4How Marketing Leaders Can Take Control of Data for Better

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1 Steps to Achieve Better Marketing Results 4How Marketing Leaders Can Take Control of Data for Better Marketing Performance and Customer Interactions As a marketing leader, you rely heavily on data to inform strategic decisions about when and how to go to market. Your customers expect targeted, personalized experiences based on deep insights gleaned from information they provide. Yet never has it been more difficult to access and integrate customer information across organizations heavily siloed by technology, business processes, and organizational behaviors. Successful marketing leaders are the ones who take control of the data and technology they need to create omni-channel customer interactions that drive revenue and increase loyalty. Your teams need access to accurate data to execute campaigns, ads, and loyalty programs. This paper clearly defines four steps that marketing leaders must take to derive insight from Big Data and deliver personalized customer experiences.

2 Marketers face an uphill battle in gaining access to accurate, reliable customer data. 73% of CMOs assert that competitive advantage comes from a singular focus on customers, but only 18% acknowledge that everyone in their organization has the same customer view. 1 The volume of all business data worldwide, across all countries, doubles every 1.2 years. 2 On average, organizations use 36 different datagathering systems and vendors for marketing efforts. 3 Between 10% and 25% of customer and prospect records in B2B marketing databases at any given time include critical data errors Lead Marketing Technology Investments Marketing competes with many demands on IT departments budgets and resources. Requests for data records or data improvements critical to the success of marketing campaigns are often delayed or overlooked. As a result, marketing leaders have to lead selection and buying processes for technology that will give their teams real-time access to accurate, complete customer information. You are the expert on your department s needs, with a deep understanding of the intent of data usage, the rules governing the meaning and ownership of the data, specific compliance requirements (e.g., suppression), and how success metrics are defined. With the authority to select the right business tools, you can empower your analysts, content specialists, and program managers with direct access to the information they need to effectively manage campaigns. Increasingly, organizations are increasingly allocating more dollars to marketing budgets, and you should capitalize on this trend to invest in technology that improves your customer interactions. According to a recent survey by Gartner, 79% of organizations surveyed report having a marketing budget for capital expenditures, which is primarily used for technology and infrastructure purchases, including marketing automation platforms, analytics suites, and other systems and applications. The increase in capital expenditure budgets has enabled marketing organizations to invest in more cloud- or SaaS-based applications for which integration, deployment, and management are more rapid and turnkey, and organizations can quickly realize business benefits from their investments. Marketing leaders must lead the conversation when it comes to selecting technology to assist them in automating complex business processes. You must embrace your role as the chief buyer for data management and technology applications to harness your organization s ability to convert Big Data to meaningful insights and results. 3 1 Pattek, Sheryl. The Evolved CMO in Forrester Research. February 24, ebay Study. How to Build Trust and Improve the Shopping Experience. KnowIT Information Systems. May Customers for Life.Technology Strategies for Attracting and Keeping Customers. Forbes Insights and Sitecore. September The Impact of Bad Data on Demand Creation. Sirius Decisions. Trillium Software 4 Steps to Achieve Better Marketing Data 2

3 2. Shift Toward Self-Service Marketing Technology Customer interactions are continuous and fast-paced, and your company will lose its competitive advantage if you re not able to analyze, execute, and respond to customers in real time. In addition to vetting and purchasing technology, you can look to solutions that put data and business processes in the hands of the subject matter experts on their team. Just as data stewards and analysts now expertly wield business intelligence tools, marketers must become more adept at using data management tools that enable them to more rapidly achieve positive business results. By its very nature, self-service technology puts the power of access, analysis, validation, and monitoring in the hands of those who can more immediately affect outcomes marketing subject matter experts. With the ability to immediately analyze customer data and automate data cleansing and enrichment processes, marketing teams can decrease data preparation time from hours and days to minutes, freeing more employee time to create compelling content and design and execute revenuegenerating campaigns. Self-service technology also enables marketers at all levels of the organization to analyze and visualize success metrics and leading indicators that inform your broader marketing and go-to-market strategies. Self-service applications provide marketing teams with direct visibility into campaign outcomes, customer engagement levels, and pipeline status. All of this information funnels to you directly, instead of through an IT department, so that you can more quickly glean valuable customer insights and make informed strategic marketing decisions. 3

