Consumers today undertake increasingly complex shopping journeys. Reports I’ve seen suggest that anywhere from 50 to 80 percent of shoppers use multiple channels to make a purchase. Yet for brick-and-mortar retailers, the quest to become omnichannel — the process of creating and maintaining a contextual, seamless customer experience across all of a brand’s touchpoints — is as much of a challenge now as it was five years ago.

Could a Customer Data Platform be the answer?

As we approach the busiest time of year for shopping, retailer's thoughts inevitably turn to opitmizing the shopping experience. More specifically, ensuring conversions from smartphones and mobile devices are as stress-free as possible.

The incentives couldn't be greater. Studies from eMarketer show that mobile-based purchases in the US have increased by over 50% in the last year alone, with retail m-commerce sales expected to generate in excess of $102 billion. Similar increases have been recorded in other parts of the world, with nearly a third of all online orders from the UK, France and Germany in the 2016 Christmas period coming from a mobile phone.

Safe to say, the smartphone has taken center stage in retail e-commerce.

We’ve heard a lot of late about how data is the new oil. That’s largely because it is not only valuable, but the lifeblood of the economy. There’s another reason why the analogy is apt: like oil, data is often difficult to extract and expensive to refine.

Many companies are finding this out the hard way.

According to recent research we conducted, most marketers are caught in a conundrum. They realize that culling and synthesizing data is integral to taking a 360-degree single customer view. However, they also know that they’re over their heads when it comes to making sense of such data.

The deluge of data from an ever-increasing number of channels and sources has opened up a wealth of new possibilities for businesses to reach out to their customers and prospects. To some, though, such volume has also proven overwhelming. Consider this: 47% of marketers of marketers claim to be “very confident” in their ability to analyze complex data, yet 64% believe that analysis should not be part of their role.

This reluctance to engage with data beyond its collection, particularly when so many marketers say they understand it, doesn’t appear to be the best approach. The same report found that over half (58%) of surveyed consumers believe they are inadequately targeted by marketing campaigns, with 83% saying they hate irrelevant ads and email marketing.

For a long time, omnichannel was just another of many confusing marketing buzzwords. 

In some cases, it was unclear precisely how an omnichannel strategy differed from a multichannel approach. In others, it met resistance because of a reluctance to move away from the product-centered practice of getting a product or service in front of the right people.

Now, the paradigm shift to omnichannel is impossible to ignore. The overwhelming emphasis today is about getting people to product, while making the process of doing so as effortless, consistent and contextual as possible. 

Every day, marketers have to eat a big bowl of alphabet soup. The marketing solution acronym game leaves marketers confused by similar sounding solutions which perform different tasks.

With expectations higher than ever for marketers to have the skills and tools to collect, manipulate, analyze and make use of customer data, marketers are always on the lookout for the right solution to help them target, communicate and respond to customers.

But deciding on a solution is hard when faced with a multitude of data solutions and a bewildering number of acronyms. 

Marketers know personalizing their messages nets a strong response rate. Personalized email outreach has been credited with improved click-through rates, increased customer engagement and a six-fold increase in transaction rates.

Yet technology has lagged behind the promise of personalization, leading marketers to default to broad-based campaign tactics. The tides are turning.