Too many marketers are being held back by their data at a time when they should be empowered by it. They want to engage in agile, omnichannel marketing, but they’re stuck with data silos that don’t allow a full view of their customers at the person level.
This siloed data isn’t just creating lost opportunities. It’s costing real revenue based on a poor view of the company’s data.
The Risks of Focusing on Short-Term Results
As Rex Briggs explains in our Agile Automotive Marketing & Measurement Webinar, if the email marketing manager at a company doesn’t have a full, 360°view of person-level data, the manager may make decisions that actually hurt customer lifetime value and overall company revenue.
For example, say that manager sees only email marketing data – just initial sales and email engagement metrics. Because information is siloed, there’s no way to know how marketing affects customer lifetime value. A sales promotion goes out every other week, generating a nice little bump in revenue and decent engagement rates, but meanwhile, all those sales are eroding customer lifetime value.
If this manager (or any manager in your company) can’t see the full impact of their decisions, you may be optimizing for results that look good in the short term, but actually end up costing the business later on.
That’s just one example of how data silos can cost money. It’s quite possible to optimize yourself out of business if you only focus on short-term results.
Siloed Data and Agile Marketing Don’t Mix
Siloed data isn’t just impeding agile marketing. It means agile is a nonstarter: You can’t do agile marketing without data – accessible, accurate, cross-department data.
Just so we’re all working from the same definition, here is how McKinsey defines agile marketing:
Agile, in the marketing context, means using data and analytics to continuously source promising opportunities or solutions to problems in real time, deploying tests quickly, evaluating the results, and rapidly iterating. At scale, a high-functioning agile marketing organization can run hundreds of campaigns simultaneously and multiple new ideas every week.
Mitigating Data Silos with Integrated Marketing Stacks
For marketers to do their work and actually contribute to revenue goals, they need the full picture, “A consistent view of the customer,” as Gartner analyst Christi Eubanks says. They need un-siloed, accurate, accessible data down to person-level specificity. Without good data, it’s difficult, if not impossible for marketing tools to work effectively.
We understand that breaking down silos is complex, rigorous work. If silos were easy to fix, you would have fixed them already. But here are just a few of the reasons it’s worth the effort:
1. Integrated MarTech Allows for Unified Marketing Measurement
Have you ever poured over reports that compared apples to oranges? Or maybe the reports seemed like they compared apples to pomegranates, and oranges to clementines?
Confusing data sources and mismatched reports slow any work, even fairly simple work. Siloed data also makes it very hard to see the insights we need to garner from this work: the exact insights needed for agile marketing.
It’s harder to think clearly when you’re seeing business systems through cloudy data. Just as clearing up a messy garage makes it easier to find things, clearing up messy data makes it far easier to see opportunities. Data affects our decision making. If the data is limited by silos, our decision-making suffers. It creates a data disconnect that no company can afford.
Integrating marketing technology and data sources minimizes this challenge by allowing for unified marketing measurement, which examines all data sources to yield person-level insights.
2. Attain Person-Level Insights Across the Marketing Mix
Customers want to be seen as individuals. In fact, they demand it. They have come to expect personalization and a customized user experience. If marketers can’t deliver that user experience, competitors will.
So marketers have an increasingly high bar to reach if they want to retain customers. But that’s only part of why we need person-level insights. It’s also so we can suggest products customers might like, or to watch their behavior so we can tell when they might be disengaging, or worse – getting ready to complain or leave.
This level of customer understanding simply doesn’t work if marketers can only see onemarketing channel, even if they can only see digital channels. Customers live in both online and offline worlds.
3. Optimize Efforts Across Campaigns
This is another example of the opportunity cost of siloed data. Let’s consider that email manager we mentioned before. Many email marketing experts say that even if a customer never opens an email, simply seeing the email in the inbox reminds them of the company. The subject line works basically like a short text ad in their inbox.
Those short text ads may be sending some customers to the company website, or to a local store, or to call their sales rep, or to check a post from the company on social media. If the channels aren’t integrated, the email manager will never know.
Even worse, the other managers – for the website, social media or sales – may never know why there was a sudden increase in interest in a particular campaign. The siloed data has made most of the company’s marketing a black box for them; they only know what’s happening in their particular channel.
4. Provide Omnichannel Customer Journeys
Let’s shift that last example so it has an upside. If all those marketing managers did have access to each other’s data – a full 360-degree view – they could create omnichannel campaigns and unified marketing programs that amplify each other. Each manager would know the influence of other channels, and would know over time how to nudge more results from customers.
Armed with a truly robust data system, they could dial down into the level of each customer, to model which channels each customer responded to best, and what hour of the day customers would be most likely to respond to a message.
Final Thoughts
Data has become the lingua franca of marketing. It is literally how we communicate – the underlying nuts and bolts of how messages are sent, which messages are sent and to whom they are sent.
But when data is siloed, communication gets siloed, too. Decision making is impaired and revenue suppressed, meaning marketers have no idea about the real consequences of their actions, whether launching a particular campaign or trying to optimize short-term metrics.
As a result, marketers must focus on integrating marketing stacks and data sources, ensuring a unified approach to campaigns across channels.
