I've worked with my team on marketing software for the past 4 years. We've managed to make segmentation, targeting & personalization a few mouse clicks away. Yet without a strong, quality message that's well timed most campaigns fail.

Good article and useful general advice at the end.

To add, all the segmentation data in the world won't help you unless you have the volume of personalized content to use that data for providing relevant communications. If you have one writer that can barely keep up with the current demand, telling them you need five versions of a newsletter with very different content is a moot point.

That said, having the data available to enable this level of personalization down the line is better than not having it from a marketing perspective. The house email list is often a company's most valuable marketing asset. The better segmented it is, the more valuable that data asset becomes.