For enterprise marketers competing for space in the inbox and eyeballs on mobile, there’s never been a more complex — or exciting — time than today. Technology is enabling teams to tailor not only their campaign content but the device in order to reach customers with relevant messages where they’re most likely to engage with it.
Our latest survey asked enterprise marketers about their experience with cross-channel messaging to try to get a feel for how they’re either thriving or struggling, and what adjustments they’re having to make in order to keep up in a rapidly changing landscape. In our webinar last week, we took a deep dive into this research, examining some of the key findings and trying to place them into the broader context of the marketing world, to better understand where cross-channel messaging stands today, and where it’s likely headed in the near future.
Here’s a quick look at some of the main points we looked at:
Email is still the linchpin
While a significant percentage of those surveyed use a variety of channels in their messaging campaigns, 83% said that email is included in their cross-channel mix, 27% higher than any other channel. In addition, 44% send more than half their marketing messages via email, and 34% said that more than half their revenue can be traced back to email. Those numbers dwarf those for any other channel.
What does this tell us? Technology is clearly evolving, and a successful enterprise messaging strategy is almost certainly going to involve a variety of channels, geared toward personalizing both the content and the channel. But, far from fading away, email is still a nearly essential piece of that mix for the vast majority of marketing teams.
Data organization matters
It’s not only in the area of messaging that technology is quickly advancing, but also in helping large companies to organize the vast amounts of customer data they collect each day. In our survey, 36% of respondents say they’re using a cloud/modern data warehouse — such as Snowflake or Redshift — to store and access their data, which is a significant shift in a short amount of time.
Large companies are starting to realize the security, accessibility, and silo-busting advantages of these modern data warehouse solutions, and it’s changing the way a lot of companies value their data. You also see that in the fact that 28% said they’re using an in-house database, more than the 25% who are storing their data with their email service provider. Super Senders are beginning to understand that solution doesn’t work for them today.
Siloed technology = Siloed teams
We found that — across email, mobile push, and SMS messaging — marketers were about equally likely to be frustrated with their ability to execute campaigns, at between 25 and 30%. And it seems like much of this may come back to how siloed their teams are, along the cross-channel landscape.
When building campaigns, 57% said they have to use a separate user interface/system to build across various channels. And when asked about how siloed their cross-channel teams are, 73% said those roles are at least mostly siloed, with 26% describing them as siloed and channel-specific. This is complicating the process of making cross-channel work, and it’s putting up unnecessary barriers to success. Among those who said personalization is difficult, 100% also said their team is siloed.
To see more from the webinar, including a look at what’s next for cross-channel marketing, download it for free and watch it at your leisure. And to see the new research for yourself, our whitepaper looking into the highlights and the complete data can also be downloaded for free.