4 3. Leverage the Full Universe of Data Customer records are composed of data from an increasing number of complex sources and are not necessarily complete or correct when they enter an organization. Marketers are slowly being consumed by Big Data and the increasing volume and variety of data from customer service engagements, transactions, social media channels, and more. To create a single version of truth for each customer, you have to aspire to more than basic customer data validation. A data management solution that can both correct and link disparate data points spread across your organization will give you the accurate information you and your team need to design and execute successful marketing strategies. Working cross-functionally with technology and data executives, you should implement a solution that can: Assess relevance: enable marketers to visualize structured and unstructured data sets and determine which ones are needed for customer insights that can support go-to-market strategies for solution offerings, campaign development, and loyalty. Ensure accuracy: validate data upon point of entry into your organization, whether it s via a third-party vendor, customer service engagement, online transaction, social media platform, or other channel. Link disparate data points: aggregate disparate data sets stored across different systems and business units, and accurately attach them to a single record, creating a single version of truth for each customer. These processes can have a rapid impact on the return on investment of marketing dollars. For example, when a large global retailer merged several loyalty, point-of-sale, and CRM data sets prior to a major campaign launch, the marketing team realized the integrated data set contained many duplicate and incomplete records. By linking disparate data points into single records and validating contact information, the organization saved tens of thousands of dollars on what would have been multiple mailings to the same customers. Additionally, the organization was able to ensure communications reached its intended audience across multiple outlets, contributing to increased online and in-store traffic, and a multimillion-dollar increase in year-over-year sales. By accurately analyzing and linking different sets of customer data, you can know more about your customers preferences and behavior. This is information you can leverage to drive your products to the market, incite purchases, and maintain long-term customer loyalty that drives revenue. The proliferation of channels, devices, and interactive media enables customers to take the steering wheel away from brands. With 58% of US online adults going online multiple times a day from multiple devices and locations, marketers must deploy technologies that recognize customers and predict their behaviors across touch points. 5 Warner, Rusty. Unlock Customer Context with Marketing Technology. Forrester Research. January Trillium Software 4 Steps to Achieve Better Marketing Data 4

5 According to a recent Forrester survey of marketing professionals: 6 67% lack access to critical data 59% are unable to effectively integrate data 56% lag in updating customer data 6 Goetz, Michele. The Data Trust Trinity Brings Data to the Business Decision Table. Forrester Research. May

6 4. Converge Critical Data for Meaningful Customer Interactions While customer engagements were often initiated by marketers in the past, the control over engagement is now shifting toward the consumer. Brand awareness in a digital marketplace means that your offering and message need to be ever-present. You miss out on revenue opportunities anytime your brand is not present in a consumer s ecosystem of sophisticated channels and devices. Data management plays a pivotal and fundamental role in helping you cull the data needed to evolve your marketing strategies from static, outbound communications to interactive, personalized interactions with customers. An effective data management strategy, supported by technology that your team can manage, will help you access, analyze, and validate data that helps you better understand your customers transaction history, contact preferences, and network of contacts and influencers all information that can help you push the right message through the right channel at the right time. For example, many brands use social media to react to customers requests, complaints, or suggestions. A large travel organization provided its social media team with access to master customer data records, which included customers purchase history, loyalty membership, demographic information, and contact information. By referencing that information prior to responding to inbound customer inquiries, the team delivered more personalized service, support, and offers, resulting in a 15% increase in customer retention in one year. As a marketing leader, you are frantically trying to keep pace with the rate of change in digital, social, and mobile terms of engagement. Comprehensive data management solutions go hand in hand to help personalize customer interactions with relevant, timely communications based on accurate customer insights. Conclusion The success of marketing leaders is increasingly dependent on their ability to formulate marketing strategies based on accurate, unique customer insights from Big Data. The first step in breaking down data silos and gaining access to data you rely on is realizing that you have the authority, expertise, and resources to be actively involved in purchase decisions for the solutions you need to solve data problems. By placing the right technologies in the hands of experts on your team, you can facilitate faster, more accurate customer analysis, campaign execution, and strategic decision making. Real-time access to accurate, complete information that resides across your organization will inform meaningful customer interactions that will help you attract and retain customers and improve marketing results. US trlinfo@trilliumsoftware.com EMEA +44 (0) trillium.uk@trilliumsoftware.com Central Europe trillium_de@trilliumsoftware.com