new report.
This is the verdict of dotMailer's Hitting the Mark study of 36 UK retailer's email marketing efforts, which places HMV and Republic at the top of the class, with Currys in last place.
Some highlights from the report:
Top performers
HMV and Republic top the table with average email effectiveness scores of 72%, with New Look ad Figleaves joint second on 70. The average score across all retailers in the study is just 60%, down seven percentage points on last year's study.
Could do better
Harrods, Early Learning Centre, H&M, Lidl, STA and Currys make up the bottom five, all scoring under 50%, with inconsistent rendering of emails across different email clients and mobile devices a common issue.
For example, this is how the Currys email looks in my Gmail inbox:
Personalisation
Econsultancy's most recent Email Census found a big increase in the proportion of companies taking advantage of their email vendors' ability to personalise emails. More than half of respondents (52%) said they use personalisation, compared to 38% in 2009.
However, despite various studies showing that personalising emails can improve open and click rates, very few retailers looked at by dotMailer seem to be making the effort, with an average overall score of 0.5 out of eight.
Just 8% of the retailers studied used any kind of personalisation in their emails and just one, New Look, used the information gathered by customers at the sign up stage to tailor content to customers. Clearly this is an area where retailers can improve a lot.
Collecting customer data when they sign up...
