How customer data integration enhances marketing

Highlights

You’ll learn how customer data integration eliminates silos and drives marketing.

• Breaks down data silos: Centralizes fragmented data for coherent insights
• Enhances targeting: Unified profiles enable personalized marketing content and campaigns
• Improves collaboration: Teams share accurate, real-time data, leading to better cohesion
• Improves ROI: Clear insights drive smarter marketing decisions

Invest in customer data integration tools to optimize your marketing outcomes!

Customer data is one of the most valuable resources for modern businesses. Yet, according to this Forbes report, 76% of businesses do not understand their data. Those who do struggle with data security, governance and integration. Customer data integration aims to fix these issues.

What is customer data integration (CDI)?

Customer data integration is the process of collecting, organizing and consolidating customer data from sources into a single, unified view. This enables businesses to get accurate and complete insights that drive personalized marketing and business growth.

The core components of customer data integration

There are several elements you can expect in customer data integration, which include: 

• Data consolidation: Businesses have data in different systems. With data integration, they can combine the data from these sources into a single system. This leads to data consistency and the removal of duplicates.
• Unified customer profiles: Customer data integration consolidates data from multiple sources to create unified customer profiles. This gives you a holistic view of each customer.
• Data synchronization: Data integration updates and reconciles data from various sources in real-time. This ensures you have the most consistent and accurate data.

Tools and platforms for customer data integration 

You need the right tools to integrate data and that could range from APIs and CDPs to other data tools like data lakes and warehouses.

Customer data platforms (CDPs) 

CDPs integrate customer data from multiple touchpoints, organize it and provide real-time insights. This gives marketers access to unified customer profiles that enable them to personalize marketing campaigns. CDPs also:

• Integrates with multiple data sources 
• Processes data in real-time
• Segments audience
• Offers an intuitive user interface

How CDPs enable real-time decision-making 

Customer data platforms process data in real-time. This provides immediate insights into how customers behave and interact with a brand. For instance, when you track a customer’s purchase patterns, you may be able to decide if they qualify for a loyalty bonus based on how frequently they have bought a product.

Other tools for customer data integration

While a real-time CDP remains the ultimate tool to integrate customer data, there are also others, such as:

• APIs: APIs are sets of rules that enable systems to interact and share data. They support seamless data sharing and allow you to synchronize data from different systems.
• Data lakes and warehouses: Data lakes store data in their raw, original format, while data warehouses organize historical data from multiple sources to support analytics. Both support the integration of customer data and serve unique use cases.

What happens when there is no customer data integration?

First, what could lead to a lack of data integration? At times, there are human factors, like a reluctance to share data across departments. Then, there is the technology angle, where a business lacks the right tools to do it. When you have data in fragments, you end up with conflicting strategies and missed opportunities, as you cannot fully understand your customers.

Breaking down data silos for improved marketing outcomes 

Imagine you are about to run a marketing campaign. While going through customer insights, someone from another team says that you are working with incorrect data. Now, there is confusion, as both teams try to reconcile the data.

Data silos occur when data is isolated in separate systems or departments. When data is fragmented, you get incomplete insights, missed opportunities and duplicate efforts that put a strain on resources.

Per a Salesforce report, 81% of IT leaders stated that data silos hindered their digital transformation efforts. So, data silos are a big deal and you must find ways to deal with them.

Strategies to eliminate data silos

So, how do you deal with data silos to enable you to deliver consistent and cohesive marketing campaigns? Here are some pointers.

• Centralized data management: Unify and centralize all customer data using a system like a CDP. That way, every department has access to the same data across the board. 
• Encourage cross-departmental collaboration: Design processes that allow every department to collaborate and share data. This eliminates the human factors that create data silos.
• Automate data integration: Use tools that make it easy for you to synchronize data. That way, you can keep all systems in sync without manual efforts, which may be prone to errors.

Best practices for effective customer data integration 

When you integrate customer data, it is essential to follow proven best practices. That way, you can be sure the data is safe, correct and of the right quality. Here are some tips to follow.

• Focus on data governance and compliance: Adhere to data security and privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA, set up data security and conduct regular security audits. 
• Standardize data: Use standardized formats when collecting data. For instance, ensure all systems collect customer names in the same format. This helps you avoid mismatches. 
• Conduct regular data audits: Implement periodic reviews to check that data is complete, current, relevant and accurate. That way, you can detect and fix issues on time.

