The process of writing and sending emails and seeing how they perform has been picked apart by countless experts. Between them, they've analyzed billions of emails sent to tens of millions of people.

What wisdom can they share to help us improve email open rates and create winning emails?

Database marketing is nothing new, however today's marketers are collecting more customer data than ever before. As a result, data analysis is at the core of all modern marketing strategies. 

With the amount of data created by consumers continuing to grow, the insight opportunities available through data collection is also growing, with marketing automation tools empowering marketing teams to put this data into action in many different ways. 

However, for businesses that do not have a focused database marketing strategy, they are failing to capitalize on the benefits of database marketing. 

So, what are the advantages of taking control of your customer data – and the benefits it offers to your customers?

Welcome 2018! A New Year with fresh ambitions and new objectives, to make your business perform better and be more profitable.

As many marketers pick apart the data they collected in 2017, they inevitably look to see how they can build lucrative relationships with new contacts.

So, how can brands improve database marketing in 2018?

According to the Financial Times, 2017 has been the toughest year for advertising and marketing since the financial crisis. Marketing departments have expected to be more accountable for how they spend money than ever. Those poor marketers deserve some festive cheer – so what gifts would brighten up their Christmas?

While they’d certainly be happy with a bottle of spirits (a stiff drink would help them recover from presenting their 2018 budget to the board), we have a list of suggestions for things that marketers really want…

Despite what some may think, there is no such thing as a definitive customer journey. It’s not that the customer journey itself is irrelevant — only that the way in which marketers previously understood it (as linear and consistent) is far from the truth.

You can analyze almost every stage of your own digital marketing campaigns in intricate detail, from awareness through to conversion. No doubt, it will provide you with plenty of revealing information about your customers and their behavior.

Even so, consumers exist, behave and engage with many touchpoints outside of your sphere of vision and control. If you're being completely honest, this means your customer knowledge is still myopic.

The notion that effective marketing requires deep customer knowledge seems obvious. After all, how can a business cater to their requirements unless it understands its customers?

Yet many B2B marketers appear to be failing to connect with them. A recent survey reported that 71% of B2B customers are either indifferent to their vendors, or actively disengaged.

Why is this the case? It might come down to the perception that B2B marketing is impersonal; a feeling there isn’t a need to connect on an individual level in the same way as a B2C marketer does. Customers today have high expectations from their experience of the B2C world. It is only natural that they want to apply those same expectations to the B2B world.

When we look at a modern, data-driven approach to marketing, website personalization is one of the most successful strategy for connecting with customers on a one-to-one basis.

As a way of 'humanizing' digital marketing, personalization demonstrates that your brand cares about a customer’s individual needs, and that you are capable of (and dedicated to) meeting them.

As customers become more aware of their own digital footprint, and how their data is used for personalization, it’s something they have increasingly come to see as an expectation from all businesses they engage with.

Our feet are sore. Our bodies are tired. Our brains ache. Some of us have even experienced the unique feeling of being inside a furry, hot, 7ft tall monster suit. But we’ve done it. We survived another Technology for Marketing (TFM) exhibition.

TFM is the only dedicated event of its type in the UK. Over the course of the two-day exhibition at the end of September, TFM hosted over 150 speakers delivering presentations across six theatres, more than 100 of the world’s leading martech vendors, and over 7,500 visitors to its home at London Olympia.

We’ve heard a lot of late about how data is the new oil. That’s largely because it is not only valuable, but the lifeblood of the economy. There’s another reason why the analogy is apt: like oil, data is often difficult to extract and expensive to refine.

Many companies are finding this out the hard way.

According to recent research we conducted, most marketers are caught in a conundrum. They realize that culling and synthesizing data is integral to taking a 360-degree single customer view. However, they also know that they’re over their heads when it comes to making sense of such data.