Oracle Marketing Cloud Interact 2014 took place in San Francisco earlier this month. From sessions covering modern marketing best practices, to training sessions from marketing leaders, exciting keynote lineup and private shows, Interact 2014 proved to be a great event for B2C and B2B marketers. Courtney Buchanan, a writer for the New School Marketing blog, covered the event’s happenings while picking up on valuable tips from Oracle Marketing Cloud attendees. Let’s take a look at the latest insights and best practices Courtney gathered from top professionals at the event.
In her article, 4 Tips for Data-driven Glory: Insights from Interact 2014, Courtney addresses the importance of making sense of customer data to drive personalized experiences and, ultimately, bottom line impact. Below is a list of Courtney’s top 4 ways marketers can make use of data to get the most results from their marketing campaigns.
- Read the story in the data
Metrics aren’t just numbers, there’s a whole story behind them. Data tells the story of which campaigns and marketing messages are most successful in an effort to help marketers duplicate efforts that work. Yet, with more than enough data, it becomes easy to focus on the wrong analysis. By analyzing campaign performance, marketing is able to identify where customers are engaging most. With this information, they are able to devise better strategies for reaching out to customers. With so much rich data available at marketing’s fingertips, companies can really zero in on customer needs and aid them through the buying journey.
- Choose metrics that matter
With the advent of new technologies that allow marketers to gain metrics on almost anything, marketers often get bombarded with so much insight that they don’t know what to make of it. Josh Gerads, digital marketing manager at MetLife, says marketers have to consolidate their data, establish tracking and perform ongoing, “always-on” testing to achieve success. By focusing on such metrics as attributed sales, incremental revenue lift, lead rate and sales conversion rate, his team is able to really zero in on the data that matters most while not getting bogged down with the rest.
- Combine data streams
Patti Rutkin, associate director of digital CRM and direct marketing at Verizon stated that she and her colleagues combine email behavioral data, product interest data, purchase data and demographic data in order to craft messages that resonate with targeted customers. For Verizon Wireless, newsletters are all the rage when it comes time to drive value. While to some newsletters may seem like dinosaurs, for Verizon, “There’s so much data at our fingertips that it’s overwhelming”, says Rutkin. To marketers, the newsletter era may be gone in a world where push notifications and snappy Instagram posts are all the rage,but for large companies like Verizon, gathering data from a single source – from product interest to demographics, means gaining real and tangible customer insight.
- Personalize email automation with real-time insights
In the modern marketing world, customer loyalty is a must-have. This is why companies are increasingly turning to marketing automation. The marketing automation process enables marketers to deliver personalized messages to customers thereby really working on enhancing customer relationships. Yet, few companies say that most of their revenue comes from email automation – except for Sears.
At every customer interaction - either through display ads or in-store with a salesperson, Sears automatically triggers an email update in real-time based on the most recent customer activity. A customer that visits a store to look at a microwave but doesn’t by it, interacts with a salesperson who gets the customer’s email address and within several hours gets an email that recaps the product inquiry with similar recommendations. What’s more is that if a customer receives a daily email about TVs, the email content is personalized to include appliances instead.
It’s all about data. There’s nothing like getting real customer insight than doing so with the measurable and targeted marketing campaigns. Making sense of customer data works to drive personalized experiences that ultimately play a large role for customers and their buying decisions. From email campaigns to newsletters, data acquired from customers tells a real story about their behaviours and preferences and drives personalized experiences to achieve measurable results for the bottom line.
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