It's another data gap, but this time it's serious
Nearly all digital marketers (70%) believe that achieving a single customer view will provide improved marketing personalisation, but less than one quarter (21%) say they currently have a single view of their customer's interactions, according to research into Big Data and the single customer view from Celebrus and Teradata.
While the 'single customer view' is still very much a hot topic among marketers, less than a quarter reported that they currently had a single view customer interactions - but this figure is set to more than double over the next two years, with 57% predicting that they will have achieved a single customer view by the end of 2016.
To achieve this target, almost half of respondents recognised the need to store their customer data in appropriate systems such as integrated data warehouses (49%) and/or technologies such as Hadoop (27%), rather than in separate data marts or with third parties.
Additionally, analytics is becoming increasingly sophisticated within marketing as more and more organisations realise how it can enhance the effectiveness and profitability of campaigns. This success can be hard to achieve, with the survey showing the top barrier to better customer analytics is lack of time (47%), followed by lack of internal skills and expertise (37%).
To overcome this, respondents cited a growing focus on resourcing specialist in-house analytics teams to drive customer analytics, increasing from the current 40% using in-house specialists to 51% in two years' time.
"This research showed that organisations truly want to understand the journeys of individual customers as they interact across a multitude of different channels," said Ruth Gordon, director of digital marketing for Teradata. "But this is a challenge for digital marketers because it requires not only the tools to capture these interactions but also the advanced technology and skill-sets to analyse this data to garner new insights and drive action."
In today's world of 'treat-me-as-an-individual' consumers, the role of personalisation is becoming ever-more important, with 80% seeing it as key to their digital marketing success over the next two years, versus just 51% today. Moreover, 78% plan to use real-time data in their channel personalisation in the future, compared to 44% using real-time data today.
"The 'always on, always connected' consumers of today are demanding more engaging and relevant content from brands and organisations. They expect to be communicated with as an individual and organisations that fall short of this are missing a key component of their customer engagement," commented Katharine Hulls, vice president of marketing for Celebrus Technologies. "This study reinforces the notion that the fast-paced, data-generating world we live in requires organisations to have data collection and analytics capabilities on an unprecedented scale."
For additional information: · Visit Celebrus at http://www.celebrus.com · Visit Teradata at http://www.teradata.com
