70% of email marketers are not personalizing their messages with subscribers' names, locations, birthdays or other collected attributes, according to a new study by Experian CheetahMail. The report also finds out that Pinterest promotion lags other social networks, with only 32% of marketers promoting the social network in their emails. 98% and 91% promote their presence on Facebook and Twitter respectively. 

Similar to B2C email marketers, mobile will be as important in 2013 as B2B. Business emailers must also look towards opt-out as a critical metric, and internal conversations about who "owns" the customer.  Read the full article on BtoB Online. 

Bronto Software announced a strong Q4 and the addition of several new clients, including JustFab, Clark's, CafePress and Geek.com. The company also increased headcount by 33 employees year-over-year. 

An increased adoption of CRM applications means that more companies than ever will need to grapple with the challenge of creating and enforcing policies on who within the organization owns the rich CRM data. The owner of an individual record is quickly subjugated by team ownership, such as "sales team" or "support team," setting up a territory battle that can only be resolved through diplomacy, governance, white boards and spreadsheet. 

A study on consumer email response data published by Cue found that in 2012 people took 10% longer to respond to email than 2011, prompting one reporter to posit that by 2020 responding by snail mail will be faster. The prediction is met with resistance however, as email's pervasiveness and relative privacy compared to social channels are cementing its role in business communications.

A new survey by Prosper Mobile Insights finds that consumers expect to become even more reliant on their smart phones and tablets in 2013. 34% responded that they will spend more time with their mobile devices compared to 6% who intend to scale back. Another 19% expect to integrate their mobile devices more into their lives in the coming year, versus 15% who predict they will integrate mobile less. 

Ask.com, WSJ, CNN.com, Pinterest and other major sites have been accused of violating user privacy by sending email addresses and other personally identifiable information to other sites in the open without security encoding, according to an analysis published in The Wall Street Journal. The data is collected during a user's session and passed via the web browser.

A survey of 3000 small business owners by AWeber Communications found them largely optimistic about 2013, with 67% planning to increase their total marketing spend and 85% intending to increase the amount they spend on email marketing. Social spending is expected to rise as well, though not as dramatically. 72% plan to spend more on blogs, 70% on Facebook and 58% on Twitter.

The average email user received 5,579 messages and responded to 869 of them in 2012, according to new data from Cue. The average response time rose to 2.5 days from 2.2 over 2011, though 56% of messages that received a response saw it within the first hour. Tuesday was the busiest email day of the year, with 11am the peak time.

Despite all the talk about companies using big data to uncover insights, maybe automation is the real reason the world is so excited about big data. It could be that big data technologies are more like manufacturing robots - better tools for specialized tasks at speed and scale.  Read the full article on GigaOm.