Data is the fuel that drives modern marketing programs. Yet, most marketers struggle to take full advantage of the data that’s available to them. These struggles are often rooted in one of two common organizational challenges:

1. Marketers err on the side of wanting ALL the data, but often don't understand the sources of data and the processes currently in place to deliver relevant and reliable data to their platform
2. Data and organizational silos hinder marketing from making the right asks to the right teams to get the data they need — often resulting in lack of data, or poorly structured or incomplete data in their ESPs

In this session, Cat Mears, a Business Strategist at Stitch, leverages her 20+ years of experience across email marketing, marketing technology, and customer engagement to offer tactical tips that help marketers gain clarity on what data they need to drive optimal results and how to bridge the organizational gap to access that data.

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Transcript:

Hey, Stitch fans. My name is Cat Mears and I recently had the pleasure of speaking at Unspam. That's a conference that is put on by the folks over at Really Good Emails. And the topic of my conversation at Unspam was about using our first party data or our customer data to build better marketing programs.

And so I wanted to share that content with you all as well. What I hope you get out of watching this video is a base understanding of what's available in marketing technology today, what does the landscape look like, understanding what data those different tools can create, and why or what types of data may be impactful to your marketing programs.

And then we're going to look at leveraging that data and working with other teams within your company to get buy in on bringing that data into your Braze platform, which will ultimately hopefully make you look like a rock star within your company because you're somebody who can work well with others and also get your work prioritized.

So I mentioned that I'm Cat. I am a Business Strategist at Stitch. I have a little over 20 years of experience both in consulting and in working client side and doing exactly the types of work that you all are doing today. I'm a proud email geek. I currently have a little kitty cat running around somewhere. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn and or check out my Medium page where I've written some other sort of marketing related content. 

Okay, so let's dive in on it. Let's look at what marketing technology looked like in the past, and this is kind of the landscape of marketing technology back from 2012. This slide is put together by a group called Chief Martech. They've been putting a slide together for 12, 13 years now, and every year it grows and looks different, but You can see back in 2012, even the number of logos, the number of little categories of technology.

You can also start to see, you know, the Venn diagrams of how these technologies overlap, but when we fast forward, or at least look at what's happening today,  this is what we're talking about. So this is actually the 2023 slide. The 2024 slide has not quite come out yet. It should come out shortly, but I expect it to look even, scarier than this, to be honest with you. You really can't discern any logos from this. You'd be well pressed to actually even read some of these categories 'cause the font even is pretty small. So,  just in general, just year over year, highlight how many options there are available to marketers.

That slide represents over 11,000 different logos. And in addition, there were a thousand added to that slide just from the year prior. So from 2022 to 2023, a thousand new tools or a thousand new logos got added to the slide, which is bonkers. As a marketer, you're faced with any number of problems and 11,000 different vendors trying to tell you how they solve those problems for you.

As we kind of saw even just in the beginning in 2012. These tools can have a lot of overlap. They can have a lot of similar functions, and maybe they do other different things, but they can also do some of the same things, and then those tools that may be having similar functions are often not connected to one another.

They can be siloed, or they may all end up funneling into a data warehouse, but they don't talk to each other directly.  And here's an example of just in category terms, how technology overlaps today. You may have something that does primarily, email messaging, but it can also do mobile messaging and it can also potentially even host landing pages or do lead scoring. You've got event management systems that do kind of, you know, the same thing. And anyway, this is where we get to the problem of where marketing just has a really, really hard time. It's a big problem to solve, to get the full overview of a subscriber's actions within all of the different technologies that they touch. 

So, let's dive in on it, look at what data comes from what types of systems, and then we're going to build in and look at how to make that data available to your marketing campaigns and to your marketing program.  In general, I pulled out some of the Martech categories that I felt like would be most relevant for us.

They're generating data that would be actionable within your Braze platform.  You know, we've obviously got WebMobile, and if you're using Braze for mobile, you know, that data's native to Braze in there. Also with email, if you're using Braze to send emails, that data will live in Braze, but you may have another platform that sends emails.

So you're going to have email sends, opens, clicks, all that living in a different system. You may also have a marketing automation platform, which is similar to your email platform, but it will typically do lead scoring. It may have forms and landing pages as part of that. Your CRM is a goldmine of data because if you've got an actual CRM to support a sales team and or a service team, that data is going to have information about where a person may be in a buying cycle.

