In order to retain customers businesses need to be responsive to their needs and send them relevant communications.

Mobile growth platform company Urban Airship is making it easier for marketers to do this with a service that lets them deliver individualized messaging to any platform, device or marketing channel and use real-time customer data from any system.

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We’ve already covered fintech, and now it’s time to have a look at another technology portmanteau: martech. Short for marketing technology, it refers to innovative new approaches to campaigns and other marketing tactics, driven by software and hardware developments.

It is an area that is experiencing rapid growth, with worldwide martech spending expected to reach $32 billion by 2018, up from $22.6 billion in 2015. Because many of the tools behind the growth of martech are relatively new, such as customer relationship management software and big data analytics, they are generating both opportunities and challenges for many marketers. The test facing businesses is whether they can remain agile enough to harness these new martech solutions to gain a competitive edge.

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The use of push notifications in apps to reach users is an attractive option for marketers. But done wrongly it can lead to more annoyance than success.

So what do companies need to do to ensure their notifications are effective? App monetization platform Tapjoy has released data based on a study of over 4.4 million push notifications sent between February and August 2016, to help businesses use push notifications effectively.

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Email is still among the most popular ways of delivering marketing messages to customers, but it can be hard to measure how well it works.

A new study from delivery platform SendGrid measures the engagement numbers for the average percentage of male and female recipients, the percentage of emails that are opened on mobile and non-mobile devices, open rates, click rate, click-to-open rates and monthly send rates across 10 industries.

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Google Ads has proved itself an effective tool for gaining new business, but it's a rather less useful way of targeting existing customers.

Now though, marketing cloud specialist Optimove is launching a new integration with Google Ads. This allows businesses to target existing customers with personalized ads on google.com and across the Google Display Network, based on recent and predicted behavior patterns.

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Email is often cited as the technology that made the internet essential for businesses. You would have thought by now that something else would have come along to replace it in our affections, but the popularity of email shows no sign of waning.

A new infographic from email authentication company ValiMail shows that 98.5 percent of people check their email daily and spend as much as six hours doing so.

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Twitter is worried. It's worried that while it is a well-recognized brand, a disturbingly large number of people have no idea what Twitter is actually for. What is the point? Getting slightly meta, the company today explains its raison d'être and tries to clear up some common misconceptions.

'What misconceptions are there about Twitter?', you may well ask. That it is a social network. (It ain't.) That you have to use it every day. (Seriously?) As Twitter says, 'We realized we had some explaining and clarifying to do!'

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Although they account for only two percent of all emails sent, triggered marketing messages -- those sent to mark birthdays and other events -- generate 10.2 percent of email-driven revenue and 9.7 percent of email-driven orders.

This is among the findings of a study by Yes Lifecycle Marketing, the company behind marketing and analytics platform Yesmail360, which shows that people are twice as likely to open triggered messages as they are general marketing emails.

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We all know that first impressions are important and it seems that the same is true when it comes to email marketing.

According to a survey by email marketing company Campaigner 39 percent of marketers say that the first email content new subscribers see from their brand is a thank-you-for-subscribing message. And those messages work, with almost half reporting that 21 percent or more of new subscribers engage with them.

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Marketers are constantly trying to find new ways of engaging with consumers with their message. But although technology is important there still needs to be a human angle.

Content creation specialists Ceros and Column Five have taken a look at the ways in which brands are experimenting with their content and using technology to help drive home their message.

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Fifteen years ago today, the first Apple Store opened at Tysons Corner Center in McLean, Va. I was there, covering the event for CNET News. Four days earlier, then CEO Steve Jobs briefed journalists—bloggers, bwahaha, no—across the way at upper-scale Tysons Galleria. Most of us thought his scheme was kind of nuts, as did analysts, and news stories reflected the sentiment. Recession gripped the country and rival Gateway was in process of shuttering more than 400 retail shops. Timing was madness.

But companies that take big risks during economic downturns are most likely to reap rewards later. Retail would be Apple's third walk across the tightrope during 2001. The others: iTunes (January); OS X (March); iPod (October). I've said before that these four are foundation for all the company's successes that followed, including iPhone. But 15 years ago, battling the Wintel duopoly with less than 2 percent global PC market share, Jobs figuratively walked a tightrope across the Grand Canyon carrying original Macintoshes in each arm.

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Businesses are under increasing pressure to improve their customer experiences and make more effective use of their digital communication channels.

Yet new research from apps, data development and integration company Progress shows that 62 percent of respondents believe their business is in denial about the need to transform digitally.

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The idea of account-based marketing (ABM), treating B2B customers as individual marketing targets, has been around for a while. Technology has made it more practical approach in recent years, but a new survey reveals there are still factors holding back its use.

Business insights specialist Avention has carried out a survey of 100 B2B sales and marketing practitioners about their use of ABM techniques and strategies. While more than 90 percent of those surveyed believe ABM is relevant to their businesses, respondents say that their number one roadblock to starting an ABM program is lack of access to the right data and the ability to use it.

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Millennials have an overwhelming preference for texting according to new research. In fact, when given the choice between only being able to text or call on their mobile phones, 75 percent of millennials would rather lose the ability to talk.

Respondents to the survey from enterprise mobile specialist OpenMarket say texts are preferred because they're more convenient and on their own schedule (76 percent), texts are less disruptive than a voice call (63 percent), they prefer to text rather than call in general (53 percent) and because they never check voicemails (19 percent).

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For businesses, particularly online ones, there will always be a mix of new and old customers. But what does the ratio between them tell you about the health of the company?

Cloud marketing company Optimove has studied data from millions of online customers and more than 180 brands to help companies understand if their ratio of new-to-existing customers indicates a state of growth, stagnation or decline.

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