For enterprise marketers, the dream when it comes to cross-channel marketing is to be able to easily access and utilize the data they have to deliver campaigns that feel personalized to the individual customer. But what’s been clear for some time is that’s a dream that’s rarely realized, with data hard to get out of various sources and nearly impossible to reliably get up to the ESP’s marketing cloud in order to build out those targeted campaigns. Response time lags, data feeds break, security is questionable, and everything’s often just generally a mess.
If this sounds familiar to you, you’ll want to watch for our upcoming research report, examining our Q4 survey in which we examined marketers’ experience with modern data warehouses, looking at the challenges and benefits they’ve encountered from their investment in consolidation and access for their customer data with a modern data warehouse.
Our webinar provided a deep-dive preview of the data we uncovered, but here’s a quick overview of the chief findings to give you a taste of what to expect when the full report is released next month.
The transition is smoother than you might expect
One of the biggest questions we’ve heard from marketers when they start talking about the possibility of partnering with a modern data warehouse is how challenging the move would be. After all, if their data is scattered all over the place and seemingly impossible to work with in its current state, won’t it be a massive pain to move everything into this one storage center?
What we found is that marketers haven’t found the transition to take unusually long or be especially disruptive. Well over half (65%) said it took less than a year for them to be fully operational on the modern data warehouse, and a solid one-third experienced zero negative impacts throughout that move. The full report will dig deeper into how database size impacted this, but the overall numbers showed the transition to be a reasonable one for the vast majority of those we surveyed.
Marketers generally like the results once they’re up and running
The move to a modern data warehouse really has been transformational for a lot of marketing teams that have tried for years to run personalized campaigns they’re confident would net great results with their customers, but kept running into frustrating roadblock after roadblock.
That’s probably why 95% of those we surveyed said the modern data warehouse has improved their overall messaging engagement, and 88% said it’s been beneficial for their customers. In addition, more than half (52%) described that customer benefit as “significant.” Those are some pretty overwhelming numbers, and show that marketers quickly see how much immediate data access can help them do their jobs — and serve their customers — better. In the full report, we look even further, at the specific benefits they cite, and there are plenty of them.
The largest companies have unique needs and challenges
It may go without saying, but the biggest companies with the most customer data had bigger challenges and needs than their counterparts on the lower end of the database-size scale. It makes sense that, the more data you have to organize and move around, the more difficult that task is going to get, and the more of an impact getting that done will have on your ability to personalize messaging.
With companies storing so much of their data in the modern data warehouse once they get up and running — 58% of respondents said that more than 75% of their data is stored there — it’s essential that the largest companies are able to meet their outsized data needs. We found that 33% of marketers at companies with $1 billion in annual revenue cited a significant reduction in time spent processing and accessing data as the biggest benefit to having the modern data warehouse, while just 14% of enterprise marketers at smaller companies said that. And 44% of those same marketers said having resources available to consolidate their data was the biggest transition challenge they encountered, vs. just 20% of the rest. You can quickly see the deep need for time and resources that scales up as your company and marketing team grow.
To get a larger preview of this exclusive research, check out our webinar with MessageGears VP, Marketing, Will Devlin. And watch for the full report to land early in Q1 2020.
Jeff Haws
As MessageGears’ Senior Marketing Manager, Jeff is focused on producing engaging and thoughtful content that resonates with enterprise marketers, helping them to better understand how MessageGears makes their jobs easier. He’s passionate about understanding the way data impacts messaging, and he’s also hopelessly obsessed with baseball.
