Supercharge Your Customer Experiences: How to Act Faster, Work Smarter, and Drive Business Outcomes

We all know that we’re living in a data-rich era. Never before have marketers had access to so much valuable customer information, but how effective are marketers at seamlessly integrating that data to deliver exceptional customer experiences and drive positive business outcomes?

Simon Data recently partnered with ClickZ to gain deeper insights into the role of data in email marketing. Based on the responses of 130 marketers, we examined the overall effectiveness of email service providers (ESPs) and generated this report. The findings were striking. A majority of brands reported a lack of data integration, leading to subpar segmentation, lack of personalization, and ineffective email campaigns.

The good news is that while many organizations are scrambling to play catch-up, marketers can supercharge their customer experiences with the right ESP. Let’s review some of the key findings from this report and steps you can take to increase your email marketing campaign success.

Feelings of Uncertainty

Overall, marketers aren't confident in their email marketing campaigns. In fact, of the respondents, only 31.7 percent said their email marketing campaigns were effective. The other 69.3 percent call their email campaigns either "adequate' or "not very effective."

In other words, a majority of email marketers aren't confident that their campaigns are having a strong impact or intended outcomes. So, what plays a critical role in helping marketers gain confidence that their campaigns are effective? Survey results indicate data integration.

The Trouble With Lack of Data

Email Marketing: A 10,000 Foot View

One of the biggest problems with many existing ESPs is that they're dated. ESPs have been around for longer than we've had effective ways to capture customer data. Therefore, not all platforms integrate with existing data or capture it in real time. To that point, 48 percent don't believe their current ESP integrates with their current data or don't know if that's a possibility.

A Closer Look

Not having proper data integrations becomes an issue when marketers build out email marketing campaigns with deeper personalization and segmentation. These campaigns often become delayed due to the time it takes to have either data or engineering teams build out segments. Specifically, 47 percent say it takes them four days or longer to get the information needed to run campaigns. Nearly 15 percent say it takes them a staggering 11 days or more to access that data!

Smarter, Faster, Better

Choosing an ESP which directly integrates with your data sources can help your business work smarter by centralizing all your customer data in one location. This puts critical information into the right people's hands and allows them to make informed decisions based on what all your data is telling you now.

Getting data into the hands of the right people will also enable you to make smarter and quicker decisions. Marketers no longer have to wait on other teams to get campaigns up and running.

Most importantly, integrating your data drives positive outcomes. Personalization in emails drives conversions. In fact, emails that use three or more personalized pieces see 2x greater clickthrough rate and 6x boosted conversion. At the end of the day, it's all about driving increased return on investment through more robust messaging and higher conversions.

The bottom line? Seamlessly integrating customer data with your ESPs is the secret to supercharging your customer experiences and driving positive business outcomes.

Jason Davis is the CEO and co-founder of Simon Data, a customer data platform.