In our 2016 State of Marketing Report, we surveyed nearly 4,000 marketers to identify insights into how the world's best email marketers achieve superior results. Let's check out three important findings that should be part of every email marketing strategy.


Winning Email Marketing Campaigns Include Predictive Intelligence

As personalization capabilities grow more sophisticated, the importance of email has escalated. Eighty percent of marketers now list email marketing as core to their business.

A key facet of effective email marketing is predictive intelligence. In fact, top-performing marketing teams are 4.2x more likely than underperformers to leverage predictive intelligence or data science to create personalized emails. Why? Gaining deeper, behavior-based understanding of customers allows marketers to be smarter in creating next steps along the customer journey.



Successful Email Marketing Drives Cross-Channel Strategy

In keeping with surveys from previous years, the best email marketers see great results from email campaigns designed to drive loyalty, offer exclusive deals, and promote content. But they're also seeing increasing value in cross-channel messages, most notably social selling and mobile opt-in.


Premier Email Marketing Teams Embrace Automation and Personalization

There's a direct correlation between email marketing success and automation and personalization. The best email marketers are 2.3x more likely than underperformers to differentiate their campaigns with triggered emails. Likewise, they're far more prone to segment and target emails to reach customers with personalized content.


Top Email Marketing Teams Generate ROI

Using the tactics described above, the best performing email marketers are experiencing significant uptick in return on investment. While 54% of marketers said email directly generated ROI in 2015, that percentage rose to 79% in 2016.

Among those who agree email is core to their business, nearly half (49%) say email is directly linked to their business' primary revenue source-a notable jump from the 20% of marketers who said the same in 2015.


More Secrets to Email Marketing Success

The gap between the world's best marketers and 'the rest of the field' is substantial. For more tips and best practices for how to create exceptional email, mobile, social, digital advertising and web campaigns, download the complete 2016 State of Marketing Report.