Email continues to play an important role in the overall customer experience. In fact, according to our 2016 State of Marketing Report, 80 percent of marketers agree email is core to their business and 79 percent say it directly generates ROI.

Marketers need the ability to manage their email campaign development soup to nuts with ease and reassurance -- giving them the confidence to press send on an email that will reach millions if not tens of millions of customers. To help keep the simple things simple and make the complex things possible for email marketers, today, we are excited to introduce Email Studio, our new email marketing solution to give marketers the ability to deliver personalized, relevant content to their customers' inboxes at scale. Email Studio puts enterprise email marketing functionality in the hands of every marketer.

With Email Studio, marketers can now:

• Create great messages with no code experience. We have taken our core functions from AMPscript, our coding language, and turned them into easy-to-use, drag-and-drop content blocks. Now, every marketer can build 1-to-1 personalized email content without the need for coding knowledge -- allowing them to significantly accelerate email campaign creation;
• Streamline content development by leveraging our new content management system, Content Builder, in Email Studio. Content Builder lets marketers easily tag, search and share content, enabling them to create personalized emails at scale;
• Send with confidence with foolproof testing to reduce errors. Marketers can now preview and test emails to show the exact customer data driving the message content, ensuring the right message is sent to the right customer, alleviating that moment of anxiety before pressing send.

Fanatics, the provider of authentic, officially licensed sports merchandise for organizations like the NBA, MLB, NFL, NHL, NCAA and more, uses the power of Email Studio to send millions of highly personalized emails in the minutes following the end of big sporting events. From the Super Bowl to the NCAA men's basketball tournament championship game to Peyton Manning's retirement, Fanatics delivers custom, personalized emails to fans showcasing the right merchandise at the right moment. With Email Studio, Fanatics is able to effectively leverage data around user behavior, subscriber preferences, and real-time sporting data like game scores, to deploy smart, personalized email campaigns at scale for more than 300 brands, 23,000 times per year with 3.5 billion messages.

For example, the minute Peyton Manning stepped on the podium to announce his retirement, Fanatics was able to send custom emails with merchandise targeted to fans who expressed interest in Peyton Manning in the past, and customized based on if they were Denver Broncos fans, Indianapolis Colts fans or Tennessee Volunteers fans.

"In the world of sports, consumer demand is constantly changing based on what teams are hot or what players have achieved big career milestones. It's critical that we have the right tools to deliver the right merchandise to the right sports fans at the right time," said Matt Smith, VP of CRM at Fanatics. "Whether we're in the office or in the field, Salesforce Marketing Cloud enables our team to quickly personalize and customize communications to millions of sports fans every week. It also gives us the ability to integrate real-time and post-game stats for a truly cross-channel customer experience."

Email Studio will be available to all customers to opt-in beginning in the middle of May and will be rolled out to all customers this summer. To learn more about Email Studio, please visit marketingcloud.com.