Personalization at Scale- Martech Stack Integration to Create a Single View of Customers

In our last blog— Tips to Select the Right Personalization Platform, we discussed what should be the basic capabilities of the technology platform that you choose for your personalization strategy. Now let us consider how to integrate martech stack to create a single view of customers.

Marketing technology is now one of the most significant portions of a company's total marketing budget (26% on average, according to Gartner). ChiefMartech.com identified nearly 7000 marketing technologies in 2018, and according to Internet trends report, an average Enterprise uses approximately 91 of them. But the question is how much martech do we need?

Today we have unprecedented access to data as every aspect of the customer journey is being digitized. As technology grows, the role of your martech stack to execute, analyze, and improve marketing across the customer lifecycle becomes critical to your success. The expectation is that your martech stack should be able to improve internal collaboration, measure the impact of marketing activities, and reach customers faster.

Making Sense of the Technology Available to Us: A Simplistic View.

Marketers now have access to market insights from market intelligence platforms like Similarweb, which help you plan and optimize your digital strategies vis-a-vis your competition, plan your media, and ad-spend.

They've got digital experience platforms like Sitecore, which help you perform end to-end-personalization across channels, automation, and smart delivery across websites and portals, apps, and IoT devices.

MAPs (marketing automation platforms like Pardot, Eloqua, Marketo, etc.) help you orchestrate brand messaging & campaigns across channels (email, mobile, social, etc.) and identified customer segments, score engagement and leads.

Customer Data Platforms (CDP) like Tealium act like a data hub to collect, enrich, and activate customer data in every channel. Analytics tools give you insight into your website and how your content is performing across the web. Then we have your CRM, which helps you collect everything in one place, including customer profile and transactional data, firmographic data, and helps your sales get into action.

To simplify this further, let us take the analogy of a baseball game.

MAP is your pitcher. They help you deliver your market messaging via social, email etc. Your Digital Experience Platform (DXP) is the catcher, which catches customer engagement & optimizes your customer experience to highest extent possible and helps convert this engagement into sales intent. This information is captured in your CRM which is your scorer, which helps you keep a count of who, when, and how got engaged and what is the real-time score of each prospect for sales to take action.

If sales people can get a visibility of incredibly rich data and insights of this engagement, goals hit and engagement value across campaigns – to concentrate their sales time to having meaningful conversations with the most likely to convert prospects with the highest economic value. In a B2B enterprise sales scenario, this is worth gold.

Your martech needs to allow you to do three things well when integrated:

1. Break Data Silos: Systems of data unification, systems of insights (analytics) and systems of engagement (activation) need to be tightly integrated, and accessed easily.
2. Create a Single View of Customers:
• Identify prospects from unknown to known, capture customer intent
• Collect cross channel ‘touches’, transactional data and store as an integrated system of records
• Set up basic machine learning components to provide data driven optimization insights
• Update customer profile data iteratively across the buying journey
3. Orchestrate Omnichannel communication :
• Score engagement values, goal completion, trigger relevant content, and communication in real-time
• Centralized customer data for omnichannel communication and engagement, leveraging automated triggers for personalization become easier to test and optimize
• Centralized marketing content and workflows to manage and distribute brand consistency & taxonomy

Picture Personalization at scale as an engine- consisting of several moving parts and levers that need to work in unison, connected to each other, feeding relevant information in real-time and most importantly solve a single purpose- to be able to view each customer uniquely as a single version of truth across channels and be able to market to the audience of one.