As marketers, we’re constantly measuring the ratio of effort to impact, and making the requisite trade-offs in time, staff and budget to achieve our goals. Ratios help us to find balance, to weigh, to measure. Ultimately, they help us make smarter decisions, because you can’t improve what you can’t measure.
New research posted on eMarketer explores the ratios between effective and difficult digital marketing techniques. It explores whether or not Marketing need to be difficult to be effective. We certainly don’t think that’s the case. In fact, we strongly believe that the advances in technology and access to more data be making our lives easier!
Apparently, many marketers are not finding that to be the case. According to the research, even out of respondents who describe their company’s digital marketing as “very successful”, less than 1/3 say they are effective at data management. Of this same audience, nearly half say that they find data management difficult. No digital marketing technique ranked higher in difficulty.
As a CDP, we see this all the time. Brands in nearly every industry, from retail, to travel & hospitality, to banking, are trying to wrangle their customer data from disparate sources into a central data hub that can be used by the entire marketing team. However, the technical and strategic challenges can be enormous with a trusted partner.
That could explain why CDPs as a category saw 76% growth last year. More companies are finding that even though they invested heavily in marketing automation tools, those tools can’t reach their full potential until the data being fed into them is accurate and optimized. We’re finding that our customers see, on average, a 95% reduction in “time to campaign” after implementing QuickPivot’s CDP. Or as one customer puts it, they can do twice as much in half the time with half as many people. Now, how’s that for a good ratio?
Shifting to a Customer-Focused Marketing Strategy
As a CDP and Marketing Cloud, we help companies optimize their known customer data, help grow retention and loyalty, and drive higher lifetime value (LTV). When it comes to customer communications, email is still the primary method of customer interaction.
But we still see many brands rely on batch and blast email strategy, so it’s not terribly surprising to see the low effectiveness score in the survey. As more and more companies embrace a CDP and harness the power of customer segmentation and use that to deliver more personalized campaigns, ones informed by purchase history, browsing activity, channel preference and other factors, the effectiveness of the email channel will increase. For more on how a CDP can impact your email strategy, click here.
We’d love to see these survey answers a year from now, when more companies have made the investment into gathering their customer data and are seeing the impact it’s having on these marketing tactics.
So how are your marketing effort to impact ratios looking these days?
