• by Jess Nelson , June 7, 2016

The return of investment on email marketing skyrockets when marketers successfully leverage data to understand and market to consumers in a more holistic and engaging manner. 

Personalized email marketing messages deliver a 600% boost to overall transaction rates, per Experian, and 74% of 1,100 marketers polled by eConsultancy assert that email personalization leads to increased customer engagement.

The batch-and-blast campaigns of yesteryear no longer prove fruitful in today’s personalized email marketing economy and marketers who utilize contextual and behavioral data in their messaging perform more successfully then their peers.

Data-driven marketers distinguished themselves in Salesforce’s annual State of Marketing Report by significantly outperforming marketers who relied on less tactical marketing outreach. In a poll of over 4,000 digital marketers, 63% of marketing teams that self-identify as high-performing say they excel at creating personalized, omnichannel customer experiences. On the opposite of the spectrum, only 2% of underperforming marketing teams asserted the same.

Top-performing marketing teams were also more likely to use predictive intelligence and data science as part of their marketing strategy, according to Salesforce -- as well as ranking customer satisfaction as the primary goal of the campaign.

Email and the converging data universe is the theme of this week’s Email Insider Summit, hosted by MediaPost.

In a keynote address on Monday, Allysson Reagan, director of CRM and email marketing at Angie’s List, discussed how data has helped the local business review Web site better understand its customers. 

Reagan discussed how the email channel was formerly highly siloed at Angie’s List.

“That was one hurdle we had to get over -- just getting the data in one location,” says Reagan.

Over the past year Angie’s List has restructured the way the company stores and utilizes customer data to offer better marketing experiences to its customers. Everything that a customer does on the Angie’s List Web site is now noted in data analytics.

Angie’s List has over 3 million paid members currently, but has an additional 10 million email addresses and 100 million unique views. The company plans to drop its pricing structure this summer to encourage more visitors to visit the company’s Web site.