How Can Marketers Actually Do More With Less?
Marketers are constantly being told to do more with less. Efficiency is the name of the game during a recession, but marketers are often stretched thin when tasks pile up.
To actually succeed in greater efficiency, marketers need to be empowered with sophisticated tools and specific guidelines in place. Through these five practices using the power pair of Movable Ink and Twilio Segment, you’ll maximize your CDP (customer data platform) and ultimately grow your independence as a marketer.
Take Data Inventory
When data is disparate—living in multiple warehouses and coming in from countless sources—marketers end up strapped for time and resources. Finding relevant data is time-consuming, and finding the most effective information to power every campaign is virtually impossible. Combine that with cleaning your data sets and ensuring privacy policies are in place, and you’ve got an endless to-do list.
To cut down these manual tasks, use a tool that automatically brings all of your data points together to tell cohesive customer stories. This is the leverage marketers need to get out from under the mountain of data. When choosing a CDP, collation and organization is key. Organize your data and prioritize a solution that has multiple data connections in place and easy-to-use tools for when you inevitably need to build out new data sources.
Is It Really Real-Time?
Real-time options are loved by marketers for obvious reasons. Nothing sparks a customer’s attention like a personalized follow-up message after a browsing session. When messaging is relevant and timely, customers get to feel that personal touch. When engaging customers is a top priority, a real-time UI is the way to get a leg up on building those valuable customer relationships.
The thing is, marketers need to be critical that the tool they’re choosing is really real-time. Tools labeled as real-time can often be better described as recent-time, with updates occurring in regularly timed cycles. That means if a customer browsed a pair of jeans this morning, they may receive a follow-up message regarding the shoes they looked at two days ago; it’s not only irrelevant, but it’s clearly impersonal.
The Golden Profile
Many marketers know that basic, segmented demographics aren’t enough to support their personalization, but often are unsure of the next practical steps forward. Again, it boils down to the marketing solutions on hand.
With a sophisticated CDP that performs identity resolution—taking all of a customer’s data points to form an individual profile—marketers are able to move away from pre-labelled buckets.
Picture an athleisure brand with a cutting-edge CDP and content generation engine. No longer would marketers send two different customers labeled as “runners” the same content; now, they could take all data points into account, location for example, before deploying a campaign. After all, a runner living in blazing hot Hawaii is hardly going to wear the same gear as a track star living in the cold chills of Canada.
These tools roll into AI powered personalization, the pinnacle of marketing, perfectly. As the engine that generates personalized content, Movable Ink AI uses data from customers’ unique aggregate of traits. Meanwhile, Twilio Segment acts as a source of data-driven fuel the AI engine uses to learn more about the customer.
What Strategies to Avoid
Three powerful ways to leverage your marketing solutions have been covered. But just as importantly, here are two pitfalls to avoid when transforming your data practices:
Start Small
While automation ultimately empowers marketers to do more with less, every new tool has a bit of a learning curve. When starting with a tech stack like Twilio Segment and Movable Ink, it’s most strategic to start with one or two use cases that you know will move the needle for your business if data-powered personalization is included.
After that, analyze and iterate so that you can make your next best move—from there, you can start expanding your repertoire of use cases.
Data Quality Over Data Quantity
As tempting as it is to move fast, remember that not all data is made equal. While a sophisticated CDP will collate, organize, and clean your disparate data, the marketer still chooses the sources to input. That being the case, don’t use third-party, unreliable sources purely because they’re the quickest—opt for high-quality zero- and first-party data.
Once your sources are sorted, ensure that you’re not using data points just because they're the most recent or because you feel the urge to include as many as possible. Relevance is key, and leveraging a few powerful data points is far more effective than multiple tidbits of information that don’t resonate with your customer.
You're Ready To Do More With Less
By strategically using cutting-edge tools, you’ll actually be able to do more with less. But these five tips are just the beginning; discover even more you can do with AI powered personalization today.