Data Integration for Marketing has lately been gaining momentum for its success in bridging the gaps and complexities of a martech stack to the customer. Thanks to Big Data the entire process of adjoining and analyzing your own data to create significant insights for yourself not only sounds great but also reduces significant labor down the pipeline. However, instead of diving straight to the complexity of the Data Integration and its simulation with the Martech stack let us start by understanding what exactly is Data Integration.
What is Data Integration?
Data Integration for marketing means adjoining various information from a plethora of sources into something of use. On the core value, it is all about managing data properly and making it available to those who need it with the help of business intelligence and relative automation tools. It amplifies the working of your stack.
If we go by the definition of IBM:
Data Integration means “ “discovery, cleansing, monitoring, transforming and delivery of data from a variety of sources.”
Importance of Data Integration in Marketing Functions:
On the off chance that you are a marketer, you realize that data integration can represent the core of your marketing activities. To drive your marketing campaigns, you have to gather data from various sources, regardless of whether they are social media channels, ERP arrangements, CRM frameworks, cloud servers or even Excel documents on a partner’s workstation. It isn’t unprecedented for marketing departments or organizations to utilize around 50 unique technologies consistently to monitor their clients’ activities and their buying journey. Prior to data integration, advertisers needed to manage information put away in siloed servers – now and again in various areas around the world, in different formats. With data integration, advertisers can get to this information from one place.
Why Data Integration for marketing?
Data is one of the most valuable for any organization, but for utilizing the value of data, marketers must have a unified customer view which indicates aggregating the data silos.
Main reasons as to why we need data integration for the marketing world
1) Enhanced decision making
Access to ongoing information introduced in a simple to process configuration will furnish you with significant intuition, helping you to be proactive, revealing chances and distinguishing potential bottlenecks before they happen.
Improve client experience
Siloed data avert a total perspective on clients which sway on the sales and hence directly impacts the revenue. Just when you approach continuous client data along with the historical data would you be able to focus on your clients with the correct message at the ideal time to improve your client experience, dependability, and revenue.
2) Streamlining of tasks
Right from procurement and supply chain to assembling and management, continuous access is valuable for improving procedures, expanding the total production, and bringing down expenses crosswise across different departments, including sales, production, distribution, and the sky is the limit from there.
3) Increment efficiency
In the event that you need to always move between various frameworks to assemble knowledge, your profitability is essentially decreased. With automated data integration, your information from all the various sources is pooled into a single view, enhancing your productivity on the whole.
4) Anticipate the future
Consolidate historical information with pipeline data to make forecasts and foresee client requests. This will assist you in assessing your products and services while furnishing you with the capacity to stay ahead of the competition.
How to integrate your customer data?
Coming to the most important aspect of Customer Data Integration(CDI) is the how of it. As much as Data Integration is needed in the marketing kitty, we also acknowledge that the integration is quite tough and there can be major questions that need a clear answer.
How accurate is the customer data that you have?
Where is the core information warehoused
Is the location fixed?
Is it proliferated across several places in the data warehouse?
What if your information is duplicated across several business channels?
Developing baby steps towards your integration process is the key to a successful implementation. Anything that is done in parts not only simplifies the process but also makes sure that you understand the heart and soul of your customer data.
Let us dive into top 5 things you should do primarily when integrating customer data:
1. Enterprise-wide integration plan
Create an integration plan which is enterprise wide-spanning across all the departments so that the plan you are chalking out applies universally to all your employees and hence there will be no systematic bottlenecks regarding the process.
2. Rightful resource planning
Obtain the most rightful resources to support the plan. Make sure that your resource requirements are sufficient to support your complete enterprise-level plan. Make sure to identify and define priority and specialized areas to diagnose and optimize your company’s capabilities to the fullest.
3. Data quality
Data quality is another serious aspect when it comes to data integration. Building significant measures of data quality is extremely necessary. Put significant emphasis on the various aspects of data quality such as Data completeness along with data accuracy and access. Grouping accuracy also needs special attention as that decides the proliferation channel of the data.
4. Transactional History
Make sure to collect transaction history data. Holding a minimum of 3 years worth of transaction data and history forms a strong foundation of detailed analysis. Three years in consideration represents a sum of two or more sales cycles, more or less.
5. Use your data
Make the correct use of customer data to understand and fathom significant insights from it. Customer data is rich in informing about lifetime value, customer worth along with customer retention factors. An aggregation of combining sales margin along with sales and marketing costs should be able to give you the worth of individuals in no time.
In Conclusion
From the start, executing client information combination may appear to be an overwhelming procedure. In any case, you ought to be empowered by most by far of organizations that have built up CDI forms who currently wonder how they at any point worked together without it. CDI is an icon of ease and simplified usability. CDI is a demonstrated product—reliable, fruitful and quantifiable. With CDI set up, you will appreciate expanded incomes, critical cost investment funds, higher efficiencies in marketing and, generally significant, happier clients.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chandrima Samanta
Content-Editor at MartechCube
Chandrima is a Content management executive with a flair for creating high quality content irrespective of genre. She believes in crafting stories irrespective of genre and bringing them to a creative form. Prior to working for MartechCube she was a Business Analyst with Capgemini.