• by Jess Nelson , January 5, 2016

Increasing subscriber engagement is the highest-ranking business objective for email marketers in 2016, according to a recent study by Strongview.

In a poll of 295 professional email marketers, email engagement was overwhelmingly selected as one of the top business objectives for 2016. Thirty-five percent of respondents selected it as their primary objective for 2016, with an additional 10% of respondents placing it in their top three priorities for the New Year.

Increasing subscriber engagement outranked 16 additional categories across the email marketing field, followed by improving segmentation and targeting, which ranked as the second-highest priority among email marketers with 14% of respondents selecting it as their primary objective.

Improving data analysis to better understand customer context, growing opt-in email lists and implementing a data-driven CRM strategy to get a holistic view of the customer closed out the top five highest-ranking objectives for email marketers.

On the other end of the spectrum, using display retargeting to improve email performance was the lowest-ranking priority overall for email marketers and centralizing email programs onto one platform received the fewest first priority rankings with less than 1% of the vote.

Integrating mobile and email marketing did not even place among the top ten objectives for email marketers in 2016, which could forecast trouble and frustration for email marketers considering that the majority of email reads are now on mobile devices.

Less than 3% of respondents listed mobile optimization as an important priority in 2016, although mobile-friendly email design hovers at only 56% of B2C emails, according to a June 2015 study by Litmus and Salesforce.  

Mobile optimization should be an essential priority for email marketers in 2015 -- especially considering that 75% of Americans will simply delete an email before reading it if it is not optimized to be viewed on their screens, per a Brafton study.