Email Vendors: Here's What Business Users Really Want

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According to the Forrester Wave report, it's obvious what users are looking for from their email vendor: data security, account management, ease of use, and database support. In this post, we break down some of the key findings.

Marketing clouds are said to be the future of marketing, where you can automate all your marketing solutions and social campaigns on one platform. But as it turns out, a Forrester Wave report shows that email presence in the marketing cloud isn’t that important to them. They would rather email programs include data security, account management, usability and database support first.

The Forrester report, which surveyed 89 email marketers, found that nearly two-fifths of them don’t currently integrate email with other channels and only 19% of them included a multichannel mix for three years or more.

“This doesn't mean that marketers don't value integrated marketing solutions,” Forrester concluded. “But it does mean that they want email best practices—as well as multichannel solutions—that can boost results.”

Before deploying email operations on a larger scale, businesses should consider improving and rethinking their marketing strategies and email operations first.

According to the repot, two-thirds of the respondents do not perform micro-segment targeting, which is a great way to use machine data to analyze and predict potential leads and customers. It also turns out that 61% have never tried open-time personalization, which takes information about who opened what and when and allows you to customize emails based on those findings.

If businesses want to retain customers, drive sales, build loyalty, generate brand awareness and increase website traffic like they say in the report, turning generated data into useful intelligence so that you can personalize and target the right consumers is imperative.

Forrester says innovation is on the horizon due to email vendors being interested in marketing clouds. And if email vendors can be open to innovation and understand the power of using analytics to drive your marketing strategy, it would serve them well.  

Jonathon Mahon is a content marketer, writer and designer based in Boston. He writes for various digital publications and blogs specializing in the cloud, email automation, software, and technology.​