Through a special arrangement, presented here for discussion is a summary of a current article from MarketingCharts, a Watershed Publishing publication providing up-to-the-minute data and research to marketers.
According to a new Forbes Insights and Sitecore survey of North American senior executives, more than three-quarters say that average customer lifetime value (CLV) is a highly or extremely valuable indicator, but only 58 percent regularly calculate it.
Indeed, 24 percent have no plans to calculate it or just don't know.
Of those who rate keeping customers for life a somewhat high, extremely high or top priority, less than half (49 percent) are well satisfied with how their current marketing technology supports those goals
Respondents identified a lack of cohesion in their own organizations, disparate technology and silos of both data and team functionality as the biggest challenges to achieving a single view of the customer for life.
Part of the problem, the study asserts, is that C-level marketers and technology executives are often left out of the process. Of the 84 percent reporting having a strategy in place to support keeping customers for life, only 38 percent involve the CMO in the process and 33 percent include the CIO. When CIOs or CTOs are involved in strategy development, higher levels of team integration are also reported — up to 43 percent and 45 percent respectively, from 37 percent overall.
Full integration of various data gathering and customer communications systems also increases from 27 percent overall to 34 percent when a CIO is also involved in customer retention strategy development. Likewise, rates of non-integration drop from 11 percent overall to five percent and two percent when a CMO or CIO is involved in strategy setting.
Another related hurdle is that while 53 percent consider creating a single customer view a high to very high priority, multiple systems, data redundancies and silos obstruct the 360-degree view.
On average, organizations use 36 different data-gathering systems and vendors for marketing efforts. Only a quarter (24 percent) of all respondents felt customer communications and data gathering systems were fully integrated for the purpose.
The top challenges to more-integrated ways of communicating with customers include a lack of willingness to collaborate cross-team, and insufficiently evolved talent or technical capabilities to warrant integration.
The study surveyed 312 senior executives based in North America across a range of industries.