As a modern marketer you’ve probably realized by now that your most important asset is data. Far beyond collateral, advertising methods, and so on, it’s your database that keeps everything moving and in perspective as a manageable and tangible system of record.

Once, you could offer your customers a discount and reap rewards, today that doesn’t work. Yes, you can stimulate a response, but not one that will lead to any long-term and sustainable outlook for your business. How you segment data today has changed dramatically: it’s now driven by increasingly complex demands from your customers to be treated as individuals. Consequently, the one-to-many practices of the past no longer work.

The question now becomes: How do you manage your data? Trying to keep up with manual or even semi-manual customer data analysis and segmentation without automation and platforms designed to do the heavy lifting, is borderline impossible. And as data scales, as it should, your task becomes exponentially more difficult as each minute passes.

So, what do you do to keep pace? Here are five key elements that will help you with the aggregation and segmentation of your customer data.