I can't stress enough how important it is to always be testing in your marketing campaigns. Whether it be creative, audience, format, or offer, developing a test and learn plan with your client is a necessity if you want to keep growing and evolving. Here are some tips on how to get started, along with key milestones for planning.

Targeting and personalization are key components of online marketing. By tailoring your marketing messages for the individual visitors to your website, instead of making them overly-generalized for a broad audience, you can increase the chances that they will become a customer and a repeat customer.

Here are four keys to maximizing your role as a valued digital messaging partner.

Testing helps optimize your user experience from start to finish — from landing pages and home pages to product information to checkout processes to form fills and beyond. A/B testing can help optimize these areas and more.

As personalization mainstreams into healthcare, consumers and patients are demanding greater inclusion in healthcare decision making; accessing their own health data and connecting their healthcare experiences with Amazon-like personalization. Here's how healthcare brands should react.

Data-driven orchestration enables marketing to move personalization from one-to-many to one-to-one. Personalization is delivered via a hybrid of orchestration techniques. Merkle has categorized these techniques into an orchestration maturity model, with five levels of increasing effectiveness in people-based marketing decision making.

Machine learning, artificial Intelligence (AI), cognitive computing, and decision engines. These are all buzz words or phrases that are trending in 2017. Understanding this mix is the first step in obtaining truly personalized customer experiences at scale.

Personalization has evolved beyond simple customer recognition and into the delivery and management of “personal” customer experiences: Experiences that are always-on and flow from channel to channel, and that deliver and manage one-to-one relationships. Personalization is never defined by marketing technology; instead, personalization should be a strategy focused on delivering seamless customer experiences across all channels and throughout the entire journey. To that end, every company should look at several criteria to define a customer’s interaction with its brand.