So how can you super-charge your email marketing campaigns in 2020? Here are a few important advantages email provides.

Personalization. As a concept, personalization isn鈥檛 a new idea. As far back as 1993, Don Peppers and Martha Rogers introduced the idea of one-to-one marketing, meaning your message is tailored to an individual鈥檚 interests rather than being a broadcast message.

What continues to evolve are the technologies that help businesses embrace personalization, including email. Use an email marketing platform that integrates with your CRM system to build data-driven, customer-specific lists and tailor the content so it鈥檚 relevant to your audience.

Marketing Automation. This is the practice of planning a series of emails or marketing touches that are automatically sent to a pre-defined group of contacts on a regular interval or based on an action the contact takes.

Use marketing automation to nurture and grow relationships with customer and prospects. For example, you could create a series of emails to send a customer who has purchased a piece of equipment with product information, a promotion on accessories or related products, and scheduled service reminders.

Although there is an entire segment of marketing software dedicated to doing marketing automation, most email software provides the opportunity to create a series of scheduled emails.

Device Optimization. In today鈥檚 digitally connected world, it is important to remember that people are using multiple devices to access their email, and they expect you to meet their experience expectations on all of them.

Most companies still design their email templates primarily for desktop users. Sending emails that are not designed to be responsive or adaptive not only limits the effectiveness of the email. It also can damage your brand by creating the impression that you do not embrace technology.

It鈥檚 important to choose an email provider that offers email template designs that scale automatically according to the user鈥檚 screen size. And don鈥檛 forget to test your emails before sending to make sure they appear correctly.

The start of a new year is a great time to re-evaluate your marketing practices and set goals for improving them. Is it time to think differently about how you approach email as a channel to fully capitalize on its potential?

Contributed by Betsy Chase at Charter Software, which partners with agricultural, construction, golf and motorsports OEMs through technology-based management tools.