Dotdigital blog
Level up your email marketing with practical steps and insights straight from Dotdigital’s Hitting the mark report.
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.
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:
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.
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.
Start by building data collection into your automation. Instead of manually collecting preferences, let your journeys do the heavy lifting:
Creating simple, self-maintaining workflows that build and clean your data automatically is a must for busy marketers.
Turn a single welcome email into a three-step journey that thanks, learns, and rewards.
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.
You don’t need to overhaul your strategy to get smarter with personalization. Start small and scale what works:
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.
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.
Use automation to connect your campaigns and react in real time to what your customers do:
💡 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.
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.
Sync your next campaign with web personalization so customers see content related to your email as soon as they land on your site.
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.
