By keeping the interest of the customer first, email marketers can enjoy the benefits of increased read and click rates.

We recently completed our eROI Q2 email marketing survey that provides a look at how marketers perceive email design and coding. Specifically, we polled more than 200 marketers and asked them what they deem important when creating an email, how they design emails and how they test deliverability and rendering. We then compared those marketers that handle all creative and design in-house versus those using an agency. We found a vast difference between what they say and what they do, which was a bit surprising, but not completely shocking. 

First, let's take a look at what marketers say are the most important elements when creating emails. Our survey finds that 87 percent feel that relevant content within the email is the most important. Email deliverability comes in second at 81 percent. One interesting point that we uncovered is that only 68 percent of respondents feel that it is very important that email is coded to work across email clients (email rendering).

We know that deliverability has been a hot topic for a while now. Rendering, however, has not caught up to this same level. With all of the talk around image blocking and Outlook 2007 not supporting styles properly, it is interesting to find that only two-thirds of respondents feel that rendering is important.

Most of these same marketers are also using internal seed lists to test their rendering, but how many marketers have looked at their list composition? Just because you use Outlook does not mean your recipients do. Running simple list composition reports can be very telling.

Second, it is age-old email marketing wisdom that calls to action above the fold help increase email's efficiency, especially with preview panes. With only 59 percent of respondents saying this is important, there is a lot of room for improvement for marketers in this area.

In terms of email design, we found this is an often overlooked element in email marketing. Many marketers feel that if you just get it out the door or to the inbox, it will work. Specifically, only 69 percent of respondents feel that email design needs to reflect their brand and 59 percent stated that calls to action above the fold are important elements of email design.

When we broke down those marketers that use internal teams to create their own emails versus those that use agencies, the percentage of marketers that feel calls to action above the fold and how the brand is reflected in the email is approximately 50 percent more important. This shows that there is a more conscious effort for internal teams to get the design right versus using agencies that implement these best practices from the beginning, thus it is not as top-of-mind for these marketers.

One other interesting point that we discovered: While relevant content is the most important aspect of email marketing, marketers aren't addressing that content to specific email segments. We found that more than half of the respondents send broad-based messages to their entire lists and do not talk to specific segments or focus content on the individuals. This decision is, however, echoed in the fact that only 55 percent of marketers feel proper email segmentation is a very important aspect of email marketing.

Lastly, we compared results between marketers who use agencies (23 percent) and those who use in-house resources (77 percent) and found that those using agencies had 50 percent fewer email bounces. This is due to more proactive list cleaning, checking content and using third-party deliverability tools to test message delivery before distribution.

Producing consistent, predictable results at the push of a button is the dream of every marketer, but as this survey shows, marketers need to keep some best practices top-of-mind. By keeping the interest of the customer first, email marketers can enjoy the benefits of increased read and click rates.

Jeff Mills is a senior analyst at eROI. Read full bio.