What types of customer service inquiries have they had? Are they currently engaged in an escalated case or something where they're having a lot of trouble with your platforms and maybe they're not, you know, actively looking to buy, so maybe you keep them out of marketing, for a bit.

You've also got CDPs, event management platforms, social media tools, just a quick note on social media tools that a lot of times it's hard to get actual individual metrics based on like what I'm doing on your social media platforms, but you can see potentially like if I'm leaving a review and is it a positive review or a negative review. 

And so all of this kind of plays into what we're trying to solve for, which is getting that holistic view of a subscriber and the actions they're taking and then kind of knowing where or what data each of these types of categories is creating for you.  Because we're going to start looking at, to serve as a foundation for us when we go to work with our teams to help bring all of this data into Braze, or at least bring it into Braze so that it's actionable for us to use as we're building out campaigns.

Let's make sure we're all level set on what these different acronyms and technology and processes mean so that we don't feel maybe as intimidated when we're talking to some more technical teams.  So in terms of technology, you may have heard of a map. You've heard me talk about marketing automation platforms or your email service platform.

The CRM it's just a customer relationship management tool. Again, it's used primarily by sales and services teams, to track where a person may be in a buying cycle, what they're interested in, and then what types of customer service inquiries they have, sending in a lot of tickets or voting in a lot of requests and those types of things.

A CDP is a customer data platform. The main sort of selling point of those technologies is that it actually helps marketers resolve records back to a unified profile. So you may have, for example, like different IDs across different systems and a CDP can help you resolve those different identifiers back to a person.

And then finally, I listed content management systems because not that they're generating actual engagement information about a subscriber and what they're doing, but content management systems give marketing or your content teams the ability to sort of like tag or add keywords to the content that they're creating.

It's sometimes called taxonomies. Essentially that just lets you know, Hey, if I'm interacting wit these landing pages or this white paper or whatever,  then you've got those keywords to say, Oh, but that page or that white paper or that whatever blog post translates into this category of interest for a person.

And you can start to suss out maybe a theme that they're interested in.  And then, this is more processes or sort of like how data works. It's also important as we get into looking at  what data we wanted to Braze and how we want it so understanding this will be really, really helpful for all of us.

Your API application protocol interface, all that really is, is a way for one piece of software to communicate directly with another piece of software. So think like if you pick up your phone and you call your friend, you're having a direct line to them and you're chatting and you're able to have a conversation and API allows technologies to do basically the similar thing.

They're connected directly to one another, typically records are sent from one system to the other system in real time typically based on some type of action or trigger that's been set up in sort of the configuration.  An FTP is kind of similar. It stands for a file transfer protocol.

You'll sometimes see it as FSTP, which just means that it's a secure FTP site. This is the OG technology on the slide. It essentially is a batch of data from a source system. So let's say you've got an hourly or daily or weekly update that you need to send over to Braze. An FTP site allows  that software to extract a literal file and it places it on this FTP site, where then your destination source primarily probably Braze would go then and pick up that file and ingest it into the platform. Like I said, it's kind of the OG way of doing things. But it's analogous to like, if you have a file on your laptop  and it's saved locally, only you can access it.

But the second you put it into a shared drive, somebody else could go in it and download that file, back down to their laptop. It's similar to that.  SQL is a structured query language. So this is an actual method or language of code that people use. And what it does is it allows you to reference data across different types of tables to deliver your desired results.

So let's go through an example just to illustrate what SQL allows us to do. Let's say you wanted to find all customers who made a sunscreen purchase in the last 90 days because you wanted to target them with a promotion at summertime. Let's send them something about sunscreen or about taking care of their skin while they're out at the beach or the lake.

SQL would allow you to then take, like, your customer table, where I would be listed once because I'm one person. And then maybe potentially an orders table where if I purchased 10 times from you, I would have 10 different orders with 10 different order IDs.  And then a products table, which has information about all the SKUs that you have in your catalog.

SQL gives you a way to say, all right, take all these customers, find their orders, where those products equal the category of sunscreen and it delivers a file back to you that says, okay, here are all the customers that meet your criteria.  That's all that is.  I used to describe it to people as it's a way of connecting the dots or if you think about a frog jumping on different lily pads, that's what SQL allows you to do.

