For email marketers, MailChimp is the preferred software (by a slim margin)

Online marketing firm Lionbridge recently revealed the results of its annual Global Email Marketing Survey, where it gathered responses from 570 individuals from across 25 countries on their use of marketing emails.

Here are some of the major insights:

Email is more likely to be handled internally than an agency:

77% of respondents handled email communications internally, out of which 31.4% used marketing automation program, while 35.6% used a standalone email marketing program. Only 7.2% used a full service agency.

It’s still hard to track business results:

Despite the advances in analytics and customer tracking, 4 out of 5 respondents said they don’t directly track ROI from email channels. Less than half (49.1%) said they were able to tie email campaigns to impact on sales revenue, and only 13.2% said they use performance metrics to secure budgets for future programs.

There’s no clear leader in the vendor space (although MailChimp is marginally ahead)

Here are the results for email marketing/marketing automation vendor preferences:

MailChimp is marginally ahead of the pack, with ExactTarget, Marketo and Oracle Eloqua battling it out for second place. The report noted the wide variety of programs being used by marketers today:

“While Mail Chimp (12%) leads the pack by a nose, the market is highly fragmented, with six major providers in close contention and no clear market leader. This is probably because the companies they serve have diverse needs. Since email marketers usually leverage multiple touch points across multiple channels and markets, some companies find that the best solution is to use separate tools that cater to each facet of their marketing objectives, integrating them into a synchronized marketing effort.”

Mobile is the future, but email marketers are lagging behind.

Increasingly, the first place a customer is likely to open a marketing email is a mobile device, but marketers haven’t been great at developing responsive designs for these emails. In the survey, less than half (42.3%) the respondents said they were working on developing responsive designs for their emails, while 36% said it wasn’t a priority, and 21.7% said they didn’t have the budget to do it.

You can download the entire report from Lionbridge here.