As an experienced email marketer you are well aware of the fact that “the power is in the list.” This internet marketing dictum effectively means that the primary power of an online business is contained in its list of subscribers with which your brand communicates through email marketing strategies which you concoct. The power of email continues to outperform even the most innovative online technologies, and as the mobile device adoption rate continues to flourish, email is blooming along with it. A recent eMarketer report entitled “B2B Email Marketing: Benchmarks and Best Practices for 2014” demonstrates that email is more valued by savvy online brand marketers than ever before and to an ever burgeoning level automation processes are taking email metrics to new heights.

Email marketing is the #1 most important automation feature

According to the respondents of the survey, email marketing is the single most important feature that any marketing automation system can have, with 89% agreeing to this statement. In the number one position, email marketing features in automation outshine lead nurturing at 84%, campaign management at 82%, CRM and social integration at 80%, and everything else! The rise in uptake of marketing automation features by online brand marketers is nothing short of amazing.

Automation adoption is now nearly universal among email marketers

In 2012, just 18% of marketers stated that they had implemented complete adoption including the integration of marketing automation into sales and marketing initiatives, but by 2013 that percentage had reached 26%. 2014 saw a huge increase in the total of complete adopters reaching a pure majority at 52%! In the meantime, the number of marketers who stated that they had taken on a strong adoption in 2014 was 29%, and only 2% of all marketers stated that they had only taken on “some adoption” of these necessary features.

Email marketers want highly sophisticated, advanced automation systems

Automation features for email marketing are often quite varied and are engineered to be applied across several channels at once as well as various formats. Professional email marketers have found that the primary email technologies that they want to harness are not simple the basic mechanisms which are able to provide a conventional measure of automation and management to email, but they want to go further and benefit from highly sophisticated and advanced systems which are able to manage a breadth of cross channel marketing campaigns in order to provide the precisely targeted and fully personalized experiences that today’s email subscriber has learned to expect from the brands they trust.

The majority of consumers will purchase more items if they receive personalized emails

This aspect of consumer appeal information is best shown by a recent Harris Interactive survey which stated that fully 82% of all polled consumers were willing to some degree to receive a higher frequency of email marketing missives, as long as their previous behavior, shopping habits, and other aspects of personalization were taken into consideration in the message. The survey found that 8% of consumers were extremely likely to purchase more items after receiving automated personalized emails about products, 17% were very likely and 56% were somewhat likely.

Personalization helps to drop the barriers to providing personal information

The barriers to providing personal information seem to melt away for a majority of consumers when it comes to whether they are willing to share their personal preferences with etailers in order to receive email marketing missives which are more relevant to their needs, preferences, and requirements. 16% strongly agreed that they would be happy to share more information, and 53% somewhat agreed. That totals up to 69% of all your email subscribers who are effectively telling you that they don’t mind revealing more about themselves, as long as you reward them with more targeted automated marketing messages. This seems to run counter to the prevailing concept that customers are recalcitrant to provide personal data… just treat them well!

Those statistics clearly prove that if you are one of the last holdouts of utilizing the powerful ability of marketing automation to laser-target your emails to the particular characteristics of the consumer, you’re really waaaaaaaaaaaay behind!