On average, a single company works with upwards of 20 different marketing technology (MarTech) vendors and is constantly swapping out the old with the new. Thanks to tag management, it’s much easier to implement and manage the ever-changing technology stack. However, it leaves marketers with a huge problem. Every one of those vendors collects ‘some’ use case driven data and creates its very own ‘profile’ for your customers. Then you have to log into all 20 systems and create a segmentation and action strategy. This leads to disjointed campaigns, clumsy marketing and an unsatisfied customer. How many times have you abandoned your cart, returned and made the purchase but continue to see the products in remarketing ads for days on end?
In an ideal world, marketers would segment customers once and activate all of their marketing tools on that single source of truth. That way the different MarTech vendors are working together towards the same strategy and once achieved, can all turn off. This approach is called ‘Unified Marketing’ and is a hot topic these days.
A Customer Data Hub (CDH) provides a simple approach to achieving Unified Marketing. Now, marketers can look to this hub to define their omnichannel cross-device segments and leverage hundreds of pre-integrated vendors to act upon them. The best part is that if you switch vendors, the new one can simply plug into the CDH and access the rich profiles for immediate relevancy. Welcome to the party New Guy!
So what is possible with Unified Marketing? Let’s say that someone abandons their cart. You want to create a smart, unified approach to converting that customer. First, the customer is entered into the ‘Cart Abandoner’ segment. You could obviously have many sub-categories such as VIPs or Window Shoppers and apply different strategies to each, but for this example let’s keep it simple. Now you need to choose which vendors/channels to leverage and WHEN to leverage them.
Here’s a cool concept:
Step 1: In real-time you trigger an email with the cart contents and turn on Facebook Custom Audiences. Both are considered the best ‘time to action’ channels and are most effective in absolute real-time. People just can’t get enough of that Facebook thing!
Step 2: Push the cart contents to your Personalization and Live Chat vendors so if, and when, the customer comes back we hit them with a custom fit welcome mat and experience.
Step 3: If in 4 hours the customer still has not converted, turn on a display retargeting campaign with Doubleclick or any other DSP.
Step 4: If in 12 hours still no dice, you turn on Google AdWords retargeting and send a follow up email offering free shipping.
Step 5: The next time you see the customer you will personalize the content, images and offers that they see on the website.
Step 6. Once they convert, capture the attribution trail on a per user basis that worked. The next time you want to engage that customer you will use the channel that worked! Now you’re making AND saving money. So spicy!
Unified Marketing is super sweet, now your marketing team can get together once a week and talk about ‘OUR’ segmentation and action strategy. Email meet Display, Testing, Personalization, Social, Search, Loyalty, CRM and all of your other new BFF’s!
Fragmentation is a tough subject, everyone’s talking about it but the solution has evaded us—until now. Stop talking to your customers in 5 different languages and deliver a precise, well defined strategy across all of your marketing channels. The results will amaze you…and your customers.
