Marketers continue to see the value in intimate and direct communication with consumers. Not so long ago, families gathered around the TV; now individuals surf the Web and watch videos on personal handheld devices. Consumers have grown comfortable with—and even come to expect—a one-on-one dialogue with marketers. Personalized marketing messages are essential to getting customers' attention and delivering communications that increase sales. In today’s market, customers large or small don’t have the time or patience to deal with irrelevant information. Data-driven personalized messaging has never been more important.

If you sell a product or service (business-to-business or business-to-consumer), you must gather and use information about customers' purchases, characteristics of purchasers, how much they spend per sale, and when or how often they buy. Knowledge of demographics, psychographics, geographics, and past behaviors is a valuable tool for predicting future purchases. This is where market segmentation comes in.

Customer information must be used for effective market segmentation. Market segmentation is of critical importance because the buyers of a product or a service are not a homogenous group. Instead, every buyer has his or her individual needs, preferences, resources, and behaviors. Since it is virtually impossible to cater to each customer’s individual characteristics, marketers attempt to group customers into market segments by variables they have in common. Creating customized marketing messages links directly to improved business results.