Dive Brief:

• According to research from Venture Beat Insights, email clickthrough rates are down, but marketers using personalization find increases on both open and clickthrough rate.
• The report also found personalization is helping in reducing unsubscribes.
• However, personalization in advertising may be trickier than marketers believe. Research from Forrester and SAP Hybris found 66% of marketers say their personalization is strong, while less than half are leveraging behavioral data and only 16% are capturing customer intent.

Dive Insight:

Irrelevant emails are making one click rate go up, and it’s not one marketers want to see – unsubscribe rate.

The solution is engaging in email personalization tactics, even basic personalization, which reduces unsubscribes and lifts key email marketing metrics in open and clickthrough rate. Experian Marketing Services also found personalization increased transactions by six times, according to VB Insights.

Despite barriers, VB Insights pointedly asks, "With a revenue increase of 500-600 percent, can brands really afford to send irrelevant, non-personalized communications?"

For the long term health of an email marketing program, reducing unsubscribes can be an underemphasized goal. Research from AgilOne found unsubscribes result in an average 60% drop in future lifetime value, and also impact email deliverability by hurting the sender’s reputation score.

At the same time, research from Forrester and SAP Hybris found that email was the most popular channel for personalization, but around half of marketers only targeted 10 or fewer segments, and that more than half use rule-based segmentation.