TLDR:
According to a global survey using a representative sample of business professionals, 55% agree that better use of data is a given for 2019.
Ecoconsultancy, a hub for marketers and ecommerce professionals to build upon their existing set of skills, authored a broad survey consisting of thousands of B2B & B2C professionals. More specifically, the focus of this survey was overwhelmingly about customer experience.
Notable trends reflected in the survey included opportunities to personalize, data use for better segmentation and targeting, and intense interest in using data in this fashion.
Businesses in the sample group viewed the opportunities to personalize as one of the more exciting things to come in 2019.
Almost 25% of the companies surveyed had an immense amount of interest in personalization based on data, or data-driven marketing. These companies were thrilled over the recent developments in this area. In fact, companies that held around $195m in revenue prioritized this over customer experience.
Although, it should be noted that there was divide that emerged in the data between B2B and B2C organizations on this issue. 21% of B2C marketers were enthusiastic about data-driven personalization. And about half of that statistic—12%—of B2B marketers were as excited as their B2C counterparts.
The study seemed to suggest that data-driven personalization opportunities were on track to entering the mainstream. Account-Based Marketing’s presence in the B2B advertising landscape reinforces this assertion.
Data-driven personalization opportunities once again took center stage when 23% of the marketers in the sample said that it was the variable most expected to grow in their priority list.
55% of these marketers also chose to point out their desire to use data more efficiently when segmenting audience or targeting an audience. This statistic was higher than others—with 42% reporting that 360° customer viewing and marketing tool integrations tying for second.
When asked about their most pressing challenges, the sample responded with 44% claiming that getting the whole picture from customers across interactions was troublesome. Single customer viewing is extraordinarily difficult when using isolated data created from tools that lack the proper integrations to be effective.
The last trend the survey pointed out was that customer experience was is often late to the party—that is, it’s slow to change. The data bore out only a 2% difference from when respondents were asked if they were any good at customer experience in a 2015 survey.
This isn’t shocking. As a whole, companies aren’t well-versed in the matters of customer experience. Taken together, the data indicates that companies are in the infant stages of addressing the issue.
Original article from eConsultancy on 19 February 2019.
