Loren McDonald, VP of Industry Relations at Silverpop, an IBM Company
Loren McDonald, VP of Industry Relations at Silverpop, an IBM Company, shines a light on key issues in email for 2015
Hi Loren. What’s the single biggest issue facing email marketers at the moment?
The biggest challenge today for email marketers is data integration. Many email marketing programmes are stuck in a primarily manual, ‘batch-and-blast’ approach because they lack the IT resources and budgets to integrate data from multiple sources. As these marketers try to move to a more real-time approach and leverage behavioural data across channels, getting IT to prioritise their projects is often the biggest stumbling block to success.
What factors do you anticipate dominating digital marketing in 2015?
Marketers will increasingly shift budget and resources toward behaviour and automation-based programmes and rely less on campaigns based on the marketing department’s timeline. This shift requires several changes in the marketer’s mindset. These include use and comfort with more sophisticated marketing platforms; tighter relationships with IT; marketer skill-sets that are increasingly left brain and process oriented. And finally, the ability to capture customer behaviour and data across channels and act on it in real or near real time.