Many (or most) of the people who build data-driven marketing campaigns often feel like Sisyphus, pushing that boulder up the hill, only to have it roll down every time they near the summit.
For good reason.
The modern miracles of big data technology, rather than saving time, too often punish marketers, analysts, and data engineers with endless and thankless tasks. The burden, in fact, is worse than pushing a single boulder. Customer data is fragmented among so many different systems that it’s really like pushing a giant pile of pebbles up the mountain. There’s no rest. Data gets old. New incompatibilities and errors arise. Before too long whoever's in charge must run and scoop up all the pebbles again.
The torment of customer data has four phases: scavenger hunts, data ferrying, bad data, and the search for meaning. Below we explain each of them, identify their cause, and show how to break the cycle of pain with Amperity.
1. Scavenger Hunts
Time sinks:
Hunting through multiple database tables and logging on to different systems to find the data needed for a marketing campaign.
Stitching data from multiple sources together, reconciling different data formats and ways of describing customers and products.
Reverse engineering how a database is set up when a data engineer needs to upgrade or modify something.
Cause:
The sheer number of systems that most companies have that interact with customers—websites, apps, in-store point of sale, CRM, loyalty, call center, and more. Add on all the marketing technology tools used to manage the many communication channels, and it’s a wonder anyone can find anything at all.
Amperity’s solution:
Amperity pulls all the information about customers into one place. You can browse the data to see every field and pull what’s needed into the active project. Everything is consistent and up to date. And it’s all documented.
2. Data Ferrying
Time sinks:
Copying data multiple times between systems that perform different functions.
Using and maintaining Extract, Transform Load (ETL) tools to reformat data as it’s moved between systems.
Downloading data into spreadsheets for analysis or to manually correct errors.
Cause:
All the systems that companies use are focused on solving certain problems in specific ways. They don’t address the full range of marketing issues. Nor do they have the flexibility to integrate easily.
Amperity’s solution:
Amperity is a single tool that stores customer data, identifies segments, orchestrates campaigns, and analyzes the results. It has built-in connectors to integrate with hundreds of applications. It knows how to interpret their data formats and bring the information into a single profile for each customer. There’s no need for manual data manipulation or scrubbing.
3. Bad Data
Time sinks:
Setting and changing the rules to merge data from multiple sources into a single customer profile that reflects one, and only one, person.
Trying in vain to compensate for the high-cost and low returns of campaigns that result from incomplete and duplicative data.
Cause:
Customers lead busy lives and don’t make it easy for marketers to keep track of them. They change addresses, use multiple emails, and sometimes go by nicknames. When you try to make a single customer list by merging all your databases, you’ll probably wind up missing matches. That means you won’t know who your best multi-channel customers are and will annoy them with duplicate messages.
Amperity’s solution:
Amperity’s patented Stitch technology creates unified customer profiles from full transactional history to accurately determine customer value. We use an artificial intelligence algorithm, rather than simple rules, that constantly updates whenever new information is available. When you look at a profile in Amperity, you can be confident that it shows all their spending and interactions with your company across every channel — and doesn’t have information from anyone else.
4. The Search for Meaning
Time sinks:
Writing code to apply basic marketing concepts to customer data such as purchase levels, loyalty, and product preferences.
Building calculations for metrics such as lifetime customer value and propensity to churn.
Cause:
General-purpose technologies that are meant to aggregate data from multiple systems, such as data lakes and ETL tools, are not designed for marketing applications, so these functions need to be added.
Amperity’s solution:
Amperity has the power to incorporate data from any source, and it is designed for marketing. It comes prebuilt with the functions and models that marketers need, including product preference, churn prediction, and customer lifetime value. Marketers can put these to use right away, and analysts can spend their time building more advanced functions and finding hidden pockets of opportunity.
There’s good news in all this. It doesn’t take the intervention of Zeus to be released from the eternal burden. Amperity’s technology scoops up all the data fragments about your customers, puts it where you need it, and keeps it up to date. You can do creative and meaningful work without repetition.
You might say it’s an achievement of mythological proportions.
To learn more about life with customer data confidence, check out our guide.