As marketers we have to be smart when the noise gets louder. In order to reach and resonate with your audience you need to be relevant for each individual, and being personal with your audience is one important part of being relevant – but how much email personalizaiton is acceptable?

Tailoring effective marketing communications for basic things that customers need, versus things that they might want, has always been a challenge. Take energy, for example. The electricity and gas services that Utility A provides don’t work any better or worse than those of Utility B, so customers have traditionally not cared who they got them from.

With the new year come numerous changes. From New Year’s resolutions to new goals, this time of year makes it more evident than ever how much people change. Buyer personas, like people, are constantly evolving with consumers’ varying wants, needs, interests and goals. Therefore, creating buyer personas is not a one-time deal but an ongoing process.

These days, the term “transparency” is big. Politicians say they believe in it. CEOs insist that it’s the cornerstone of their corporate culture. Even NFL franchises are reluctantly being dragged onto the transparency bandwagon.

How many newsletters do you get delivered to your inbox every day? Probably more than you could possibly read. People today are inundated with advertising and marketing materials — if you want them to stop and spend time reading your messaging, you need to get creative. Here are a few ways to make sure that your newsletters aren't just filed under spam.

“Coming together is a beginning;
keeping together is progress;
working together is success.”
—Henry Ford

I read the news today, oh boy
About a channel that had passed away
And though the news was rather sad
Well, I just had to laugh
I saw the epitaph:

These days, most companies that have an online presence also have a blog. What began in the 1990s as a “weblog,” where individuals could log their thoughts on the Internet, has evolved into a powerful marketing tool for businesses. To online customers, blogs are a go-to source for information on new strategies and products on the market that could better their business. Blogs play a key role in demand generation as current and potential customers seek new ways to solve identified issues or discover better ways to run a business that they never considered.

Triggered emails are especially potent because they take information you already know about your customers to build meaningful messages and offers to your current, potential and lost clients. If done well, trigger emails as a form of marketing automation is a time saving and highly effective way to build relationships with your target customers. Here are three new ways to incorporate triggered emails into your arsenal in 2016.