As marketing remains rather fragmented between online, print and TV, many in the industry are expecting technology to improve their understanding of each customer, according to new research. The study, from Terradata, indicates that 70% of digital marketers believe that achieving a single customer view will provide improved marketing personalisation but less than a quarter […]
As marketing remains rather fragmented between online, print and TV, many in the industry are expecting technology to improve their understanding of each customer, according to new research.
The study, from Terradata, indicates that 70% of digital marketers believe that achieving a single customer view will provide improved marketing personalisation but less than a quarter (21%) reported that they currently had a single view of their customer’s interactions.
Other key statistics include:
• 80% of digital marketers believe that personalisation will be key to digital marketing success in next two years and 51% say it already is.
• 36% of digital marketers identified data storage and integration as their biggest data challenges with only 39% currently storing all of their customer data in a single centralised data warehouse.
• 47% of respondents identified “lack of time” as the top barrier to better customer analytics.
• Surprisingly, given the proliferation of mobile devices, only about a quarter of respondents (27%) see mobile marketing as a priority.
View the infographic below:
The single customer view is still a hot topic amongst marketers, but less than a quarter (21%) reported that they currently had a single view of their customer’s interactions. However this is set to more than double in the next two years, with 57% predicting that they will have achieved a single customer view by the end of 2016. To achieve this target, almost half of respondents recognised the need to store their customer data in appropriate systems such an integrated data warehouses (49%) and/or technologies such as Hadoop (27%), rather than in separate data marts or with third parties.
Additionally, analytics is becoming increasingly sophisticated within marketing as more and more organisations realise how it can enhance the effectiveness and profitability of campaigns. This success can be hard to achieve, with the survey showing the top barrier to better customer analytics is lack of time (47%), followed by lack of internal skills and expertise (37%). To overcome this, respondents cited a growing focus on resourcing specialist in-house analytics teams to drive customer analytics, increasing from the current 40% using in-house specialists to 51% in two years’ time.
“The research shows that organisations truly want to understand the journeys of individual customers as they interact across a multitude of different channels,” said Ruth Gordon, Director Digital Marketing, Teradata International. “This is a challenge for Digital Marketers as it requires not only the tools to capture these interactions, but also the advanced technology and skill-sets to analyse this data to achieve insight and drive action.”
In today’s world of ‘treat-me-as-an-individual’ consumers, the role of personalisation is becoming ever-more important, with 80% seeing it as key to their digital marketing success over the next two years, versus just 51% today. Moreover, 78% plan to use real-time data in their channel personalisation in the future, compared to 44% using real-time data today.
“The ‘always on, always connected’ consumers of today are demanding more engaging and relevant content from brands and organisations. They expect to be communicated with as an individual and organisations that fall short of this are missing a key component of their customer engagement,” commented Katharine Hulls, VP Marketing at Celebrus Technologies. “The results of this research reinforce the notion that the fast paced, data- generating world we live in today requires organisations to have data collection and analytics capabilities on an unprecedented scale. We believe that every business has the potential to unlock the insights within their customer data and transform their digital marketing, as long as they have the right data foundations to understand their customers as individuals.”
Survey Methodology
The Digital Marketing Insight Report 2014 was carried out by MyCustomer.com and is based on a European Survey of 115 marketing professionals working in a variety of industry sectors. The survey was live during November 2013. MyCustomer promoted the survey to in-target segments of its readership via email marketing and social media promotion. The research was intended to survey a broad cross section of sectors and company sizes with a bias towards marketing and data job functions. The research sample targeted the UK, France and Germany markets. For full details of the methodology and research results you can access a copy of the report here.
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