Why Real-Time Data Access is Critical for Email Marketing

To truly understand the immense impact of having access to truly 100% real-time customer data while building email marketing campaigns, marketers almost invariably need an “A-ha!” moment. Or maybe several hundred of them. For the vast majority of marketers, that moment never comes, because the volume of data they’re working with is small enough to where much — if not basically all — of it can live right in their vendor’s cloud where they’re building messages.

For marketers who send fewer than 10 million emails a month, data lag and syncing issues just don’t show up on their radar. But, for those on the larger end of the scale, the barriers that can stand in the way of them delivering high-level customer experiences are high without immediate access to all their customer data. They see the value because it impacts their jobs. It negatively affects what they can accomplish, and hurts relationships with their customers.

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That’s the perspective we’ve learned from decades in the industry, and from talking to thousands of marketers. Our research looks at this, going directly to these marketers to get their views on real-time data access. We wanted to see if the new, wide-ranging data would reflect conversations we’ve had in the field. In addition, we wanted to address the challenge of defining what “real-time data” even means.

The barriers that can stand in the way of them delivering high-level customer experiences are high without immediate access to all their customer data.

In our new whitepaper, “Why Real-Time Data Access is Critical for Email Marketing at Scale,” we address these questions, and look at our 2018 ESP Satisfaction Report. For the report, we surveyed more than 100 enterprise marketers on a wide range of their views regarding email marketing. Part of that included looking at how they viewed real-time data access. Were they happy with their current level of access? Did they consider it an imperative to their success? Was it something they were looking to improve?

Our research suggests that, the larger their company, the more likely marketers are to recognize the importance of real-time data access. And, given the realities of scale, this shouldn’t be surprising. Even on the lower end of that 10 million mark — the lowest number in our survey — the effect of real-time data is only just being felt. The fact is, most of the largest companies don’t have the real-time data access they need. But our numbers show, their marketers know it’s something they want. At the bigger end of the scale, they have more experience, data, and — quite often — ambition. Because they’ve done it before. They also know all the tricks their cloud solution won’t allow them to pull off. And they want to do more.

For others, though — and for many email service providers — it’s easier to re-imagine the very idea of “real time.” Since building emails in the cloud means sending data away from a company’s centralized database — and single source of truth for customer information — something has to give. Either marketers and ESPs themselves acknowledge that the data being used to build emails at that level isn’t actually live and in real time, or “real time” has to be defined down to mean something other than “100% live.”

Most of the largest companies don’t have the real-time data access they need. But our numbers show, their marketers know it’s something they want.

And that causes a muddying of the term, to the point where many disagree on its meaning. In our whitepaper, we go to some length to detail how and why we think “100% live” is the standard. You wouldn’t allow your website’s data to be hours late in updating. Why do you accept it for your email? There’s no reason for the two to be different in this respect. And our whitepaper will show that the large-scale enterprise marketers are coming to realize this more and more.

Click here to download the full whitepaper, with statistics and observations from our exclusive research.