Three Key Takeaways From The Omnichannel Marketing Excellence Report
A new report from Digital Doughnut sister company London Research explores the extent to which organizations are delivering integrated customer experiences. Carried out in partnership with BlueVenn, the research is based on an international survey of more than 200 companies with revenues of at least $50m.
As part of the study, respondents were asked to assess their organizations across four key pillars of omnichannel marketing maturity – outbound marketing, inbound marketing, owned media and cross-channel orchestration.
Key findings from the research include:
#1. A seamless experience across online and offline channels remains elusive.
Only 9% of organizations surveyed say they have engineered seamless experiences across online and offline channels, with website and ecommerce experiences properly integrated with other customer interactions.
A lack of C-suite responsibility for CX is holding back companies because siloed organizational structures lead to a more channel-centric rather than customer-centric approach to marketing. Only 17% of organizations say there is a dedicated CX team and ownership at executive level, according to the research.
#2. Companies are getting better at mapping customer journeys, but the majority are neglecting more advanced planning.
As the chart from the report below shows, just under half of the companies surveyed (45%) are using customer journey mapping in some form, although only a fifth (21%) of companies are using journey maps to design ‘integrated, omnichannel customer experiences across the customer lifecycle and at every touchpoint’.
More than half of companies (55%) are not using more advanced communication planning techniques, something that needs to be addressed if they are to develop more integrated outbound programs as part of their omnichannel maturity.
How do you plan your outbound communications?
Source: London Research and BlueVenn
#3. CDPs help to drive more advanced analytics and personalization.
The research shows an increase in the proportion of organizations using customer data platforms (CDPs), a jump to 63% from 51% in 2019 when we asked the same question as part of our Customer Data Excellence research, also carried out by London Research in partnership with BlueVenn.
This latest research again finds that CDPs are delivering significant return on investment, with those companies with CDPs more than twice as likely to have significantly outperformed against their main business goal in the 12 months leading up to the Covid crisis (32% vs. 14% for those organizations without CDPs).
Organizations with CDPs are almost twice as likely to have fully synchronized cross-channel communications that are coordinated over time and tailored to match consumers’ needs (40% vs. 24% for non-CDP users).
The research also documents the extent to which the right data drives the analytics required to power advanced personalization, an increasingly important use case for CDPs. CDP-equipped companies are more than five times as likely to be using advanced customer data analytics to support real-time or time-based triggered messaging and personalization (37% vs. 7% for non-CDP users).
Similarly, CDP users are significantly more likely to personalize the website/ecommerce store using both offline and digital customer variables (23% vs. 7%).
Commenting on the research findings, CDP Institute founder David Raab said: “CDP users are much more likely than non-users to employ these advanced capabilities and to have outperformed their business goals. Clearly the CDP is a key enabling technology. While many other organizational and technical factors influence marketing maturity, it’s almost impossible to do advanced marketing without having some type of CDP in place.”
Download the London Research / BlueVenn Omnichannel Marketing Excellence report to learn more.