Using data

There are still clearly silos when it comes to the sharing of data in an organisation. Digital teams have their own set of data on customers, while the ‘offline’ marketing teams have their own separate information, on theoretically the same individuals.

This information needs to be integrated more effectively between teams in order to provide better personalised customer service and improve conversion.

Capturing data

The delegates discussed how they can convince people to be more active online, and in turn facilitate companies in their abilities to capture this behavioural information more easily.

Email marketing

Marketers need to find the right email marketing solution that can accurately segment their customers, so they know what an individual’s interests are and their behaviour.

Delegates also stated the importance of finding a solution that allowed them to accurately measure KPIs.

In our Email Marketing Industry Census 2015 we asked our respondents “which of the following practices are a part of your email marketing efforts?”

Email variation

There was much discussion as to how to make email subject lines and content more interesting. If a company is sending multiple emails a week, there’s a strong chance that recipients will emotionally unsubscribe, if not physically unsubscribe from them.

Therefore variation is the key to preventing ‘email blindness’.

Customer journey

Delegates asked whether there is a platform that can manage the customer journey and all related platforms? Often organisations were running multiple campaigns across multiple platforms, without any integration.

It’s difficult to accurately measure the customer journey and improve the customer experience with this lack of joined up strategy.

The pull and push between marketing and IT

Implementing data capturing and management systems can be a lengthy and technical process, and often this falls behind the expectations of marketers.

More collaborations are happening between tech and marketing teams now though, but the main objective should be the ability to execute campaigns faster with the minimal amount of fuss.

Increasing personalisation

Ultimately everything discussed at this roundtable, and in fact all the behavioural marketing events this year, has been about the importance of personalisation and how this is vital to a business’s success, as relevant and timely customer service will be a key differentiator in the future.