The Secret Weapon of Cohesive Marketing Automation

Connect data silos with a Customer Data Platform.

Most companies have tons of data but very little opportunity to generate insight and create marketing activities from it. In the past, data collection tools followed the same departmental lines as companies, creating huge data silos, and unless they were willing to invest in expensive consultants, companies couldn’t really get insight from that data. Even when leadership had the budget, chances were the insights were one-time data from a point in the past.

The rallying cry to date has been to break down data silos, but that reality is messy and expensive, especially considering the real goal is insight, not destruction. Thankfully, enterprises can now build Customer Data Platforms (CDP); a layer on top of data silos, connecting and analyzing all available data to provide insight for marketing automation activities.

Hundreds of Data Sources, No Source of Insight

An ideal use-case for meaningful data is automated, personalized interactions between brand and consumer. But there can’t be an automatic follow up email if the system doesn’t know whether someone engaged with the first email sent. No support ticket can be closed digitally if support reps don’t know that someone asked for help in-person. For marketing automation to work, it needs data. Without it, no actions can trigger. 

At every point in the customer journey, there is likely data collected, but marketing teams have limited opportunity to act on it. Frequent problems with data include duplicate entries, outdated information, human mistakes, and data silos. This is usually the result of having multiple customer data inputs that don’t talk to each other and if this is the case in your business, you’re not alone: the average enterprise company has over 400 custom applications running simultaneously. Even when companies have a robust Customer Relationship Management (CRM) implementation, data silos can still exist outside of the CRM due to limited integration capabilities.

Data Insight is a Two-Way Street

Every team needs data, so the fact that it’s being collected differently is not an issue. The challenge is in making sure it’s accessible to everyone. Data-driven marketing relies on being able to monitor and make sense of customer behaviours throughout all stages of their journey and unfortunately, old solutions to data silo problems are no longer effective.

When data is isolated, it’s easy to lose track of the customer journey. This not only hinders marketing activities but also fragments the whole organization, leading to issues down the line where teams act on differing insights gleaned from disparate data, each not knowing about the other.

When it comes to collecting data for marketing automation, teams need:

• All sources of data brought into one central source of truth.
• Analysis conducted on the data and tied to individual customers to plan marketing automation activities.
• Data collected from marketing automation activities so teams can tweak campaigns based on real activity
• Insights and discoveries floated back to every other department, putting fresh data back into every source the company uses.

Without this holistic connection, marketing automation becomes a single activity— yet another silo. At best, it continues to bring in leads that fit whatever the organization is currently doing. At worst, it over-optimizes for a type of customer the business cannot properly serve, resulting in high drop off rates, low conversion rates, and high churn rates.

CDPs Bridge Data Silos to Produce Insight

CDPs sit on top of every data source in the organization. This new layer collects all the data, translates it into a common language, and analyzes it for insight across the customer journey. From there, it can deliver value to marketing automation activities and collect insight on how those activities perform. When experiments run, CDPs communicate backward, sending new insights into silos, refreshing the data for teams throughout the organization.

When a CDP is integrated with a CRM and other customer data systems, the platform is capable of handling millions of data points across multiple systems. With advances in API integration and analysis capabilities, CDPs often ingest data in real-time and make it available instantly.

Instead of ripping and replacing data silos, a CDP serves as the ideal complement to these technologies, integrating legacy and new data into marketing automation systems.

When integrated as a new layer across silos, CDPs provide three benefits to enterprises:

1. It analyzes data from every system in the organization.
2. It speeds up legacy systems that were built for scale, but not for speed.
3. New insights are floated back to existing systems, making every team more data-driven.

Most CDP vendors provide out-of-the-box machine learning capabilities too, allowing businesses to apply advanced analytics and predictions to audience selection, personalized communication, and next-best-action recommendations. Many businesses try to do this manually, but enabling real-time, contextual data integration and customer communications adds complexity, making an automated solution a much more viable solution long-term.

Don’t Break Silos, Build Bridges

The business world has been beating the drums to break down silos. The claim is that breaking down silos will finally let companies analyze data in a fresh, new way. While there’s some truth to this claim, idealism is lost when reality steps in.

To truly break down silos, companies have to refactor all operations. This is not only massively time consuming and expensive, but could also gut the entire organization of what makes it unique in the market. To be sure, there is always opportunity for optimization and growth— this is not a cry to stay siloed and isolated. Instead, it’s a call to build bridges.

New advances in CDP technologies mean companies are now able to pull data and read it from almost any source. Once that’s done, a new level of data can sit on top of the silos, connecting them together from a data sharing perspective. This new level conducts all necessary analysis, produces insights for the marketing team to deliver a high quality customer journey, and then redirects new insight downward into the silos. Existing business lines gain new data in a way they are used to working with and the marketing team gains a connected, integrated data source focused on the entire customer journey. 

The net result is to create a cohesive CDP that connects with existing CRM and other systems through API integrations. A CDP unifies customer data from marketing and other channels to enable a single, 360-degree view of their customers’ behaviour. While both CRMs and CDPs gather customer data for enterprise use, they are fundamentally different from one another. But when combined, they can drive significant value for businesses.

Marketing Automation Doesn’t Have to Be Painful

The promise of marketing automation is personalization at scale, but that requires unique data insight that can’t be delivered in silos. However, breaking down silos is not only tedious, it requires the kind of budget and buy-in that most enterprises simply can’t offer. Instead, build a CDP layer on top of data silos that provides insight, improves data quality throughout the organization, and doesn’t disrupt how other departments work. With a fully integrated CDP, businesses are more able to produce insight from data. It’s all there; data collection is rarely a problem in the enterprise. It’s simply about unlocking that potential, which is what a CDP is built to do.