What is Centralized Data?

In order to boost the efficacy and efficiency of your marketing organization, it’s important to centralize your marketing data. A recent survey from Gartner found that 66% of marketing teams are now either fully or primarily centralized.

But, what does centralized data mean and why is it important?

The Problem with Siloed Data

Because customers engage with your brand across a wide variety of channels, there are many different sources of data to track. Data might come from an email, a mobile app, a website, a third-party app, a social ad, in-store interactions, your e-commerce platform, your CRM, and your customer support platform.

If these channels aren’t connected to one another through a centralized marketing platform, you’ll only be able to see certain pieces of a customer’s brand interactions, rather than a 360-degree view of their interactions across all channels.

That means you’ll miss opportunities to segment your customers based on their interests and behaviors, and can’t develop the highly personalized marketing campaigns that are most likely to engage them. For example, let’s say a customer received promotional messages via both email and SMS, but only clicked the SMS message. If your marketing automation platform hasn’t connected the two data sources, you may not be aware of your customer’s interest in this promotion, and may not provide follow-up messages to encourage them to complete their transaction.

Without centralized data, you may also be attributing a conversion solely to one channel, even though the customer has had brand interactions across other marketing channels. This lack of visibility makes it much harder to monitor your KPIs and to track the collective ROI of your marketing efforts.

To get the visibility that allows you to make data-driven business decisions, you need to make sure that your entire marketing technology stack is integrated, using a cross-channel marketing platform as the hub that connects all of your different apps and systems.

How to Centralize your Marketing Data

To integrate all of this data and ensure that it is securely accessible to everyone at your organization, you’ll need to buy a technology solution. A cross-channel marketing platform like Iterable can build detailed user profiles by integrating all of your disparate data sources, including your CRM, web forms, email lists, phone records, social media activity, e-commerce data and other data sources.

Iterable can migrate all of the data from your existing sources to analyze relationships between channels and eliminate redundancies. The platform will populate all of your channel data including customer events, attributes, and insights into a unified view, updating in real-time each time a customer interacts with your brand.

By centralizing your data and getting a detailed picture of how each customer engages with your brand across every channel, you’ll be able to move away from a generalized approach and build a highly personalized approach to marketing to your customers.

The Benefits of Centralized Data

There are a number of benefits to centralizing your data.

For one, all of your teams will now be able to draw from a single source of truth. They shouldn’t need to ask for technical support accessing data or wait for another team to provide it. Up-to-the minute information should be available to pull from as needed. That makes your marketing teams more self-sufficient and more informed.

Centralized data also helps you get a much more complete picture of each customer.

A prospective customer does not need to have made a purchase or even signed up for your list to generate a user profile. The platform should be able to tie all activity to their IP address when they first engage with your brand, and add to their profiles every time they interact with your brand. This comprehensive picture of each customer can inform your efforts as you develop highly personalized marketing campaigns with deep segmentation.

Your cross-channel marketing platform should be able to integrate with the other solutions in your martech stack—your CDPs, analytics dashboards, lead capture tools, and more—to give your team full visibility into the actions of each customer. . That enables you to market to each customer with highly segmented, personalized approaches that will resonate with them.

For instance, if you know a customer has viewed a specific product page, you can build a focused cross-channel marketing campaign around that product that incorporates email marketing, SMS marketing, and push notifications. Then, you can track the customer’s engagement across each of those channels to customize your campaign as they continue their customer journey. If a customer rarely opens emails but regularly clicks on SMS links, you can optimize your messaging approach based on the channels that they prefer to engage with.

With detailed user profiles, you can market to your customers on a 1:1 basis with user-specific recommendations and offers, using the types of engagement that work best for that particular customer. You’ll be able to immediately access event data so that when a customer clicks on a specific offer or page, it will trigger an automated, highly personalized sequence of cross-channel messages that’s relevant to the user’s interests. With a cross-channel platform like Iterable, all of this can be automated and scaled to reach an audience of millions.

Get Started

If you want to harness the power of centralized data in your marketing organization, contact Iterable to learn how to migrate your data from your existing databases and software tools. From there, you’ll be able to integrate all of your existing data and build on it with user event data. Your centralized data will serve as a rich source to help your entire marketing organization develop personalized cross-channel marketing campaigns that generate results.