Your Email ROI is Vulnerable, but it Doesn’t Have to Be

Tom Sather, Senior Director of Email Research at Return Path discusses top email trends, per Return Path’s Email 20/20 report that highlights important trends and tips for positioning brands for success 

The world is going digital. More and more digital products are entering the market and more than 90 percent of households have over three internet capable devices. To capitalize on this digital revolution, brands are shifting their sales and marketing activities to digital channels in order to reach consumers where they live.

CUSTOMER DATA PLATFORM (CDP) BUYERS’ GUIDE 2019

Welcome to the 2019 edition of CDP Buyers’ Guide. As customer data platforms are becoming increasingly necessary for enterprise marketers, it is also becoming more complex to choose the best fit CDP platform amongst the pool of new and old vendors.

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Among all digital channels, email has stood the test of time as the most effective and efficient channel. In fact, people overwhelmingly prefer email above for marketing communications. As a result, email produces more ROI than any other marketing channel.

Amid the noise of viral advertising, mobile apps, and the latest social media sites, this workhorse of digital marketing has quietly established itself as the core of ecommerce. Almost everyone has an email address (or several), and email is used for much more than just communication. Email has become so ubiquitous that an email address is a requirement for almost any online activity: social networking, online banking, and online shopping, to name just a few.

Email creates a one-to-one digital connection

But email has benefits that extend beyond its universality. Unlike other digital media channels, email offers marketers a direct connection to an individual. Think of it this way: a tweet, Facebook post, or digital ad is sent out to a wide audience but is only effective if those potential consumers see it – before it gets buried in their feed – and the message is enticing enough to draw them in. This leaves a lot to chance, and many potential sales and relationships are lost due to bad timing or mass appeal messaging that doesn’t actually resonate on an individual level.

With email, you send one targeted message to land – and live – in one inbox. This allows you to not only tailor the experience to the individual subscriber and have your message available in the inbox until they take action, you also are able to collect rich subscriber data based on the engagement of each subscriber with each message.

By consistently collecting data from your email campaigns and analyzing data points around individual subscriber activities and preferences, you can optimize your future email campaigns to increase customer engagement, conversions, and ultimately, the ROI of your email program. This is particularly important as mailbox providers are increasingly reliant on engagement based email filtering to catch unwanted email before it’s delivered to the inbox.

The vulnerable side of email

Unfortunately, brands are not the only ones taking advantage of the email opportunity. Email’s ubiquity and high ROI has made it the favorite channel for cybercriminals, as well. The beginning of 2016 saw a record high in email phishing attacks with 250 percent increase over a six month period. This trend poses a serious threat to brands, as each malicious email attack has the potential to damage both customer trust and your bottom line. In a recent study, Return Path found that one in five phishing attacks negatively affect email deliverability and one in three result in reduced engagement. Reduced access to the inbox and a loss of subscriber engagement are a dangerous combination, as they can cause exponential harm to your email ROI.

Email fraud affects every department, from sales and marketing to finance, security, and customer service, and this vulnerability will not be resolved until your entire company unites in their commitment to do something about it. Marketing and security have the most visibility into this problem – and often have the most at stake – so CMOs and CISOs need to work together to identify the risks within the email channel. Together, CMOs and CISOs can develop a comprehensive plan of action to prevent fraudulent attacks before they happen. Only by joining forces and taking responsibility for fighting email fraud can marketers and security professionals take real steps to defend their company, defend their brand, and defend their bottom line.