What are the reasons why email marketing goals are not achieved?

Today we will talk about the main reasons why brands often fail to achieve their email marketing goals. We talk about a number of variables that hinder the effectiveness and performance of the email marketing strategy are desired and that objectives such as generating and increasing traffic and visits to the website, increase user engagement, generate more sales in e-commerce or those linked to inbound marketing are not achieved.

Below we have selected the six most frequently recurring reasons. We will analyse them and finally see which of them is the one that is repeated in the majority of companies.

1- Lack of knowledge

Lack of mastery of the discipline can be one of the reasons for not achieving the expected objectives in the field of email. It can lead to problems in getting the most out of the tool used, the campaigns and the analysis of the results.

However, according to data recorded in the study that we published on the State of Email Marketing in Spain in 2022are few (18,5%) companies that claim to have elementary proficiency of your organisation's email marketing. We can see how more and more companies are increasing their expertise in the discipline. 44.4% are medium proficient and 37% are advanced..

2- Budgetary constraints

Investment in any area of marketing can also be closely related to the expected result. Not having the necessary budget, for example, to invest in the necessary tools or to have the necessary equipment, has an impact on the daily work and the objectives achieved.

According to the data extracted from our study, for the majority of companies surveyed (48.1%) spend less than 10% of their total marketing budget on email marketing activities.This percentage remains the same as last year (48.6%). However, the number of companies investing 40% - 60% of the budget is decreasing, 1.9% in 2020 versus 7.1% in 2020/2021.

When it comes to the investment they plan to make in email marketing in the medium term, companies are clearly divided. They agree that this will be will be increased (50%) or maintained (50%)but it will certainly not diminish.

3- Lack of internal resources (people and/or time)

Another reason that can lead to undesired performance of your email marketing programme is the lack of internal resources, such as time and dedicated team. Often, the burden of managing email marketing falls on a single person or a very small team to deal with strategy, management, analytics, etc. In fact, is the most repeated motive among marketers in the sector, 53.7%.

Having to be aware of so many variables makes it difficult to devote as much time as you would like to implement new ideas, test new strategies; in short, squeeze all the juice out of your email marketing programme. One way to solve this problem is to outsource email marketing services. By doing so, the client can replace the time spent on execution tasks with time spent on other more value-added tasks, such as defining the strategy and analysing results.

4- Technological shortcomings/deficiencies

When we do not have the necessary and appropriate tools to develop our email strategy, the results we want to achieve may be altered. Other times we do have the infrastructure but it is not aligned with the needs that our email marketing programme requires or we do not know how to get the most out of it.

In this case, the 37% of marketers feel represented with this insight.

5- Management support

Management support is also critical and is reflected in the results we can achieve through this channel. When it is not given the necessary importance in terms of time, budget or resources, it has an impact on the metrics and performance of the programme. In fact, 11.1% of email specialists feel identified with this problem..

6- Quality of the database

A low quality database with many inactive/non-existent users and out-of-date addresses can lead to low open and click-through rates and poor performance of your email marketing actions. It is therefore important to cleaning our database where necessary.

In this case, 37% of marketers consider the quality of their database to be a major problem. to achieve the stated objectives of your email marketing programme.

In short, here we can see in general terms the insights that are repeated most often. As we said, lack of internal resources (people and/or time) is the most recurrent problem among marketers.. We will see whether or not these results are sustained over time.