Even with the global economy in the early stages of recovery, marketing budgets are under tight control and competition remains fierce across many marketplaces. The emphasis is now on brands to know both their marketplace and customers much better than their competitors, but with the rapid change in consumer behaviour it is tough to gain that essential customer knowledge. The birth of the omni-channel customer has seen the generation of an extraordinary amount of behavioural data and marketers are viewing this data as an opportunity to gain in-depth customer insight - but it is a challenge.
Research from the Digital Marketing Insights Report 2014 has shown that there is an overwhelming acceptance amongst digital marketers that harnessing a Single Customer View (SCV) is vital in order to remain competitive, with 70% citing better customer insight and 60% improved marketing personalisation. However, a low number of those surveyed (21%) told researchers they feel they have achieved the SCV goal.
This shows a contrast between the recognition that a huge amount of data does exist that can be actionable and profitable, against the ability to leverage that data through implementing new technologies and enhancing data and analytics skills.
Digital marketers understand the need to create the SCV. However, precious few are yet to achieve a true SCV, let alone use this omni-channel insight to improve their customer engagement and enhance customer experiences. Encouragingly, 57% of respondents anticipate that they will have harnessed a SCV by 2016. So what’s stopping them from getting it now?
Like any marketing shift with a technological implementation requirement, there can be challenges. Part of the research in the Digital Marketing Insights Report 2014 examined the barriers blocking the way for the SCV. The three most common barriers were: ‘too time consuming’ (51%), ‘structural issues’ (46%) and ‘technology challenges’ (44%). Yet a majority (70%) believed that a SCV would generate improved customer insight.
An important insight gained from the report is that 36% of respondents cited storage and integration of customer data into a single customer database as a challenge to their marketing teams, preventing their digital marketing efforts from capitalising on their customer data. Encouragingly nearly half of respondents (49%) expect to have deployed single centralised databases by 2016.
As the situation stands today, over a third of respondents (38%) have actually managed to create a single, centralised database that is helping to deliver a SCV. However, almost half of respondents recognised the need to move customer data into appropriate storage systems over the next two years - such an integrated data warehouses (49%) and/or Big Data technologies such as Hadoop (27%) - rather than in separate data marts or with third parties. Organisations must be able to bring their multiple sources and types of customer data – transactional, loyalty, Web behaviour, social and mobile to name just a few – together in order to create that critical omni-channel SCV.
What does this mean for digital marketers wanting to improve their one-to-one personalised communications? The research shows that, as it stands, a small number of digital marketers are likely to be currently benefitting from having a SCV – these are the ones that have collected robust individual level data from across their online and offline channels and store this in a single, centralised database (or other appropriate storage) to make the analysis of this data swift and accurate.
Whilst the advice would be for the remaining marketers to act fast and implement these systems quickly, some effort is required to overcome barriers such as data quality, database storage and technical in-house problems.
To the credit of digital marketers surveyed, when analysing the responses regarding expectations for 2016, the landscape is positive with 57% expecting to have a SCV by 2016.
This ambition demonstrates that whilst only a few digital marketers have this technology at their disposal currently, the chasing pack includes a large number of digital marketers working very hard to integrate these systems into their organisations. Yes it can be a time consuming process fraught with challenges, but the vast majority of digital marketers recognise it as an extremely worthwhile undertaking.
By Ruth Gordon, Director Digital Marketing, Teradata International and Katharine Hulls, VP Marketing at Celebrus Technologies.
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