Over the years of advancement of digital marketing has evolved to realised that the biggest source and best resource of the industry is its target customers. Thus, marketers have started moving away from an earlier campaign driven way to a better and more effective customer centric approach in order to ensure that their customers get the best experience.
This resulting customer dialogue has therefore given rise to an even greater necessity of a single customer view. In this scenario, many businesses have realised how data has become an extremely valuable asset. But if they are to utilise the value of customer data to its best potential, marketers now need a single customer view more than ever before. And this means that the need of integrating their data silos is higher than ever.
In order to reach their goal of the best use of customer data there is a growing need of data integration in today’s market and there are various needs of a marketer which have given rise to the current ethos of the digital marketing world.
While shopping for data integration platform for your business, take a lot of time to research and understand how well it will integrate with the other existing technology you use because simply a partnership or application programming interface, API, does not mean that all different systems will work perfectly together. Therefore, check if you will be able to do everything you want to achieve with the new tools.
Before you go all in, it is important to decide whether a best-of-breed kind or a single software suite goes best with all the different needs of your enterprise. Another thing you need to look into is whether you need to go for an incremental improvement or for a big bang approach to meet your goals because unless you decide all of it beforehand it is likely to cost way too much or otherwise take too long.
While there are positives and negatives to both ways, it is the best to strike a balance between time and cost for the sake of a balanced effort. There is yet another thing that you need to take care of and that is mapping your varied customer journeys and then to priorities where you need to drop the ball between the different data systems of your use. As you need to integrate necessary data, quantify the benefits for a continuous improvement.
It is often seen that Businesses do not have the necessary means to obtain a real-time single customer view and if that is the case with you as well, it the next best thing which you can do here is to make use of a cut-down customer profile for real-time applications. While at it make sure to employ data fusion or segmentation techniques which link disparate data sets. Lastly, look out for any hidden integration costs such as extra set up charges, maintenance fees etc.
