For too long, marketers have taken the easy way out: emailing every campaign to their entire database. Though simple to execute, such a "batch and blast" approach no longer works in a world where each email competes with thousands of digital, mobile, and social messages. It can be nearly impossible for your email to stand out and get noticed.

But there's good news. You can cut through the clutter by creating personalized email campaigns that are relevant—sometimes irresistible—to the people you are trying to reach.

Companies need to adopt new strategies and technologies that allow them to convert from "broadcast to personal" and drive customer engagement to accelerate business results.

Where do you start?

1. Take control of your data

Create a 360-degree view of all customer data sources

Data reflects your customer's persona and personal traits, and so it can help companies better understand and target relevant messaging to them.

In Bluewolf's annual study (email required for access to report), data was the second largest budgeted initiative for marketers, likely because 63% of marketers don't have a single dashboard to measure marketing activities.

Customer data is the backbone of your company's growth strategy, and it's essential to maximizing sales effectiveness, amplifying your marketing messages, and increasing customer engagement. But, oftent, it can also be overwhelming, quickly becoming untrustworthy, outdated, or redundant.

Take an inventory of what data and content you can actually access and measure across Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, and Social. You need full visibility into how data comes into your organization and its importance for different departments. When your systems are consolidated into a single view, that view fosters a natural alignment and better communication across all departments—leading to greater customer satisfaction.

Standardize data fields and values to ensure data consistency

The best way to increase the health of your database is to start at the point of data collection.

Companies that employ consistent data hygiene generate seven times the number of inquiries and four times the number of leads (email required for access to report).

For example, if your database has multiple titles for the same person, it can make figuring out whom you want to talk to more difficult. To create a solid foundation for effective email marketing, consider standardizing the title data by using the fields of "Function" and "Role" rather than highly variable fields like "Job Title." Doing so brings consistency to the contact list by normalizing around single-defined values.

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