You think you’re doing it right. But it just isn’t working.
What happens when your analytics is in silos!
You’re checking your website traffic.
You’re tracking numbers
You’re analyzing customer behavior
You’re watching to see how many convert
You keep an eye on the mobile app
You track all your campaigns
You even have the tools to personalize.
But – you see very low conversion numbers and your customer engagement is poor, at best.
Baffled?
Did you ever think that these are stand-alone, disconnected units of tracking that you do?
This is what happens when everything works in individual silos!
Well – you are not alone. Many marketers struggle with this.
Did you know that the average business today has deployed at least 16 Marketing and Digital Analytics technologies? For larger organizations, this number is as high as 98! (MarTech Industry Council, 2017).
You have all the right tools. And you may be doing several things right – you keep adding new channels for your audience to engage better with you. And there may be many from your target audience who are taking to these new channels quickly.
But when your audience interacts with you across multiple channels, they just don’t move between channels, they also move back and forth in the purchase journey.
There is a very strong likelihood that you are dealing with multiple legacy systems – they could have been put in place by various teams who have been working independently and not with one another. Because of this, there could be a huge disconnect between each system and all the data that is generated by each of them. Your CRM, analytics platform, marketing automation, and social listening tools may not be linked and this is a serious problem.
When you have disparate analytical systems in place, you end up tracking audience interaction on each channel separately and respond without taking into account, how they behaved on other channels. And so your messaging has no context or relevance to his situation and his level of engagement drops.
But if one can solve this by bringing all the data together or integrating the data across systems, it will give you an opportunity to create a more complete view of a customer or prospect. Apart from this, it will give the marketer a view of a customer’s complete buying journey which will help him send each of them the most relevant messages.
This might sound like just common sense and something everyone ought to do – but in reality, this is what distinguishes analytically mature, successful brands from others. Not everyone does this right.
A brand that is analytically mature does not stop at collecting multichannel data. They integrate systems and analyze all the data as a whole – in context – so every message or communication is relevant and hyper-personalized. And this is what leads to a stronger engagement and greater conversion rates.
Not everyone does this, sadly.
So what can you do?
One word – Connect!
All your systems.
You have to start breaking all the data silos down. And bring them all under one head. Make them all speak to each other so the data that they produce is shared.
The first step in doing this is the creation of a list of data collection processes and tools across every single department in your business. Once you have this information, you will be able to see if there are any systems that can be connected to each other.
There are many tools that are standalone – tools like CRM, marketing automation, and analytics platforms that can be integrated with each other. You could also maybe possess a tool that has other functions and so you can bring various functions under one umbrella. And do away with the stand-alone platform. You could also think of getting an alternative – a completely different tool that can either connect with your other systems or do multiple things.
It is very important that you get all your data in one place and look at the full picture.
Once you know each person’s situation, offer the next best course of action to him.
Once you do this, you will see the engagement increasing and your numbers rolling in.
Sound and effective Digital data and analytics management are crucial to getting all the data together and deriving contextual valuable insights from it. You might have all the tools and the tracking and measuring systems. But unless they are all integrated, it just will not work!
So how can you act like the big guns – the analytically mature businesses – with high conversion rates and deeply engaged and loyal customers? You have all the right tools. And you may be doing several things right – you keep adding new channels for your audience to engage better with you. And there may be many from your target audience who are taking to these new channels quickly.
Coming right up!
We would like to know how you handle data silos at your organization, share it with us by writing to marketingfolks@xerago.com
