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Eliminating Data Silos to Improve Cross-Channel Marketing

Nov 18, 2020
Jeff Haws

As a marketer, how much insight do you have into the entire customer journey, from first touch to ongoing communications? Do you have a complete, global view of your loyal customers, or are data silos keeping you walled off?

Today’s consumers expect personalized, relevant, and immediate messaging coupled with a consistent experience, no matter how they’re interacting with your brand. Yet, most organizations have pieces of customer data stored by various vendors and departments. This makes it difficult to obtain a complete view of their customers and market to them effectively. Marketers need access to the freshest data from every touchpoint to create a seamless experience. And a lot of that starts with centralizing data internally.

Marketers know they need this to be successful

In a report from MessageGears, marketers said that improving personalization and segmentation would be their two biggest priorities if they had the time and resources to dedicate to improving their messaging strategy.

But in order for them to get the time and resources they need, they need their data to be easy to access so that data friction stops slowing them down and making it impossible to do their jobs in the way they want. And getting to that point also enables them to send the sorts of personalization and segmentation that they know will get results.

That’s because today’s consumer expects real-time, relevant, and consistent messaging no matter how they’re interacting with your brand. Marketers know they need to utilize demographic data, customer satisfaction metrics, lifetime value, purchase behavior, clickstream analysis, and more to drive consumer engagement. So how exactly can they break down this roadblock?

Plan to consolidate and centralize data by eliminating silos

This limits the amount of integrations needed and keeps everything in one place for all teams and vendors to access. Your organization’s goal should be to give everyone a unified, global view of each customer. This, in turn, can help you provide a seamless, consistent experience no matter where your customers are interacting with you. This will allow you to break down the data silos and give your entire team access to more information about your customers.

Your organization’s goal should be to give everyone a unified, global view of each customer.

For most enterprise companies, this means partnering with a modern data warehouse like Snowflake. These solutions are extremely effective at getting your data consolidated in one place, accessible to teams across your organization, and making it easy to work with. That’s one of the first big steps in the direction of transforming your relationship to customer data. But it’s still important that you take the next step to reach your customers with effective personalization.

Find technology that can access data directly

If your current technology can’t access your data directly, put a plan together to find technology that does. One of the major limitations of many vendors (especially SaaS/hosted providers) is they require you to send pieces of customer data to be stored in their systems. That gets in the way of providing that global view and doesn’t give you the complete picture. You can’t send all of your data to a vendor, as it would be too large of an undertaking. Instead of sending bits and pieces of customer information to the cloud, find technology that plugs directly into your database.

MessageGears’ unique solution is to live wherever your data lives, so you can maximize your investment in consolidating your data, allowing you to utilize it live and in real time to build sophisticated cross-channel marketing campaigns. Our entire customer engagement platform is built with the idea of being centered around your data, getting out of the way so that your marketers can simply do their jobs without having to think about if the technology they’re using allows it.

Our entire customer engagement platform built with the idea of being centered around your data, getting out of the way so that your marketers can simply do their jobs without having to think about if the technology they’re using allows it.

Don’t outsource things you don’t need to

The beauty of some vendor solutions is marketers are in control of everything, but always protect your data. That’s yours, not theirs! Carefully select vendors that don’t want to control your data but instead want you to access it and utilize it. Involve your I.T. department in the vendor selection process so they can bring up some potential challenges before you settle.

As consumer expectations continue to evolve and technology gets more sophisticated, marketers need to work to centralize their customer data and find technology that taps directly into it. With access to complete, up-to-date customer data, brands can deliver a personalized, relevant, and seamless experience that promises to increase revenue and loyalty.

About the Author

Jeff Haws

As MessageGears’ Senior Marketing Manager, Jeff is focused on producing engaging and thoughtful content that resonates with enterprise marketers, helping them to better understand how MessageGears makes their jobs easier. He’s passionate about understanding the way data impacts messaging, and he’s also hopelessly obsessed with baseball.