It's no exaggeration to say that the marketing data landscape has changed dramatically over the past two years. For one, the way companies collect user data has come under the microscope, with Apple and Google's policies forcing sweeping changes to marketing data analysis.
Customers are also more cautious than ever about what information they want to share and how it is used. Finally, scalability and personalization have become buzzwords, but neither can be achieved without powerful analytics. And achieving that has been a difficult journey for many companies.
How are companies succeeding in this new era of marketing? We spoke to marketers from Cox Automotive and Sobeys about their unique path forward and how to connect with customers in this complex landscape. We talked about how they find it.
Learn how these companies adapted marketing data analytics to increase efficiency and improve outcomes across the customer journey.
Be a leader, not a follower of the crowd
Read the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Customer Data Platforms. See why Gartner named Salesforce a Leader, with the highest ability to execute and highest completeness of vision.open report
table of contents
Rethink your marketing data analytics strategy
It's good to see that the movement toward consumer privacy is accelerating. However, the downstream effects of increased data collection restrictions mean that a variety of metrics, such as open rates and the measures used to benchmark success, are no longer reliable. Therefore, you need to change your strategy.
As previous success metrics become obsolete and customers increasingly value experience, marketers are realizing how important it is to have a more complete picture of campaign performance. Rather than evaluating marketing channels individually or separately, we assess the performance of all investments together as part of a unified strategy. Last year, 83% of marketers said cross-channel collaboration is dynamic rather than siloed or duplicated, up from just 68% in 2021.
Marketers are also placing greater emphasis on first-party data, or information obtained directly from customers. Rather than relying on older systems such as open data exchanges to purchase audience data, we are modernizing the way we build first-party data assets through the lens of user consent.
Over the past two years, Cox Automotive has been building a more complete picture of its prospects and customers, including integrating role, engagement, and product purchase data from across the brand into a central location. Teams can now target specific users with custom product or service messages.
By integrating data, Cox Automotive can better segment its audience and deliver more personalized messages to its customers. With values defined by segment and role, you can clearly understand the problem you're solving and the message you need to convey for each product.
It’s time to redefine CDP
Explore use cases that show how you can power personalized, connected experiences across your marketing.Take the next step
Use automation to save time and gain smarter insights
Having a clear vision for marketing data analysis is essential for a successful marketing strategy. And building a reliable data foundation is the first step to executing on that vision. Automation can handle simple tasks like collecting and segmenting data, giving you a clear picture of the information you need to make decisions.
Marketers are using more and more different platforms within their technology stack to advertise, engage with customers, provide better experiences, and ultimately drive people to conversion. This complexity often results in teams spending too much time connecting and harmonizing data to generate reliable insights instead of optimizing their work.
Instead of relying on a hodgepodge of platforms, you can invest in automated data governance to free your team from manual data aggregation. This includes managing campaign naming and classification, requirements tracking, data distribution, and quality assurance.
The right marketing intelligence platform will facilitate data connectivity with no coding and all in just a few clicks. Platforms that use technologies like automation and AI allow you to spend less time preparing data and more time connecting with your customers.
But it's more than just connecting data. Marketing intelligence helps harmonize your data to create a consistent framework that enriches your raw data, helping you find actionable insights rather than getting lost in a sea of data points. You can take this even further with automated classification management, flexible harmonization logic, and comprehensive data governance tools.
With an accurate data foundation that evolves with your changing data ecosystem, you can migrate more efficiently and regain time to test and learn more. The final result? Less time is wasted deciphering inaccurate marketing data analysis, resulting in better return on investment and happier customers.
Turn insights into results with marketing data analytics
Access cross-channel and first-party data so you can measure your customer base's performance across your marketing efforts. You can then use those insights to accomplish your marketing strategies. For example, rather than focusing on top-of-funnel metrics like clicks and opens, marketers can optimize for downstream outcomes like signups and purchases.
Grocery store chain Sobeys uses qualitative and quantitative data to improve how it measures success across the customer lifecycle.
Erica de Haas, vice president of marketing communications for Sobeys, said: “As we continue to build connected, full-funnel experiences, establishing clear baseline benchmarks based on all the first-party data we have will not only connect our experiences; , will be important to drive its impact and expand its loyal customer base.”
Sobeys' strategy is to approach the sales funnel as one connected experience, where every interaction helps build customer loyalty.
“At the top of the funnel, we focus on the psychological benefits that motivate Canadian families to choose Sobeys. We look at brand preferences, but most importantly, brand ownership. and capital,” de Haas said. “As those same customers move through our funnel, we develop communications and experiences that provide more functional benefits, and success is measured more by transaction.”
De Haas said Sobeys' success will always be measured by the same criteria. In other words, are we providing what families need to continue choosing Sobeys as their shopping destination? Now, the team has new tools to help customers achieve that metric throughout their journey.
“Knowing if a customer is engaged with our brand at the top of the funnel but abandons mid-funnel requires a different strategy than if they are engaged in the middle but abandon in-store. ” she says. “Monitoring our data in a holistic way is a differentiator that allows us to ensure that our customers connect with our brand throughout the entire journey of their engagement with us.”
Connect with customers across channels
Once you have your strategy, automation, and insights all in place, the next step is to bring it all together and start generating engagement across all channels. That engagement generates higher-quality first-party data, resulting in more data analysis, better insights, and more as data analytics operations grow into self-perpetuating, self-improving marketing powerhouses. leads to better engagement in rounds. .
The first step to getting there is building connected customer journeys that guide every customer through the right interactions across their favorite channels. It means different things depending on the company. Perhaps for you, it could be increasing engagement in your customer's inbox or reaching out to them at the right time through SMS.
But no matter what the individual steps are along the way, AI can support customers like an invisible tour guide, helping them build the perfect journey with the right strategy and clean data. Masu.
By being smart about automation elsewhere, you can have more success on that journey. Using first-party data instead of cookies results in lower conversion costs. Automating more basic customer communications saves time and allows marketers to focus on the bigger picture.
It may sound like a lot to manage everything, but with the right intelligent reports and connected dashboards, you can easily track everything in one place. Get the most out of your marketing data analytics by removing the guesswork and focusing on your customers with AI and automation.
How to save time and money with data cloud
Learn how to use AI to optimize campaign performance and spend, making your marketing more efficient.Watch free demo
Originally published on Salesforce.com on September 27, 2023.