Melanie Clark

As 2018 commences, customers have sky-high expectations when it comes to their experiences with every business they interact with: retail brands, utility services, and even their banks. We expect these businesses to anticipate our needs, know who we are, and always be relevant. Essentially, we want companies to read our minds. While this is impossible and unrealistic, businesses can make strides by enriching their customer data to improve their customer experience.

Being a Marketer myself, I know that we are nothing without our data. We are constantly looking to understand, improve, and leverage data in new and exciting ways to drive revenue for our business. We connect with our friends in Analytics or Business Intelligence to help us make visuals to share information and insight about our data, all of which takes time and resources from multiple teams. I wanted to take the opportunity to share my 5 tips for better leveraging your data.

I don’t think it’s a surprise to anyone that businesses are making their most important decisions off the back of the data available to them. Within the past year, we have conducted some market research about the role of the Chief Data Officer (CDO) and data management trends and the results indicate that organizations are truly considering their data an asset. One of the most prominent responsibilities of the CDO is transforming data into a business growth opportunity. We also have seen more and more data operations and analytics roles popping up in the market to address the issue of getting accurate and complete data back to management in a timely manner. 

Whether you’re working on a large data migration project, or simply trying to answer business questions with your data and having issues, Experian Pandora should be part of the conversation. We often hear from customers that they have disparate databases, leverage excel to house important data, or just have no idea how bad their data really is. This often leads to us running data tests on a subset of their data, which typically cannot tell the whole story, or is not statistically significant based on the total size of their database. 

As digital marketers, the technology available to help us get the word out about our products seems limitless. Whether you’re focused on hyper-personalization, segmentation, or building out models to target ideal customers, the most tried and true channel has been, and for the foreseeable future will remain, email marketing. Why do we love it so much? It’s fast and efficient and inexpensive compared to other channels.

What was GSI Commerce? GSI Commerce was the Ecommerce and payments platform acquired by eBay Enterprise a number of years ago. The great thing about GSI for its customers is that it had feature functions inherently built into the platform. So their retailer customers didn’t need to think about their add-ons, because GSI did a good job of handling it for them. Some examples of their add-ons were address validation, tax calculations, etc.

This week one of my colleagues and I were fortunate to attend Demandware’s 2016 XChange conference in Hollywood Florida for 4 days of collaboration, learning, and of course networking.

Being in the Retail space, we attend many conferences during the year but this one is consistently my favorite. We choose our partners based on people we want to be aligned with in the market and Demandware is doing some truly amazing things with customers who adore them. This spirit of success and innovation is something very apparent through interactions and presentations at this show.

I had the pleasure of representing Experian Data Quality last week at the Demandware XChange conference in Las Vegas. As many people in the tech world know, Demandware has seen massive growth over the last few years and brought an astounding 700 retailers, 300 partners and 200 employees to the conference this year. I spent the first two days connecting with other LINK Technology and Solution partners as well as learning about Demandware’s plans for joint marketing and promotions to drive additional revenue and referrals.