Best-in-Class Email Marketing: Top 6 Practices

What does good look like when you are an email marketer, and how do you go from good to great if you feel like your marketing program has plateaued?

Recently, we at Validity partnered with Demand Metric to survey email marketers to see what high-performing email marketing programs are doing differently that sets them apart. We compiled the results in our latest State of Email Marketing report.

We found the following six areas of notable differences between best-in-class marketers and others.

1. High-performing marketers have goals and objectives that align with company initiatives

Too many email marketers that report below-average performance have no objective, or simply the wrong objectives—i.e., those that aren’t aligned with the company’s goals.

Often, organizations have revenue goals, but email marketers are focused on things like communicating with customers and prospects and brand awareness. Those are worthy goals of any email marketer, but often they focus more on open rates than they should on the entire path to purchase.

Email marketers who have tied objectives to revenue were much more likely to report above-average performance compared with email marketers who have focused on simply communicating or have no objectives at all.

So start by writing down 3-5 specific business problems your company faces, and then next to each one write how Marketing can help make an impact.

2. Best-in-class email marketers focus on the right tactics