Marketers Intend to Deploy New Digital Analytics and Lifecycle Management Tools to Accelerate Digital Transformation [REPORT]

Clicks, views, posts, shares and visits have taken a back seat to acquisition, retention and revenue growth as core measures of customer experience and engagement success, reports the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council.

According to a new study conducted with Microsoft Corp., marketers are de-prioritizing digital campaign metrics in favor of business-focused measurements that more directly tie customer experience to financial performance and business outcomes.

Some 40 percent of marketers surveyed believe that because of these new business measures, they are able to better prove the impact of customer experience investments.

The new strategic brief entitled, “Making Personalization Possible,” also reveals that while 49 percent of marketers are hopefully optimistic about creating lasting relationships with customers through personalized engagements and campaigns, more than one in four are totally confident that personalization is the path to customer gratification and retention.

Key findings of the study include:

•     Thirty-seven (37) percent of marketers believe that personalization success will hinge on the ability to deliver experiences that are powered by a single view of the customer.
•     Thirty-six (36) percent of marketers admit they are currently only able to personalize engagements in select channels but are struggling to properly align the data needed to personalize across the entire relationship in a consistent and meaningful manner.
•     Twenty-one (21) percent are able to deliver highly relevant, one-to-one experiences to their customers, both online and offline.

“Marketers are moving away from defining customer experience success through moments in time like clicks or views,” said Liz Miller, Senior Vice President of Marketing for the CMO Council. “Those have become critical tools for real-time campaign success. But to measure customer experience success and the overall impact of marketing on the business, marketers are turning to financial KPIs: revenue, costs, conversions and impact on the bottom line.”

As leading executives continue to make personalization possible, they are actively seeking out tools and solutions that will amplify the customer’s voice and turn that data into real, actionable intelligence. Among the top strategies for accelerating value in 2016, marketers will look to bolster analytics and lifecycle management strategies and platforms (65 percent), along with implementing personalization platforms (65 percent), engaging in comprehensive journey mapping (56 percent), and getting smarter about predictive analytics (52 percent).

“Marketing leaders are increasingly focused on personalization,” said Gretchen O’Hara, General Manager of Enterprise Marketing at Microsoft. “In today’s data-driven marketplace, personalization is imperative. As innovations like predictive analytics and machine learning technologies become more accessible and easier to manage, they have become an essential part of every marketer’s toolbox, driving an organization’s competitive edge.”

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