"The fact is, no matter what the future legal relationship between the UK and Europe, personal information will need to flow. It is fundamental to the digital economy. In a global economy we need consistency of law and standards -- the GDPR is a strong law, and once we are out of Europe, we will still need to be deemed adequate or essentially equivalent."

At today's Data Protection Update 2016 conference, the DMA's CEO Chris Combemale is calling on businesses to take responsibility for customer data and ensure they are prepared for the new General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) due to come into force in May 2018. The data-driven economy is the engine that will continue to drive growth in the UK.

Instead of competing with email giants like Gmail and Outlook, Aol's Alto serves as an email aggregation inbox. It takes in all of the emails from your various accounts and automatically organizes them into "stacks" for categories like Travel, Shopping and Finance. It marks the latest attempt to make sense of the increasingly overwhelming flow of email that floods our multiple inboxes.

When done correctly, email marketing affords you an incredibly personal, efficient and effective way to build the "Know," "Like" and "Trust" factors that are critical to any client relationship or potential sale. There are more than 4.3 billion active email accounts worldwide, and more than 192 billion emails were expected to be sent each day during 2016.

Researchers with Barilliance looked at how some merchants use triggered emails in the case of cart abandoners. They found that triggered emails at specific times post-abandon can increase conversions of those carts by up to 18%. The merchants in the report sent emails after the 1-hour, 24-hour and 72-hour marks.

Some 88% of B2B companies and 76% of B2C companies are doing at least some form of content marketing, according to the Content Marketing Institute. But that same research points to a serious problem. The bulk of people doing content marketing aren't getting good results. Only 30% of B2B marketers say their content marketing is effective. Only 38% of B2C marketers can say the same.

We spend a worrisome amount of time reading, answering and filing our emails: several hours a day is dedicated simply to clearing our inboxes. Or alternatively, we just give up, letting our unread messages counter tick up toward infinity, toward a point where it simply does not matter, as smug "Inbox Zero" colleagues show off their gleaming, empty, messages folder.

Invalid addresses are unmailable: They don't match any existing email accounts. You end up with them because sometimes people submit their contact information with typos. Others purposefully enter fake email addresses because they're annoyed that they have to provide one to access a site, and they will give addresses such as "nothanks@no.com."

There is a huge range of data that you could be collecting that allows you to target Web visitors much more effectively. For example, take abandoned basket emails. What should be a staple of every ecommerce communications toolkit is startlingly underused - Intilery's latest research shows that as few as 55% of the top 150 ecommerce retailers in the UK are actually using them.

"In the age of overflowing inboxes and forgotten emails, how can marketers prevent their messages to clients, customers and colleagues from getting lost in the shuffle? As a PR engineer, I spend a lot of time writing emails to customers. My goal is to inform and engage them. After my fair share of test emailing, I found some things garner more attention."