Email marketing software gives you massive amounts of data that can turn your company into a class leader. All you need to know is how. The most obvious people to ask are the experts. After all, they know best.

An expert is someone who has experience and has worked out the best options. The advice they give is normally sound and if followed would give positive results. After all, are your competitors not turning to these self-same experts for the same advice?

And there is your problem. You do not want to be just like everyone else. That would mean that you would have to cut profits to the bone as that is what they will be doing. Even then you will be on par with them. What you need to do is get ahead.

The way to improve profitability is to ignore the experts. This is not my suggestion but that of the president of www.kaggle.com. This site runs data prediction competitions. Whilst this might seem very specialised email marketing software puts us in the same field. On top of that, we are only interested in winners.

You would think that experts would win these competitions every time but it seems not. They are, we are told, ‘blown out of the water’ in the first couple of weeks. Counter-intuitive is always worrying but this has a lesson for us.

Marketing is a competition. Winning doesn’t provide untold riches so much as opportunities. Losing just doesn’t bear thinking about. The same rules apply whether you are fighting for the same customers or are working on an esoteric data problem.

Non specialists look at the problems on the Kaggle site in a different way to the experts. Whilst the latter’s solutions might be sensible, those new to the specialty see advantages that the established do not.

We are talking about strategy, not just fiddling around the edges with a new From address. Take a step back, look to your strengths, see what is specific to you and what information you have on your email marketing software. If the experts have not mentioned it then that is another reason for going for it.

It takes bravery, but the rewards could be big.