First-party data is critical to digital transformation

Understanding customers is crucial for retailers in Australia requiring a competitive online presence as part of their strategy. 

Increased demand for digital transformation was the biggest challenge to marketing strategy in 2020, according to 67% of respondents to Datisan’s Annual Digital Marketing Maturity Growth survey.

The Australian data and marketing technology company saw in their study that marketing technology and data activation were key growth pillars in this ongoing effort towards transformation.  

Fragmented consumers

It can be challenging to map customer interactions between digital touchpoints and point of sale. But not having a single view of the customer means many marketing outcomes are tied to inflated KPIs, giving a false sense of return on advertising spend and return on overall investment.

“The increasing availability of data points to retailers provides the opportunity to develop customer understanding and build more distinct and unique target audiences.” comments Mike Cornwell, Datisan’s head of business development. “There is an increasing focus on building more complete customer journeys to provide clearer views of attribution, return on advertising spend and campaign performance.”

This complete view comes from many first-party data sources including web, mobile, CRM, offline data, and transactional systems. A unified view combats siloed or duplicate data – a side effect of adding new channels and software that hold information without proper integration.

“When it comes down to personalising the user experience and making informed marketing decisions, there’s no better source of information than a single customer view.” agrees Chris Rozic, CEO of Datisan, explaining that this often saves costs when this step is included in digital maturity strategies. “Based on maturity projects Datisan undertaken in Australia, we have seen businesses realise up to 20% in cost efficiencies and up to 15% in revenue increases.”

Connecting the dots

A multi-brand ANZ retail group needed to drive the uptake of the new marketing technologies across multiple brands and in-house teams. This presented challenges across technology integrations, with no single source of truth for marketing activation, analytics and customer experience.

“We needed to better understand our customers, and how to acquire, retain and nurture relationships with them…we wanted to streamline our communications and personalise the experience wherever possible.”

Datisan worked with internal teams to develop a marketing data platform that enabled a single view of customer for activation across multi-channels, as well as centralised reporting and analytics.

The teams derived value from their marketing technology investment, generating understanding of customer data to drive improved CX and personalisation. It enabled unified and centralised first-party data in a fast, secure and scalable environment, as well as amplified return on advertising spend, through visualisation, analysis and segmentation of data. 

The head of marketing and operations at the ANZ multi-brand retailer affirmed this, saying “Datisan helped us drive strategic change across the marketing and operations functions, to better enable marketing practitioners to use the tools at scale, to deliver personalised customer experience. “

Maturity matters

Increasing digital marketing maturity helps retailers use technology and actionable data to deliver relevant, real-time messages. Datisan’s maturity framework has helped CMOs, CTOs, marketing and technology teams make strategic changes in the short and long term.

Google and Boston Consulting Group found in a recent study that only 10% of APAC organisations currently keep 100% of their marketing activities in-house – the rest work with partner agencies to help handle the heavy lifting as transformations get more complex. When BCG asked Datisan about their role as a partner agency, Chris Rozic said, “Our role is to help marketers map marketing investments back to business outcomes, assigning success to digital marketing maturity dimensions to deliver cost efficiency and sales uptake”. 

Datisan has supported a number of retailers along their digital transformation including: Flight Centre Travel Group, Super Retail Group, Bing Lee and Harris Farm Markets. Datisan was recently recognised for their work in digital maturity at the Google Marketing Platform ANZ Partner Awards.

Datisan’s recently published Annual Digital Marketing Maturity Growth Report is available for free download. See how retail compares to other industries and what trends they believe will continue this year.  Visit www.datisan.com.au to learn more.