Stay one step ahead – this slogan by Norwegian outdoor brand ODLO can be perfectly applied to so many different areas.
While ODLO’s mission is first and foremost to create quality performance clothing that could function in notoriously harsh condition, the company is also constantly looking to optimize itself and its processes in order to provide better service to its customers.
The sad truth is, one-quarter of eCommerce companies are facing problems proving the impact of their marketing campaigns. Instead of being able to rely on automated reporting that clearly displays important KPIs and helps proactively gain insights, many eCommerce organizations manually copy their data from various spreadsheets into an Excel or optional PowerPoint documents, thus relying on mere gut feeling when it comes to campaign optimization.
What marketing departments need to understand is that campaign reporting not only provides their team with data-proven insights into what works and what doesn't, it also has a massive impact on budget planning. CMOs must be able to justify their budgets to the rest of the management and show that they have a massive influence on the company's success. And for that, it needs automated reporting that not only reflects the data, but helps the company proactively gain insights.
Data Maturity as a Company-Wide Goal
Back to ODLO: The company has access to a lot of data, but they cannot use it effectively. The marketing team was regularly faced with very time-consuming reporting and had no control over marketing spend and only limited analysis options. What the organization lacked was a single source of truth that harmonized data from all major platforms and provided a consolidated data overview.
At our presentation at the SOM Online Conference, we conducted a non-representative survey to see how proficient eCommerce companies already are when it comes to data. The result: 48% of those present rated their company at level 1 of the data maturity scale (manual chaos), 33% at level 2. Only 7% already have access to a single source of truth and 7% also state that marketing data is a strategic revenue driver in the company.
However, the latter should be the goal of all companies. Automated and mature campaign reporting not only helps marketing departments optimize ongoing campaigns in real time and identify trends early on, but the data gathered is also very useful for other departments such as sales or finance and can therefore drive company-wide decisions and new strategies.
Trust Your Gut – But Trust Your Data Even More
In ODLO's case, automated reporting has reduced the time needed for data consolidation to only one-third of the time previously required. In addition, the process improvement led to a 60% increase in data accuracy and the automation of data management also accelerated daily needs by 60%.
All of this has resulted in an improvement in the quality of the eCommerce business. ODLO has been able to make better, data-driven decisions based on the new data infrastructure and has increased online sales as a result. In addition, the eCommerce team has developed the competence to set up new sources and further develop the platform and BI stacks. In this way, ODLO has created the foundation for a data-driven business and can be confident that every decision is made based on strong and solid data.
Of course, marketers should still trust their instincts and gut feeling, but the data is proof and validation for these decisions. It ensures that there is no gut ache after the gut instinct.