You find connections,  even if you need to go from point A to point Z,  you can get there, but you have to go through every letter of the alphabet to get there and SQL can help you do that.  your SDK is a software development kit that is something that, Braze would provide, you put it on your website, you put it in your mobile apps, and it essentially connects directly into your Braze platform to make details or data about that platform available to you, but also as a way for you to send  campaigns or content  to those places, whether they be the website or your mobile app. 

Currents. So this is some Braze specific functionality. Currents is an ability to get a real time sort of data stream of events or engagement events out of Braze and into your data warehouse. So your data warehouse is going to be a really central key part of your overall Martech stack and having all of the data about a person in your data warehouse is critical.

Currents allows you to send, you know, email sends, opens, interactions with content cards, etc. out of Braze. And into your data warehouse. That's what Currents does. Then we've got connected content, which is similar, but kind of in reverse. And so, if you've got details about a person stored in a, in a data warehouse, or stored in another sort of database somewhere, connected content allows you to, at the point of send, call that source of data, and say, okay, I want this information about Cat right now, and I'm going to pull it into my message to personalize it.

It's particularly effective for things that you don't want to maintain in Braze, maybe because it's changing all the time and so you would have to be constantly updating Braze or maybe you just want to maintain it in its source system and you don't want to have to maintain it in Braze as well.

Connected content allows you to basically call this external place where data resides and pull it into your campaign at the time of send.  And then lastly, CDI is cloud data infrastructure. It's like connected content, but on steroids. So again, it allows Braze to connect directly to your data warehouse.

You can use it to pull data in from your data warehouse. You can sync users, you can delete users, you can maintain all kinds of catalog data there. It's just an awesome tool. So think of it as like you can pull literally almost anything into Braze via CDI.  so now that we understand kind of what marketing technology looks like today, what data these platforms are, we're going to start to apply this knowledge and look at how we can work with our internal teams and appeal to them in a way that to really get what we need and get our work prioritized to get it into the platform so that we can leverage it and use it in maybe new campaigns or personalizing existing campaigns, even better than they are currently. 

And what kind of when you work with Stitch, one of the things that we do all day every day is we think like consultants. And what does it mean to think like a consultant?  What it means is we talk to you about what you're trying to accomplish. What are your, the marketers goals? And then we made, we'll dig a little bit deeper, right?

Like we want to peel back the layers of the onion. We understand what's important about that goal. Like, are you trying to increase your click-through rates or decrease your deliverability concerns? Are you trying to grow your subscriber base or shorten the length of time between a lead to a first purchase?

We're going to kind of keep prodding you and talking through like what's important about that, what's important about the next thing, and ultimately what we're trying to do is, align your goal up to something  that's a broader goal, maybe for the marketing team as a, you know, as a whole, or maybe even to your entire organization, let's just take even just something like increasing click through rates.

-So increasing click through rates. Great. Why? Well, because that is going to drive more traffic to our website. Cool, what does that accomplish? Well, it's going to do something. If you're a retailer, maybe it will be, you know, drive more orders, honestly. If you have a longer sales cycle, maybe the goal of driving more traffic to the website is to shorten the length of time between a lead and a closed deal. 

And that's how we peel back the layers of the onion. By doing that, we're going to allow ourselves to align on a goal that is important and meaningful to people across. The company. So it's not just marketing. Sometimes it's people in all sorts of other departments or roles, whether it be finance or legal or something like that. 

And I want to walk you through a common scenario for a lot of clients, but this is kind of a made up one, if you will. Let's say you've got a marketing team, you and your team, you're working through your marketing automation platform.

You're sending emails. You're sending up landing pages. You may be doing some mobile messaging, but you've also got a sales team. And that sales team is following up with their leads. And they are customers and they're doing so through the CRM or the customer relationship management platform.They are on that platform all day, every day, and that's the system that they know. That's the system that they use. That's the system that they want to continue to leverage for sending emails. And then finally, in this example, we've got an events team because this company has a yearly users conference that they put on for everybody that uses their product.

And that events team uses an event management platform. To manage things like RSVPs or registrations or  session signups, booth visits. Those are all really important functions of that event management system, but it also sends emails. And so the events team, because they live in that platform, leverages it to send emails.

In this scenario, you've got three silos. Sending emails. And so if you want to know what type of content a person is engaging with, you would have to leverage or look across all three platforms, and it makes it really difficult for you as the marketing team to get that full, clear picture of what a subscriber is doing and what they're interacting with. 

