Your email marketing roadmap for better results
Email remains the beating heart of marketing. It’s where great experiences begin, and it’s the channel that builds trust, delivers value, and drives revenue. But even the most experienced marketers admit there’s always room to improve, whether that’s improving engagement, personalizing messages, or automating more effectively.
But it can be hard to know where to start.
That’s where ‘Hitting the mark’ comes in. Every year, Dotdigital investigates the email marketing practices of 100 global brands, signing up to their mailing lists, analyzing their campaigns, and scoring their customer experience. Our goal is to uncover what works, what doesn’t, and how every brand can improve.
To help visualize this and to create a clear framework for marketers looking to improve their results, we created the ‘customer experience quadrant’. This helps brands understand where they are today and where they can go next.
Introducing the customer experience quadrant
Before diving into how to improve your email marketing, it helps to understand the bigger picture. This year, we scored brands across the two core areas that help marketers create exceptional customer experiences: automation sophistication and data-driven personalization.
When we plot those scores, four clear groups emerge. We call this the ‘customer experience quadrant’, and it reveals how brands are progressing in their email marketing maturity:
- Momentum builders are brands that have the basics in place, with room to grow and develop a connected customer experience
- Rising stars are brands that are gaining ground by using automation to build smarter, more effective customer journeys
- Creatives are brands that stand out with strong design and content, but have room to integrate customer data and journey automation for better results
- CX icons are brands that deliver top-class experiences that are personalized, automated, and connected across channels
Where you sit on the quadrant isn’t about size, budget, or industry; it’s about your next opportunity for improvement. Each quadrant highlights a different challenge to overcome on the path to stronger engagement, smarter automation, and more loyal customers.
By thinking about your biggest challenges and priorities for improvement, you can get a good idea of where you sit on the ‘customer experience quadrant’ and what to focus on next. Let’s take a closer look at some of the most common challenges we uncovered in Hitting the mark, and how to tackle them with practical solutions and smart marketing tech.
Problem 1: “I don’t have enough data to personalize or automate”
Chances are, if this is your biggest email marketing concern, you’re probably one of our ‘momentum builders’. You’re nailing the basics, growing your lists, and engaging regularly, but you’re struggling to create campaigns that feel truly relevant. In fact, you might lack confidence in your customer data. This is affecting your ability to personalize or automate effectively.
And, when data lives in silos or doesn’t exist at all, personalization feels impossible. Without reliable customer insight, every send feels like a shot in the dark.
Top tips to improve
Start by building data collection into your automation. Instead of manually collecting preferences, let your journeys do the heavy lifting:
- Add a data-collection step to your welcome series to learn about customer interests early
- Use progressive profiling forms and preference centers to capture insights gradually
- Automate data hygiene workflows, for example, automatically enrolling unengaged contacts into a re-engagement flow
Creating simple, self-maintaining workflows that build and clean your data automatically is a must for busy marketers.
💡 Small step, big impact
Turn a single welcome email into a three-step journey that thanks, learns, and rewards.
Problem 2: “I want to personalize, but I don’t know where to start”
If this sounds like you, you’re likely what we call a ‘rising star’; you’ve got healthy lists, regular campaigns, and even a few automations running, but your personalization still feels basic. You might be using first names or product categories, but your content isn’t yet shaped by who your customers really are, what they want, or what they’ve done.
That’s a common pain point and a huge opportunity. Once you start thinking beyond “who” your customers are to how they behave, personalization becomes far more powerful.
Top tips to improve
You don’t need to overhaul your strategy to get smarter with personalization. Start small and scale what works:
- Identify what data would make your messages more meaningful, e.g., favorite product types, purchase frequency, or browsing habits
- Expand your preference center to make sure you’re collecting the right zero-party data to personalize campaigns
- Use AI product recommendations to tailor products or content based on real customer behavior
- Build automation flows like wish list reminders, abandoned browse, and back-in-stock alerts to surprise and delight subscribers
- Expand your reach with cross-channel tactics and promote SMS or WhatsApp opt-ins in email campaigns to grow your channels
💡 Small step, big impact
Connect your CMS (content management system) or ecommerce platform with your email provider to connect on-site behavior with email data for more relevant content and recommendations.
Problem 3: “My emails are looking great, but engagement has plateaued”
If this feels familiar, you’re probably in the ‘creative’stage. Your emails are beautifully and thoughtfully designed, consistent, and engaging, but you’ve hit a wall. Your open and click rates are steady, but conversions aren’t climbing. The problem isn’t your design; it’s the disconnection between your sends.
To take the next step, think about how each campaign fits into the bigger picture. True relevance comes from moment-based marketing; reaching people in context, not just on schedule.
Top tips to improve
Use automation to connect your campaigns and react in real time to what your customers do:
- Build out your essential automations, think: welcome, cart recovery, and birthday
- Combine email and SMS to create consistent follow-ups across channels
- Use send-time optimization to reach customers when they’re most likely to engage
- Add conditional splits in your automations so messages adapt to customer responses
💡 Small step, big impact
Identify one high-performing campaign and use AI to turn it into an SMS campaign to reach more people. You’ll build cross-channel consistency without any extra effort.
Problem 4: “We’re building strong campaigns, but we want to keep improving”
If that’s you, congratulations, you’re one of our ‘CX icons’ that are already delivering personalized, automated experiences. You’ve built intelligent journeys and data-driven campaigns, but as ‘Hitting the mark’shows, even the best-performing brands can’t stand still. Customer behavior keeps evolving, and innovation is the key to staying on top.
For CX icons, the next step is thinking beyond the inbox; creating more connected experiences that follow the customer wherever they go.
Top tips to improve
- Experiment with web personalization, showing products or messages based on what customers last clicked in your emails
- Explore predictive analytics to anticipate needs and automate timely follow-ups
- Use eRFM modeling (based on engagement, recency, frequency, and monetary data) to identify frequent shoppers and lapsing customers, then tailor content to each group
- Add loyalty and retention automation flows to reward your most engaged customers and encourage repeat purchases
💡 Small step, big impact
Sync your next campaign with web personalization so customers see content related to your email as soon as they land on your site.
Next stop: email marketing success
No matter where you are in your email marketing journey, there’s always a next step. The most successful brands don’t get there by doing everything at once; they focus on one area at a time, refining, testing, and building on each success.
That’s exactly what ‘Hitting the mark’ is here for: to inspire you and act as a roadmap to better email marketing. It benchmarks 100 brands, reveals what’s driving success, and outlines the practical steps you can take to reach your next destination.
If you’re ready to see how your brand compares and discover your next opportunity to grow, dive into the full report.
