Study Reveals Blueprint for Marketers: Elevate Your Email Marketing with a Customized & Contextually Relevant Approach

DENVER - /PRNewswire/ -- SendGrid, a leading delivery platform for customer communication that drives engagement and growth, today released a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of SendGrid called Elevate Your Email Marketing With A Customized Approach. The study examines the adoption of integrated email marketing platforms and highlights opportunities that exist for businesses looking to create personalized, digital conversations with their customers.

The study, conducted in March 2017, surveyed 200 organizations across industries in the US and Canada to evaluate the challenges, successes and opportunities involved in implementing custom campaign management solutions for their email marketing needs. The study found:

• There are a host of data and personalization challenges that impede one-to-one digital customer communication.
• 50 percent of businesses feel that consolidating data from different sources and channels is their biggest challenge and 50 percent also feel that the ability to personalize experiences across channels and customer touch-points is the biggest challenge.
• 34 percent of respondents said adding contextualized, relevant content to email messages is challenging while creating personalized experiences via email is a challenge for 40 percent of businesses.
• While these marketers are attempting to reach their customers in meaningful ways, they continuously struggle with ways to make those messages relevant and meaningful.

• Access to customer data isn't the problem for marketers. Marketers are challenged with transforming data into truly meaningful action.
• Though many marketers have completed integrations to ensure visibility into customer data, that data access hasn't yet resulted in personalized email content.
• Two-thirds of respondents say data from their sales, marketing, and service applications is fully integrated with their email systems and yet, only 37 percent of respondents said personalized content is fully integrated and only half said the data is highly influential.

• The study identifies an emerging—but small—group of forward-thinking marketers who have managed to decrease the insight-to-action gap to achieve contextually relevant email content.
• 18 percent of survey respondents said they integrated both vendor and in-house capabilities to craft their own custom email marketing solutions.
• 22 percent of respondents who already use these tools, say that this method allows them a higher level of customization and flexibility than an email service provider alone can provide.
• SendGrid believes these marketers are leading the industry toward true email personalization and contextually relevant emails by combining their own data and business logic with the capabilities of a leading email platform.