What Still Keeps Marketers Up At Night

The marketing pain points that enterprise customers come up against are rarely isolated incidents. In fact, there are common themes that keep marketing directors awake at night. Our business development team speaks to global retailers, banks, FMCG [CPG], and multi-discipline companies on a daily basis – and hears similar challenges time and again. These points were echoed at a recent London event, the Digital Marketing Forum.

Is siloed data a thing of the past?

Different teams within companies often work in separate departments or offices – particularly email marketers, social teams, direct marketers, and others – which results in siloed data sources. This continues to be one of the biggest challenges in today’s data-driven world, and the pressure to address it will only intensify.

The holy grail is to have the customer experience as a single customer view – or, better still, single marketing view – where you are really understanding buyers at a granular level. Yet with the added complexity of multiple different business units, each with differing customer needs and expectations, how do you market to them accurately? And how do you make it seamless, both cross-channel and cross-business, so the marketing communication makes sense?

The key is to bring all the data under one roof and control it centrally. It not only makes your job easier, but you look good too! Using an integrated platform can make siloed data a thing of the past, which is critical to enabling brands to sell multiple different products to their potential buyers. This entails bringing all the required data together – including pulling in third-party data – to understand where a customer is in their buying cycle so you can communicate to them at precisely the right time.

Automating can mean 25% productivity gains – even across business units

In a recent Total Economic Impact report carried out by Forrester, the importance of automation was highlighted by brands moving to the Cheetah Digital marketing suite. Real-world gains of up 25% in marketing productivity are achievable.

What this means is – through embracing automation – you’ll actually send less email because you can send smarter, data-driven campaigns, and because it’s automated, that will save time and be much more effective. Clearly there’s a lot of work to do early on, including implementing workflows and pulling in data from different sources in real-time, creating the story, and deploying the right email.

Brands know that automation is important and means they can be more efficient, yet many are finding their providers are falling short, especially the smaller tier ones. New systems can fail in instances where there is a complicated data structure, especially across multiple business units. So it’s important to establish that your provider can show evidence they will be able to support your large-scale enterprise automation roll-out.

Is consolidation holding back efficiency and innovation?

Looking at email as a channel for a moment – even though we’ve largely all moved towards cross-channel – many providers have consolidated in recent years and the industry has certainly changed. Many players offer the technology, but to provide specific help, they will often hand you over to one or more of their agency partners.

For example, when a brand wants to build a campaign they may be forced to coordinate between multiple partners – one to do the creative, another for content, another to build it and then a fourth to deploy it. This is far too complex.

Consider larger providers that can do all that in-house, under one platform, and in real time. Aside from the day-to-day processes, they should also help drive innovation, and challenge what you’re doing today, to help drive ROI tomorrow. They may be able to show how a similar client has tried a particular approach and achieved specific results – using such a test & learn strategy can mean significant return even using techniques from different sectors.

Achieving best practice in the email and cross-channel world is not easy and you need proven experts who can help drive your business forward.