How much of your customer data is accessible for email marketing? Rising customer expectations mean today’s marketers need more access than ever before to up-to-date data. But customer data isn’t all marketers need to access. They also need data they may house outside of the marketing department, including data for inventory, geolocation, shipment tracking, etc. But just 17% of marketers at some of the world’s largest companies told us they were very satisfied with their real-time data access.

The data marketers are able to use (or not use) in email marketing largely depends upon where customer data resides and how they access it. If you want to leverage all your customer data for email marketing — not just the data that happens to reside with your ESP at any given moment — it’s time to restructure how you manage, store, and access it. Here are three steps you can take to leverage all your customer data to increase personalization and improve your email marketing efforts without compromising data security.

The primary goal of all email marketers is to drive customer engagement and retention, while constantly improving ROI. From content to IP/domain management and analytics, there are countless factors that go into implementing a successful email marketing campaign. However, when getting to the core of optimizing email campaigns and deliverability, it comes down to how you’re using data. Having access to all your data in an organized manner is one the most valuable resources email marketers can have.

Within the MessageGears cross-channel ESP platform, we offer one of the most powerful data analytics tools available in the ESP industry. It provides in-depth aggregate data on the entire lifespan of a specific campaign or job, down to the domain level (Gmail, Hotmail, etc.). Our analytics features not only help marketers easily digest and understand their email metrics, but also how they can improve their email efforts.

The MessageGears analytics toolset is composed of three levels of data — the account level, the campaign level, and the job level with performance by domain. Each level provides valuable data and trends to help identify potential issues and patterns with your sends.

With Hurricane Florence bearing down on the Southeast U.S., it seems everyone is on edge as a looming crisis unfolds. Everyone’s hearts go out to those who are in the path of the storm.

It’s a sad reality that major events like this happen often — hurricanes, earthquakes, violence, terrorism, etc. — and we as marketers can be so involved in our day-to-day operations that we lose sight of the fact that each email we send (even if it’s sent as part of a larger automated program) lands in the inbox of a real person the crisis is impacting. And, even if they’re not directly impacted, they may be sensitive to certain content. It’s not hard to spot when a brand isn’t showing empathy toward those affected, and that can turn anybody off.

When it comes to travel and hospitality, personalized experiences are what everybody wants. Travel brands have a wealth of information about their customers that should allow them to deliver on individual wants and needs. But figuring out how to leverage that data to create a personalized experience is a real challenge. Email marketing presents a golden opportunity for these brands to leverage their data to build and strengthen relationships with their customers. So what are some things these brands should keep in mind?

There are all sorts of reasons so many marketers call themselves email geeks. From the expansive opportunities for creativity to the psychology of customers’ reactions to campaigns and the potential for AI and machine learning to personalize content, email has tremendous potential for igniting the passion of a wide range of marketing professionals. And how many industries have so many people who find the work that stimulating?

We wanted to tap into that passion a bit recently when we were preparing a contest to give away a ticket to next month’s Litmus Live event in Boston. So we asked the email marketing community to tell us why they consider themselves email geeks. What, specifically, is it that draws you into this industry? What gets you excited about doing your job every day? And our favorite answer would get into Litmus Live for free.