It seems the top tactics used by firms to increase relevancy in their email marketing is changing! Typically firms have relied on segmenting their database along the lines of explicit data they knew about their contact database, such as company size, industry sector and so on.
However Marketing Sherpa's latest Email marketing Benchmarking Survey shows that firms are looking at a contact's behaviour to help them with email relevancy. 
This matches our experience here at g2m Solutions. Implicit behaviour (as opposed to explicit behaviour) has started to to become much more popular with our clients when it comes to deciding when a lead is sales ready.
Why? A number of factors come in to play.
1) Because they can. Recent advances in automated marketing solutions make tracking online behaviour a whole lot easier than it used to be. Better email marketing packages such as Eloqua, Marketo and local Australian provider StrategyMix provide such functionality. Similarly inbound marketing software provider Hubspot has a hugely powerful integrated solution.
2) Because a prospect's activity, rather than their profile turns out to be a much better predictor of purchasing behaviour. In long complex sales cycles using explicit data sources only makes it very hard to know when someone is ready to buy. By tracking behaviour and activity a marketer stands a much better chance of identifying when a lead is sales ready. For example if a lead starts to download ROI calculators and case studies or attend a breakfast briefing or signs up for a trial of your software, its a clear indication they are entering the consideration phase of their buyer's journey.
3) Because marketers are starting to realise that content marketing is the key to nurturing leads. It doesn't matter one jot if you have the smartest, fastest most powerful marketing engine with the best contacts in the world if what you have to say to those contacts is irrelevant to them. Relevant content provides the fuel for the engine. Relevant content speaks to buyers as they progress through stages of their buying journey.
