Marketing Automation for more Success

Data Consolidation Data Relevancy Data Quality Marketing Technologies Relevance and Benefits Benefits CDP

What types of data are important in terms of marketing automation? What technologies are being used? How can customer data platform solutions, such as D365 Customer Insights help overcome this obstacle?

Data Consolidation

Data Consolidation as an Obstacle to Marketing Automation

Often, resource-rich companies find it easier to deal with internal and external challenges. All the more interesting is the fact that data management is just as big a difficulty for all of them, regardless of their marketing budget.

64% of all companies surveyed said that the lack of data and information on which contacts are ready to buy is an obstacle. But it's not just the lack of data that makes marketing automation difficult. Too many data silos in different departments prevent a coherent data analysis and thus the creation of an effective catalog of measures.

Data Relevancy

Relevant Data for Marketing Automation

To overcome the obstacle of insufficient data and its consolidation, it is first important to know which data is essential for marketing automation. The study was able to empirically prove that three types of data in particular are actively used by companies for marketing and sales automation: Customer data (CRM), email / newsletter, website data (digital analytics), and social media data (43%).

Not surprisingly, this data is the most actively used by companies. It is directly related to marketing and has been used by companies for quite some time because it is easy to collect. But is this really the relevant data to drive marketing automation? From our perspective, collecting data from different areas of the business and analyzing it in combination is the key to marketing automation. Using data sets such as transactional data, service orders or customer inquiries is essential to get a holistic 360° view of the customer. The challenge, however, is that this data is either not collected and used or is not available to marketing to perform a complete analysis of all data sets due to data silos.

Data Quality

Quality of Data collected

Just as important as collecting the right data is the quality in which it is collected. Particularly with regard to the lead quality, a large gap between the actual and target state is apparent in the companies. In general, it can be stated that one third of Swiss companies have a low data quality, which must be improved in the future.

Marketing Technologies

What Marketing Technologies are used to support Data Management?

Marketing technologies can actively support companies in integrating, managing and analyzing data. It turns out that almost 50% of successful companies actively use data management tools, such as business intelligence (BI) or data warehouse (DWH), to automate marketing. However, the deployment and use of such solutions depend on the respective budget as well as human resources.

Nevertheless, the importance of marketing technologies to support data integration, management and analysis seems to have been recognized by companies. For example, the use of a BI or DWH has almost doubled among companies with a small to medium budget compared to the previous year. Similarly, the use of customer data platforms increased by around 20% across all company sizes.

Relevance and Benefits

Relevance and Benefits of a Customer Data Platform (CDP)

Nowadays, customers expect a lot from companies. They have become accustomed to good, personalized service and expect it to build loyalty. So a consistent customer experience across all channels individualized recommendations and tailored communication is essential. However, as explained earlier, companies often lack good quality customer data and the consolidation and integration of the various data into a central system to meet these requirements. A customer data platform (CDP) such as D365 Customer Insights helps overcome these obstacles by providing a holistic 360° view of the customer. This is because, compared to a DWH (data warehouse)or MDM (master data management), the focus of the CDP is on the customer data and thus specifically supports marketing in its areas of activity. It enables companies to merge, cleanse and analyze customer data from different data silos. The data can then be imported into other systems for further use. For example, the data in Dynamics 365 Marketing can be used to form customer segments and address them with targeted marketing campaigns.

Benefits CDP

The Use of a CDP opens up the following Benefits for Companies

Ready-to-use Solution
All customer data is clearly organized and can be used immediately. Only a few technical resources are required to set up and maintain the CDP.

Single Customer View
All customer data is stored in one central location, providing a 360-degree view of the customer. Based on the collected and organized data, individual data profiles can be visualized for each customer.

Unification of Customer Data
Combining inconsistent data from different online and offline sources enables a unified customer view.

Accessible Data for third-party Providers
Third-party systems may use the data contained in the CPD, for example, for the delivery of campaigns in D365 Marketing.