The inbox is sacred territory for customers and businesses alike, making email marketing a critical piece in the marketing stack. However, despite its importance and high return-on-investment, workers on the ground level say they have less and less time to execute creative or strategic roles due to operational inefficiencies.

This trend and more are detailed in MessageGears’ latest white paper, “The Cost of Inefficiency: How Operational Creep Kills Strategic Thinking in Email Marketing.” According to the report, marketers are spending significant time navigating awkward data management systems at the expense of creative and strategic work. And the more operational their duties become, the less satisfied they are with their job, and the worse they rated their team’s performance.

Of the enterprise marketers surveyed, 68 percent said they send over 50 million marketing and transactional emails a month. Also, 64 percent reported using external agencies to create and deploy their campaigns, and 26 percent said they used on-premises ESPs.

More highlights from the report: 

• More than 25 percent of marketers surveyed rated their team as average or worse on operational efficiency
• 74 percent of people whose roles are at least half operational said they had low email marketing budgets
• 68 percent of email marketers unhappy in their jobs spent half or more of their time on operational duties
• 95 percent of workers with strategic roles were very satisfied with their work

“Clearly, getting enterprise marketers into the types of roles that allow them some creative and strategic freedom has a significant impact on morale and their feelings of enjoyment in the work they’re doing,” the report states.

Marketers also had clear ideas of what would help their performance.

• 74 percent said having an easier way to target people would improve their email process
• 20 percent of email marketers are unhappy with the tools provided by their ESP
• 83 percent of people who love their ESP also love their job

“Staying efficient has to be near the top of your priority list as a marketing team, and it’s never been tougher than it is today. Marketing leaders for large organizations need to… seek out technologies that enhance their ability to deliver sophisticated, personalized messaging campaigns while not burying their teams in operational tasks,” the report states.