The benefits of customer data integration for marketing 

CDI brings numerous advantages that help organizations refine their marketing strategies and outputs.

• Better organizational cohesion: This happens when silos are broken up. Data sharing improves and teams collaborate more, leading to better cohesion and increased innovation.
• Enhanced targeting and personalization: Access to unified customer profiles enables you to tailor marketing strategies and campaigns. For example, you can match frequent customers with loyalty rewards.
• Real-time customer journey mapping: Data integration allows you to visualize all the steps in a customer’s journey. This enables you to enhance all touchpoints and improve the experiences at every stage.
• Higher ROI: Customer data integration enables you to adapt to market shifts faster. Whether by refining ad spend, strategy or email campaigns, this leads to revenue growth.

Challenges in implementing customer data integration 

While integrating customer data offers excellent rewards, there are potential challenges to be aware of. Here are common ones.

• Integration costs: Staff training, data migration and software costs can quickly run up. Hence, it is essential to plan and prioritize your investment on a needs basis.
• Technical complexities: Data format, architecture and real-time integration can be complex. Train your team to have the right technical expertise, use tools that work well together and deploy APIs where necessary.
• Data quality maintenance: With diverse data inputs and sources, businesses can struggle with data accuracy and consistency.
• Change management issues: Teams that are used to isolated workflows may resist the cultural shift needed for data integration. So, businesses must plan on how to manage potential resistance to change.

Overcoming these challenges

With the right strategies, you can manage these issues and make the most of your customer data integration. Here are some tips to follow.

• Invest in skilled data professionals and robust integration tools, like implementing a real-time CDP. 
• Create awareness of the benefits of integrating customer data. 
• Focus on small wins to build support for long-term customer data integration.

Case studies

Industry Dive

Industry Dive did not have a holistic picture of its audiences, which made it difficult to track the individual customer journey. Opting for Contentstack's real-time CDP allowed them to integrate customer data. By so doing, they could personalize customer journeys, which increased customer engagement by 40%.

"Our editors really see the value of Lytics. They’re using it every day to shape their editorial content." Robin Re said.

Keep reading to see how Industry Dive increased CTR by 40% with Contentstack’s real-time CDP. 

Land O'Lakes

After extensive market research and RFP, Land O'Lakes implemented Contentstack’s real-time CDP to integrate its customer data and deliver unique experiences to its various audience segments. This enabled them to increase CTR by 29% and conversion rates by 38%.

Steve Rude said. "Impressions are the metric of a failed marketing campaign…If you’re not getting the conversions, it means you weren’t hitting the right audience. You may not reach a million people, but we’re going to reach the right people with the right message. And that’s where Lytics helps us."

Read more on how Land O’Lakes increased the conversion rate with a CDP.

FAQ section 

What is customer data integration (CDI)? 

Customer data integration is the process by which you consolidate and organize customer data from multiple sources to create unified customer profiles. 

How can breaking down data silos improve marketing outcomes? 

Eliminating data silos leads to unified data that allows you to get a clear and centralized view of customers. This enables you to build strategies and campaigns on correct, consistent and complete data.

What are the benefits of customer data platforms (CDPs)? 

CDPs enable you to make decisions in real-time based on current and accurate first-party customer data. It also supports analytics, enables you to segment your audience and orchestrate customer journeys.

What tools simplify customer data integration?

Rolls that simplify data integration include customer data platforms (CDP), APIs, data lakes and data warehouses. 

How does data governance support data integration? 

Data governance ensures there are strong policies for data quality, safety, accuracy and compliance, which creates a reliable foundation for integration. 

Learn more

Modern businesses have to deal with multiple customer touchpoints, data formats, systems and technology infrastructures. Without the right tools, they could quickly struggle with data silos, lack of automation and poor business coordination.

Customer data integration enables them to harmonize data, break down silos and create unified customer profiles. This allows them to personalize interactions and create the right customer engagements that drive growth.

A real-time customer data platform (CDP) is an excellent tool for integrating customer data. It enables you to activate a data warehouse, orchestrate customer journeys, segment audiences and extract deep customer insights to drive decision-making. Talk to us today to learn more.