Manual Processes Are a Time Sink
Even if you worked around the clock, 24 hours a day, you still wouldn’t be able to personalize every single marketing message. From data collection and activation to analyzing your audience, driving personalization is truly a Herculean task through manual efforts alone. This is why automation is so important; it doesn’t just save marketers time (and stress), it unlocks a greater potential for customer engagement.
However, creating a seamless workflow that enhances content personalization isn’t always as simple as it seems. Though most martech tools today boast efficiency enhancements, being able to use several solutions and data sources simultaneously can be challenging. This is why integrated martech solutions are so important—they allow marketers to transform repetitive, manual processes into lightning-fast workflows.
Transform Data Sources into a Data Flow
Before considering how your tools can work together, marketers first need to consider their data sources—after all, data is at the heart of every compelling marketing experience. To make the most of the mountain of data you likely have on hand, keep these steps in mind:
- Avoid Data Silos
- Less than 15% of marketers say that their real-time data is readily accessible when personalizing content. That’s alarmingly low. To avoid finding yourself with this issue, choose data warehouses and sources that easily integrate with other tools, rather than an exclusive ecosystem.
- Access Automated APIs
- One of the best tools for synchronizing your data across marketing messages is through APIs. As the deliveryman of martech, the right API will allow you to automatically transfer data, stream customer behavioral events, and combine multiple data elements in one creative.
- Move to Mobile SDKs
- There are customer actions that marketers look for from every campaign, but within mobile, there can be even more key events to look for, such as app downloads, logins, or most viewed items and categories. SDKs allow marketers to capture all of these types of data, which can then be used to create relevant experiences.
Cut Laborious Processes and Create Cross-Channel Harmony
Once your data is readily available, it’s time to bring in your engagement and deployment tools. When it comes to personalization, one of the most time-consuming processes is transforming data into content. But with these three guidelines in mind, marketers can leverage automation and integrations for an efficient workflow that produces powerful results:
- Integrations Lighten the Workload
- Creating and coding multiple versions of personalized content creates a slow and repetitive workflow. Transform that process by choosing martech solutions that aren’t only automated but already have mature partnerships and integrate other leading tools. For example, your content personalization engine should work hand-in-hand with your chosen data warehouse or CDP.
- One Platform, Infinite Real-Time Personalized Content
- But when it comes to content creation, it's simplest for marketers to operate out of one solution. While that solution should be able to access other tools and sources easily, marketers will streamline their campaign creation if they rely on one no-code platform for personalization.
- Channels Need a Bridge
- For many marketers, email and mobile serve as their own worlds. But to offer a customer experience that stands out above the rest, both channels should reflect and support one another. With the right integrations, your tech solutions should allow you to access both mobile- and email-specific data and easily transform it into content suitable for the channel.