In the early days of email, spam filters were all about the content. Including specific combinations of words and phrases would often make your message more likely to be flagged as spam or blocked outright. As mailbox providers and their spam filters evolved, sender reputation became more important as a factor: instead of a single message, providers evaluate a sender’s “body of work.” Senders whose messages often generate spam complaints or are ignored by recipients are now the most likely to end up in the dreaded spam folder. Message content still factors into many spam filters, but is almost always outweighed by IP or domain reputation.

Even so, many in the industry remain convinced certain words or phrases are the kiss of death for an email. You can find recent articles advising marketers to avoid including words like “free” in the subject line, along with symbols like dollar signs or exclamation points. It’s not hard for senders to get confused with the seemingly conflicting information out there, so we wanted to investigate how it all might tie together.

Social media can seem like an ever-present part of our culture today, going far beyond our personal lives to become a vital part of the marketing strategy for most companies. Because of their large amounts of data on the individuals that use the platforms, social channels can provide an enticing way to reach the types of people who will buy your product, and enterprise companies devote significant resources to doing so. Some businesses even surrender their own websites in favor of using Facebook as their primary channel for providing information and interaction to their customers.

In today’s environment, there’s probably little risk or danger in doing this. LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook (and Instagram, by extension) are all publicly traded companies with massive users bases, and they’re entrenched as advertising platforms with access to troves of data voluntarily surrendered by the people you want to market to. It makes sense to be directing at least some percentage of your marketing efforts toward social media.

Enterprise B2C marketers understand better than most the importance of having a clean and organized customer database. And with the massive amounts of data they’re dealing with, getting it to a point where it’s consolidated and easily accessible for marketing purposes can be a heavy, expensive lift.

Once your company has invested in the tools that can make that happen, though — whether that’s partnering with a modern data warehouse (like Snowflake, BigQuery or Redshift) or building our your own solution internally — how does your ESP fit into the data conversation? If you put all the time, money, and effort into organizing all your data, will your ESP be ready to help you take advantage of that? Or will it just stand as another obstacle that continues to make it difficult to fully utilize the tools you now have?

Every email marketer knows that establishing the right goals is essential to success, and testing effectively is the only way to know if you’re hitting the benchmarks you need to hit along the way. In a Twitter chat this week with our friends at Email on Acid (Check out their chats at #EOAChat), a bunch of email geeks joined us to share their own expertise and experience on email testing.

For marketers trying to execute a messaging strategy, customer data is going to be the lifeblood. And for that data to provide the impact they need, it needs to be thoughtfully organized and easily accessible when they need it in order to segment and target campaigns. For our latest webinar, Aptitive Marketing Analytics Practice Lead Cierra Valor joined our SVP, Growth, Walter Rowland to discuss steps teams can take today toward getting their data in order, and some of the benefits once you can get it done.