Take Your Marketing Cloud to the Next Level with Enterprise Data Readiness

Data readiness should be an integral part of any marketing cloud. Having data that is clean, accurate, timely and fit-for-purpose for any marketing campaign is indispensable for interacting with the right customer at the right time and on the right channel.

Cleansed, fit-for-purpose data is the lifeblood of a successful marketing cloud, leading to better decision-making, more relevant and impactful customer experiences, improved efficiency and higher revenue.

If you’re using a marketing cloud, you might assume it adequately covers your data quality needs. But the truth is, many top marketing clouds overlook data readiness as secondary to the tasks they excel at – executing and tracking campaigns and taking marketing automation to the next level. They offer basic data quality processes, but usually only to prepare data within the marketing cloud for a campaign. This leads to two problems: inadequate data and inaccurate data.

Inadequate Data

In a closed ecosystem, data readiness does not extend outside of the marketing cloud. This creates problems when it’s necessary to combine the marketing cloud customer profile with any data that exists outside of the marketing cloud, such as for downstream AI/ML pipelines or any customer interaction that exists outside of the marketing cloud ecosystem. The problem, of course, is that unless the customer profile that exists within the marketing cloud is combined with all relevant data sources, the profile will be incomplete.

Inaccurate Data

Even if all relevant data is used to create the unified profile, the basic data quality processes offered by most marketing clouds are wanting. A simple deterministic match, an inability to tune identity resolution levels for different use cases, or a lack of persistent key management fail to produce a contextual understanding of a customer

Enterprise Data Readiness

Enterprise data readiness is the foundation for a consistent, omnichannel CX and for a unified customer profile that provides all business users – not just marketing cloud users – with the same view of the customer, household or entity the business needs to understand at a detailed level.

A data readiness hub and a marketing cloud have different approaches to making data ready and fit-for-purpose. The latter may offer basic data quality functions such as normalization, deduplication, and hygiene, but these functions are typically designed for activation-first purposes, meaning the data in the marketing cloud itself is only made ready for the purposes of the intended campaign.

By contrast, a data readiness hub provides enterprise-wide, channel-agnostic data quality, where it is applied uniformly across all sources and destinations. This will of course include the marketing cloud, but also a call center, website, POS, mobile app, CRM, etc.

Identity resolution activities provide a stark contrast. A marketing cloud will typically use simple matching techniques tied to email or perhaps a device ID that is sufficient for the intended campaign, but where the resulting record is not matched to anything outside the system. Contrast this with a data readiness hub that brings together all data for matching, utilizes advanced rules (with a combination of deterministic and probabilistic matching), and performs persistent key management. In this approach, the resulting Golden Record provides an unassailable view of a customer across channels, spanning the complete customer lifecycle.

From a practical standpoint, enterprise data readiness vs. data quality within a marketing cloud is the difference between a marketing campaign precisely aligning with what customers experience in other channels versus simply stitching together current data, avoiding CX missteps such as a call center agent seeing a customer vastly different than a marketing team, leading to an uneven experience.

Data Readiness = Data Governance

Data governance is another area where a data readiness hub shines in comparison with a marketing cloud. In a marketing cloud, there is no control or transparency over data hygiene, deduplications, or other processes to prepare data for a marketing campaign. And because what is known about a customer is not tied to a comprehensive unified profile, a marketing cloud may satisfy regulatory requirements (GDPR, CCPA, etc.) for a specific campaign, but will not link customer-specific conditions and choices to a comprehensive preference center. A data readiness hub instead offers full auditability, lineage tracking, and policy-driven compliance – vital for healthcare, financial services, and other regulated industries.

Data Readiness and AI-Ready Data

Finally, when it comes to having AI-ready data, only a data readiness hub is capable of providing high-quality, unified data before it enters a downstream system or AI pipeline. For instance, predictive models (churn, lifetime value, etc.) need complete, accurate, timely, and trusted data across all channels.

Without such upstream readiness, models are built and predictions are calculated on fragmented and inconsistent records – which lead to poor predictions and wasted AI investments. This is really true for any use case; a churn model and a decisioning engine in a marketing cloud both need the same trusted customer profile.

Even if a marketing campaign appears to function well, a lack of AI-ready data may cause AI models to underperform due to fragmented or inaccurate data.

Data Readiness Once, Use Everywhere

A data readiness hub ensures continuous data quality once, upstream, where a unified profile is used across the enterprise vs. a marketing cloud where data quality (within the marketing cloud) benefits only marketing use cases.

Using the Redpoint Data Readiness Hub alongside your marketing cloud ensures all customer data is clean, trusted, and unified before it reaches your marketing clouds, while also preparing the organization for AI and advanced analytics initiatives. It extends data quality beyond your marketing platform to reduce downstream work, improve campaign precision and ensure the entire enterprise can trust and act on customer data.

For more on how the Redpoint Data Readiness Hub can help you transform your enterprise data strategy and optimize use of your marketing cloud, click here.