An explosion of data from online and offline data sources means today's businesses rely on technology to correlate and enrich the data they collect, to curate a meaningful, granular understanding of each individual customer. Recent estimates suggest that global annual data generation will reach a staggering 163 zettabytes (163 sextillion bytes) by 2025, so the urgency for a technological data management solution is at an all-time high.

In fact, 73% of organizations agree that delivering an exemplary customer service experience is key to a successful business. And a recent report by the McKinsey Global Institute found that companies who remain customer-centric are 23 times more likely to attract and six times more likely to maintain customer relationships.

In this newsletter, Tealium features the Gartner report, Market Guide for Customer Data Platforms for Marketing. We aim to identify obstacles caused by fragmented customer data silos and establish how Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) can help data and analytics professionals at enterprise companies improve their first party data management. the recommendations come as the result of a yearlong study, in which Gartner analysis surveyed more than 400 martech end users and technology vendors, and collaborated with high tier industry publications and reports for secondary research. Consequently, they offer comprehensive insight into CDP's available from a variety of vendors, and factors to consider when evaluating implementation.

Organizations today are handling an inordinate amount of data from different sources and to help make sense of this influx they’re using data storage and analytics solutions. Yet, it can be a challenge to collect customer data from multiple technologies, sources, and touchpoints to be able to enrich it in a way that produces a unified data set on every customer. These complete and comprehensive data sets are needed, though, because they become the necessary foundation for driving and delivering meaningful, consistent and relevant customer experiences.

Brands are leveraging enterprise data storage technologies like Data Lakes and Enterprise Data Warehouses (EDWs) to house customer data. However, those solutions alone won’t allow an organization to capture, correlate and manage their real-time incoming data to support customer data initiatives aimed at creating unified customer experiences.

This paper will highlight key differences, benefits, and challenges of Enterprise Data Warehouses and Data Lakes, and introduce the one, key solution every brand should employ to create and drive unified customer experiences.

Website performance matters. Many factors impact site performance, including the speed of the hosting provider, page design, number of http requests and more. One big factor is the accumulation of digital marketing vendor tags and pixels on web pages. Tags can dramatically impact site performance in a number of ways– poor tag design, synchronous tags can block content, slow response time associated with the collection servers, tag placement and the sheer number of tags accumulated on pages.

Over the years, Tealium has pioneered many of the best practices in tagging and has incorporated various techniques to minimize the effect of tags on website performance. They include:

• Tag Loading & Page Performance – Perceived Load Time vs Actual Load Time
• Asynchronous Loading
• Client-Side Tagging with Multi-CDNs
• Script Compression (gzip) and Bundling
• Conditional Loading
• Reduced Page Weight
• Fewer DNS Lookups
• Intelligent Cache

This whitepaper provides more details about these techniques and their associated benefits.

Today’s customers have been trained by Amazon, Netflix, Spotify and many others to expect personalized experiences. In one recent study, two-thirds of respondents said they were more likely to shop at a retailer who knew their purchase history and 75% said they were comfortable with sharing personal data.

Another survey found that 61% believe their favorite brands understand and cater to their needs while 38% were likely to stop buying from a brand that failed to provide timely offers on sales and promotions. Yet 22% in the same survey also said they’d break up with a brand if it provided too many offers. In short, consumers demand personalization but have little tolerance for firms that do it poorly. The stakes couldn’t be much higher.

Marketing technology vendors offer many personalization tools to help. But those tools need data to pick the right experiences for each customer. And they need not just any data, but accurate, organized and accessible data that includes information from all sources, presents an integrated picture of each customer, adds intelligence to help guide decisions and is easily available to the systems that deliver the front-line experiences. It’s easy to overlook the need for this data while exploring the latest new gadget for automated video creation or augmented reality advertising. But quality data is the fuel those other systems run on. Without it, they’ll sputter to a halt or spew wildly inappropriate experiences that annoy customers even more than no personalization at all.

Unfortunately, assembling quality data is hard. Traditional methods have consistently failed to meet marketers’ needs: it’s painfully common to hear stories of data warehouse projects that dragged on for years before finally being canceled without delivering anything useful. Systems that run “in the cloud” don’t magically solve problems, since all that cloud-based data still needs to be brought back to earth to be unified, refined and exposed. Building direct connections between individual systems can sometimes close a few critical gaps on a short term basis, but becomes increasingly unwieldy as marketers continue to add new systems that must be included.

A new solution has recently appeared: the Customer Data Platform (CDP). As purpose-built products designed from the start to assemble and distribute customer data, CDPs promise to be faster, easier, cheaper and more flexible than previous solutions. But CDPs are not widely understood and such promises rightly arouse much skepticism. This paper aims to dispel the skepticism by explaining what CDPs are, why they overcome previously unsolvable problems and how you take advantage of them.

2018 sees the long-awaited General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) enter into enforcement starting May 25th. It is a once-in-a-lifetime change to the legal basis on which individuals share their data with organizations.

DataIQ undertook twin-track research in the UK to examine how consumers expect their data to be used and whether they intend to exercise their new rights, as well as into what organizations intend to do to bring their data-driven practices into line with the Regulation. The project had three key objectives:

• Understand the consumer perspective on data collection, consent, context, and control
• Learn key strategies for the business/marketer’s processes, top opportunities, and challenges in adjusting to the new Regulation
• Identify any mis-alignments between the two sides’ views of the data exchange and their root causes

The research was built around four key areas of data protection and privacy management: mobile and digital (the issues specific to those channels), relevance and accuracy (how data should be kept upto-date), readiness (how consumers and businesses are preparing for GDPR) and regtech (how technology can support GDPR compliance). Results from the research are presented in a series of four white papers, each of which looks at one of these areas.

This whitepaper specifically focuses on the research segment conducted by DataIQ in association with Tealium. It looks into the how aware consumers are of the way data is collected from their mobile and digital footprint, as well as how businesses rely on these data streams to deliver personalized services and a better customer experience.

This paper will highlight key differences, benefits, and challenges of Enterprise Data Warehouses and Data Lakes, and introduce the one, key solution every brand should employ to create and drive unified customer experiences.

In this newsletter, tealium features the Gartner report, Market Guide for Customer Data Platforms for Marketing. We aim to identify obstacles caused by fragmented customer data silos and establish how Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) can help data and analytics professionals at enterprise companies improve their first party data management. the recommendations come as the result of a yearlong study, in which Gartner analysis surveyed more than 400 martech end users and technology vendors, and collaborated with high tier industry publications and reports for secondary research. Consequently, they offer comprehensive insight into CDP's available from a variety of vendors, and factors to consider when evaluating implementation.