This is a guest post from Alyssa Jarrett, Director of Brand & Content Marketing at Iterable
Although theoretically, it sounds enticing to have a “one-stop shop” that could solve all your marketing challenges, Marketing Operations (MOPS) professionals know that it’s a fantasy.
To put this pipe dream in perspective, the average number of marketing cloud services used by enterprises is 91 (!), but when you factor all the components that run our day-to-days (CRM, reporting and analytics, project management, cloud storage and more), it doesn’t sound that crazy.
What’s actually crazy is that legacy marketing suites still claim that they can manage all of these components equally well. It’s no wonder that they have long ago been dumped and replaced by modern martech stacks that are built together with strong yet flexible APIs.
The challenge now is to ensure that data is transferred between platforms without friction, so they “speak” to each other in real time.
Here is why cross-channel personalization is business-critical, why data continuity is a requirement to achieve it, and why MOPS needs to lead the charge to make marketing dreams a reality.
Related: How marketing automation has evolved and what you can do to leverage it effectively.
The Importance of Cross-Channel Personalization
If you think your internal martech stack is complicated, just think about what the end user—your customer—experiences. In fact, just take a look at your inbox, mailbox or push notification center. Chances are that they are flooded with generic and irrelevant brand updates and promotions.
Most of these messages will go unopened, some will prompt users to unsubscribe, and others may cause people to abandon your business entirely. With consumers constantly inundated with repetitive, lackluster brand outreach, it’s no surprise that personalized marketing experiences have become table stakes.
However, cross-channel personalization is easier said than done. The thing is, there are a lot of relevant channels these days (email, direct mail, mobile push, web push, SMS, in-app messaging, social retargeting—just to name a few). And each channel introduces nuanced challenges and opportunities for engagement.
You should invest in cross-channel personalization if you want to build a great end-user experience—something that cannot be achieved without data continuity.
Data Continuity Is Key
We’ve already explained that if you don’t personalize your marketing, then your business will be left behind. To put it even more bluntly, if you’re not at a themed decades party, looking behind-the-times is not cool.
How does this relate to data continuity? To create seamless, cross-channel experiences that are individualized for each customer, you can’t rely on legacy technologies that lack sophisticated capabilities. The days of SFTP and manual export/import are over. The martech stack you adapt must be modern, agile and multifaceted; it must eliminate data silos and work in real time. This way, you can cut through the noise and beat out your competition with relevant, tactful messaging.
Because of the many challenges implicit in advanced personalization, brands require a holistic solution led by Marketing Operations. But why? Let’s break it down.
3 Reasons Why MOPS Is Designed to Manage Cross-Channel Personalization
- MOPS is the glue that connects the entire business technology stack. Sure, marketers know what is in their brands’ martech stack (e.g., email service providers, lead capture platforms and analytics tools). But that’s knowledge of apparatus, not application—which is the sweet spot where MOPS fits in. Marketing Ops professionals work across departmental lines and can connect Marketing with cross-functional data from Sales, Finance, Support, Product and more. Empowered with outreach touchpoints, billing and payment information, support tickets, NPS surveys, customer satisfaction scores and product usage data, MOPS can enable even better personalization.
- Personalization shouldn’t require an entire engineering team. With MOPS handling data collection and management, there’s no need for marketers to engage the always-in-demand engineering and dev teams to execute simple tasks, like running an A/B test or extracting an audience segment. And even if you’re already tech-savvy and can code, it’s not your or Marketing’s job to memorize data schemas or wait around for others to get a campaign out the door. It’s your job to achieve your corporate KPIs and make your company money.
- MOPS can more effectively manage technology costs. Many marketing tools can balloon costs with hidden fees and overages. If you’re the one responsible for managing the stack, then guess who’s falling on the sword when reporting this news to the CFO, CEO, or board of directors? (Spoiler: it’s you.) Not only can MOPS ensure that all tools are seamlessly integrated and sharing data in real time, they also can ensure that the business isn’t paying for API calls or other questionable billing practices.
Related: How to leverage product usage data to personalize marketing events
The Quest for Cross-Channel Personalization Is Worth It
When taking into account the difficulties inherent in cross-channel personalization, and the added layer of complexity from data continuity enhancements, it’s clear that the quest for cross-channel personalization will be difficult. But it will also be worth it.
Here’s why: it drives ROI. In fact, retailers with a marketing-led cross channel personalization strategy are most likely to earn ROI of 400% or more. These are enviable returns, only achievable with a high-functioning martech stack that provides actionable customer data and communicates it across all applications.
Cross-channel personalization increases your bottom line, expands your user base, differentiates your brand and prepares your company for the future of marketing. And your Marketing Operations team will manage this glow-up in partnership with Workato and Iterable.
How Workato and Iterable Deliver a 1-2 Personalization Punch
To build a best-in-class growth marketing stack, with the highest ROI and lowest lift, businesses can trust automation platforms like Workato to connect customer data to marketing platforms like Iterable.
Iterable is the growth marketing platform that enables businesses, like Zillow, SeatGeek, and Box, to create, execute and optimize personalized, cross-channel campaigns with unparalleled data flexibility.
The Workato-Iterable power combo will drive revenue for your brand and improve your customer experience by:
- Driving repeat purchases through targeted campaigns with CRM integration
- Running hyper-personalized campaigns by integrating with user behavior analytics tools
- Collect and move customer 360 information into and out of your data warehouse
Workato and Iterable are working together to ensure that MOPS and Marketing teams alike deliver hyper-personalization at scale.
For more information on how to take advantage of this partnership, schedule a demo today.
