Key Data Strategies for a Connected Customer Experience

Data orchestration and architecture, will be vital to driving organizational transformation and building a connected customer experience. Organizations need to make the shift from seeing data as operational to strategic, now more than ever.  Let’s look at the key data strategies that can help you build a framework for success.

Acknowledge and Remove Data Silos

Data silos or data that is only accessible to specific groups, can present major challenges to your business as well as disjointed experience for customers.

From a business perspective, data silos are often a point of tension and gatekeeping. Requesting data from various sources can be cumbersome and time consuming, with various processes to request data pulls, and different applications of data stewardship. Simply put, data silos are frustrating and breed business environments that lack collaboration.

From a customer perspective, data silos lead to a lackluster customer journey. With an incomplete and disconnected data profile, we lose the opportunity to create meaningful personalized experiences. Leveraging the right data at the right time is your opportunity to build trust with your customers and provide value.

Don’t get trapped in a data silo

Unifying your data is critical to keeping your teams collaborating and customers happy.

Start by looking at the native integrations for your existing applications and leverage them. Native integrations for existing products evolve over time and can be more effective than a custom-built integration you may have in place. Explore (or revisit) these options, with the goal of building unification across your tech stack for a seamless cross channel experience. 

Data silos are often unintentional, they happen to the best of us and are often symptoms of fast growth. Whether through acquisitions or growth in products and services, this type of organizational growth is exciting but often comes with growing pains. Especially when it comes to various tools and methodologies in data stewardship. It’s important to identify data silos quickly and have your data talk to each other, a customer data platform (CDP) like Oracle Unity can help connect the dots between your existing channels.

Know your data

The practice of benchmarking involves aggregating performance by KPI’s and utilizing them to better understand the path to success.

Why is benchmarking so important for B2B marketers?

1.  Benchmark data provides you with insight into trends over time and the opportunity to forecast. Benchmark data allows you to retrospectively look at performance and provides insight on how you can adjust your strategy moving forward to improve ROI and set goals.

2. Benchmarks provide you with a baseline to better understand factors in top performing campaigns, and conversely bottom performers. Benchmarks can be a conduit to key learnings, exploration and evaluating marketing strategies. Ie. Why is this campaign click-to-open rate xx% lower than our average for newsletter emails?  How do these open rates compare to the ones from last year? Is this click through rate ‘good’?

Start building holistic benchmark reports, with Oracle Eloqua’s Insight reporting tool to help answer these questions.

3. You can use benchmarks to compare against other regional industry benchmarks, or other competitors that share their benchmarks publicly. Knowing how you stack up against industry standards can help guide how you identify gaps and optimize your marketing strategy.

4. Benchmarks can help you with email deliverability by identifying areas of improvement. By understanding benchmarks for key deliverability KPI’s, such as spam unsubscribes, hard bounce backs, global unsubscribes etc.. you can ensure you have a healthy reputation and improve your rates on an ongoing basis by monitoring benchmarks.

5. Anomaly detection and audit - by establishing benchmarks you now have a threshold to detect anomalies. Anomalies can provide valuable insight (good or bad) that you can act on. Let’s talk about anomalies a little bit more…

Don’t dismiss the anomalies

We build narratives with data, we often say data tells a story, but it’s not always a story that makes sense.  You may see anomalies or outliers in your reporting components, and it can be tempting to dismiss them in order to make sense of trends you’re seeing.

Yes, “Analysis paralysis” is all too real, and it is important to cut through the noise that data sometimes presents, but anomalies and more importantly proactive anomaly detection can provide significant benefit to your business and should be part of your reporting strategy. This starts with knowing your base line. You can’t identify deviation in your data without first knowing baseline (which we covered earlier) as a starting point for comparison. Once you have your baseline you can pre-emptively monitor for anomalies.

Anomalies in data present you with opportunities, good or bad, and both scenarios they have added benefits to your business. Whether they present you with a real time opportunity to fix a problem or identify performance improvements – it’s important you give anomaly detection a place in your reporting strategy.

Not sure where to start? Don’t get trapped those data silos. Conduct an audit of data sources across your organization and start conversations with key stakeholders to assess how improvements can be made. It’s worth the effort as unifying your data is critical to your teams alignment and keeping customers happy!