Advancements in technology designed for marketers are making it possible to monitor the behaviour of people at the individual level across communication channels. There are two major ramifications of these technological developments. First, it is possible to gain insight into an individual’s historical experience interacting with your communications. Second, this intelligence may be leveraged to refine marketing practices or to personalize future communications based on what is known about the individual.

Consider the following trends in marketing technology:

• Pure play Web analytics companies are maneuvering into the marketing automation space
• Pure play email marketing and tracking companies are maneuvering into the marketing automation space
• Marketing automation plays are influencing the role of analytics
• The trend is towards building more complete and holistic profiles about prospects, leads, and customers by combining explicit data (information that the contact provides to the organization) and implicit data (information gathered by tracking what the contact does – behavior).
• In other words, analytic data has moved beyond anonymous metrics (number of opens, click-throughs, visits, views) and is now being associated with individual people.
• This data is converging into software platforms designed for the marketing organization.
• The marketing organization can then do more sophisticated segmentation for planning better targeted communications programs.
• Rules can also be established for how profile data can be leveraged to assemble personalized content dynamically.
• All these developments are giving marketers more tools needed to move towards “precision” or “one-to-one” marketing communications.
• A/B testing combined with real-time measurement and reporting gives marketers tools for fast and inexpensive iterative fine-tuning.
• This evolution of marketing practices promises more relevant and engaging experiences for customers and improved economic results for businesses that lead the way.