Data-driven marketing is taking business by storm. With 94% of marketing professionals saying personalization and segmentation are extremely important, data holds the key to marketing success. The more data you can obtain, the more you can personalize your experience for customers.

Basing more decisions on data analysis

How many times have you approached employees, coworkers, teammates, managers, or board members with a case for a decision based on data? Or better yet: how many times have you wished you could propose a strategy based on data? Gut decisions have their place, but your business must operate out of data analysis. That goal should be a north star for your marketing team, guiding your way to more complete and robust knowledge of your customers and audience. But isn’t there a problem with this goal? If you don’t have the right data, how can you make the right decision? This is a huge obstacle in the way of accomplishing your goals. And it’s an obstacle that is felt by tons of marketing teams and marketers like yourself. Which means there’s a systematic problem somewhere that needs to be addressed. So how can you address the problem? The first step is to be aware of it and draw attention to it as a team. The only way to begin basing more decisions on data is to start collecting more data. This happens one step at a time, looking at each system and determining if and how it can operate better.

Acquiring new customers

Pretty much everyone wants to acquire new customers, right? Growing a customer base remains an important objective by many businesses—and rightfully so. But what does this have to do with data? Smart, data-driven B2C marketers use data to acquire new customers.

Open rates for personalized emails average 18.8% compared to 13.1 % without personalization. -Statista

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Think about retargeting ads. These ads are based on the premise that you: 1) have data from top-of-funnel leads, and 2) are using that data to show them ads about your business. But what is this entire process hinging on? Data. You need to have the basic level of data to show that these people are interested in your brand, to begin with, and use that to show them relevant ads about your business with goals of converting them.

Integrating data across platforms

This point ties all data-driven objects together. The more data you can pull across platforms, the better understanding you can have of your customers and leads. Consolidating data across marketing and sales platforms has been a challenge for years. That’s why systems that offer a library of integrations often have more appeal to them. And why APIs are important and developers worthy of spending the budget on. As you can compile more data into similar systems, the power for you to make better decisions and acquire new customers becomes even greater.

Email Marketing is more than just sending out email campaigns against a list of subscribers or purchased email addresses. Take a look at the infographic below and get some ideas of how to set data goals, face challenges, and begin becoming a more data-driven marketing expert. In the infographic “24 Email Marketing Stats You Need To Know” we collected all relevant information which allows you to address proper data-driven marketing rules.