And so a lot of times what we see as consultants, we'll see clients come to us and they'll already have a solution in mind. And they'll say something like, well, I just need for all emails to be sent from one central platform that will allow us to see all of these emails and all this engagement.

And that's great. What this does, however, when you're working with your internal teams is you've already come up with an idea and you're coming to them kind of like saying, I need you to do X, Y, and Z. They're not bought in on why you need that. They don't understand why at all. You're going to them and just saying, I need you to do this thing. 

And so what we really need to go to our teams internally as we're working with them is, with our requirements, bring them in with you, bring them along for the ride and show them why you're, you need what you need to do your job better. And then collaborate on the best solution that meets everyone's needs, right?

So in our made up scenario, what you really want and what you really need is to get that email engagement data out of those three systems. And the reason you need it is so that you can identify who is interacting with emails,  So again, this is the additional layer of the onion. You can ensure that you're delivering the most relevant content to each subscriber.

-If somebody is clearly not interested in something, you probably shouldn't continue to send it to them.  And why are you trying to deliver the most relevant content? You're trying to increase click through rates. You're trying to ensure that you maintain engaged subscribers that don't tune you out because you're sending things that aren't relevant to them.

And then ultimately, that ties to your main corporate wide, company wide goal of driving revenue on site. Again, that's a made up example, but that's something that you can see people doing,  and that's how you work with teams. Again, you bring them along with them, you collaborate with them, but you make it very clear why you need what you need, and then align it up to something that's important for all of you. 

Again, this is just highlighting what solutions are versus what requirements are. Solutions are like fully baked things. It's fully baked how you're going to deliver  what you need or and how you're gonna do it. Whereas requirements are like, what do you actually need? When do you need it?

-Is it something you need daily, hourly, in real-time? Where do you need it? Do you need it in Braze specifically or how are you gonna leverage it in Braze? And then why do you need it? What is it? Going to help you do differently or bette  and I'll go through a kind of a real life example with you from a real client that I worked with.

This client was an automotive aftermarket parts manufacturer. These parts were relatively expensive and people who were buying them were usually buying them through a car dealer. And because they weren't buying them directly from the manufacturer, the manufacturer knew who these people were. They were registering their products after purchase and they sent these people a survey.

They went in to know a lot of different things. How was their dealer experience, et cetera. But, also included some really key questions about what type of  person they were. Did they fit into a key persona or not?  And so the survey was also not available to marketing. They had no idea what the results were.

It lived in its survey system alone. It didn't really do anything. it didn't go anywhere. The survey data being siloed was compounded by the fact that this persona information was also captured by sales teams. It was also captured by service teams, and it was inconsistent across the CRM.

So it may have been, as part of the sales cycle, it may have been part of a customer service inquiry or whatever. It was really hard for marketing to say,  I need to target this persona. Where can I find all of the people that meet that criteria? Because it was scattered across all sorts of different places.

And so what we did was we got in front of our data warehouse team and said, okay, well, you need the survey responses because you're not getting those currently you've got the CRM data, but that CRM data is all over everywhere. How can we make it easier for marketing,  get this information and make it actionable for them.

And what we came up with was to create sort of like a normalized or a generated formulaic type of field sort of calculation if you will of just taking this data from different places And we just calculated a simple checkbox that said is this person in this persona? Yes or no, and then marketing was able to get that data into their marketing automation platform And essentially run it with it.

So now all they had to say was, is this person, this persona, yes or no?  They could include them campaigns or exclude them from campaigns and deliver relevant dynamic content to them based off of that. I hope this was really helpful for you guys. The main takeaways I hope you got out of watching this video.

I hope you feel more comfortable with key tech terms and the marketing technology that's out there today. Um, what I would ask each and every one of you to do is take an inventory of the current tools and systems that you know about within your company and try to get an understanding of what data it's generating because you may find some really interesting things that you could leverage in your marketing programs. And then finally, working with consultants, you'll do this all day, every day, but we are going to state requirements and not solutions. So we're going to come and gather what you actually need and then work collaboratively with you and your teams to figure out the best way to deliver those requirements to you.

Thank you for watching all of this. Feel free to connect with me. Send me an email. Hit me up on LinkedIn and just thanks everybody.

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