The Case for Digital Technology Integration

There are 28,800 seconds in every workday—and it goes without saying that each and every one of them is valuable. Yet marketers continue to waste precious time and resources managing data in multiple locations. If time equals money, and improved processes equal time, it’s easy to see what benefit integrations can provide to your business—especially if the result will help fuel deeper engagement with your customers.

Integrating multiple digital marketing technologies, including email, achieves two primary benefits:

1) improved access to data. Integrations provide a more holistic view of information so that you can see everything you need to know about customers, campaigns, sales, and more—all in one place. Consolidating data into a single location provides visibility into emerging trends and enables you to make better decisions, take quicker action, and focus on driving specific business results instead of spending your time manually pulling disparate data together via spreadsheets, duct tape, and Band-Aids.

2) streamlined business processes. Remember the days when we’d depend on a computer to email, a television to watch movies, and a cell phone to make calls? While we still do these things today, we’ve also created devices that make our lives easier by allowing us to do everything at once—from a single device—helping us to be more efficient, more connected, and more productive. Integrations work the same way. Now technology users can work in the interface they’re most comfortable with (for instance, sending email from a CRM platform or accessing Web analytics data through an email platform), helping them integrate communications and take action quicker and more efficiently.

While it might seem that these two benefits aren’t directly value-oriented, it’s important to realize how implementing integrations will increase your ROI because of the time and energy you’ll save—and that means more resources to focus on driving revenue and getting closer to your customers. Remember: No one integrates just to integrate. You integrate because it increases your level of engagement with the customer, helps you go to market more effectively, and provides tremendous long-term returns.

Here are a few simple guidelines to follow as you look toward integrating your digital technologies:

• Create a single source of the truth. You need to be thinking about the consolidation of data and how to avoid silos and duplicate data records. Otherwise, your data will be unreachable, disconnected, and inaccurate—and your subscribers will notice.

• Automate for efficiency. Find ways to automate tasks so that your marketing staff isn’t bogged down on something that technology can take care of easier and faster. Marketers should be using their brainpower to solve business problems, not technical problems.

• Establish a business process. Even the greatest technology in the world can’t fix a bad business process. It starts with you and your team. You should be prepared to change your process around your technology systems to create better efficiency.

• Build measurement into the process. Success metrics and key performance indicators should not be an afterthought of the integration. Build them into the integration plan to ensure you’re focused on the right things. Start with the end result in mind and work backward. That way, you’ll be closer to achieving your goal before you even get started.

• Take action. Sure, marketing technology integration projects might seem daunting at first. But don’t let that stop you. Start where you can take immediate action. Basic report integrations (or tying your interactive marketing campaigns in with Web analytics) are relatively simple places to start with highly actionable outputs.

As your subscribers receive more and more communications to sift through, it’s imperative that you engage them with relevant, targeted content—and the only way to do that is with unified, accurate data through seamless integrations. Integrated technologies are no longer a luxury. They’re an absolute requirement for success.

Scott Roth is director of product marketing for ExactTarget, a provider of digital marketing solutions.