Marketers aren’t suffering from a data shortage, they’re drowning in it. Yet nearly 70% of customer data goes unused, gathering digital dust while campaigns get launched with the same assumptions, lists, and lifeless segments.
The Problem with Passive Data: Bridging the Gap Between Collection and Activation
Most brands focus on collecting data, not activating it. Passive data is a liability. Customers expect real-time relevance, not recycled insights. What you do with data in the moment is now more important than how much you have.
Taking this step can help you move from generic marketing campaigns to more personalized, moment-based content that sets your brand apart. It’s why, in today’s competitive landscape, the data you collect is almost less important than how you use it. But what does that mean for your business? Find your answer through the practical examples below.
Retail & E-Commerce: Activating Behavioral Data for Real-Time Relevance
The Priority: Convert unknown web traffic into known customers and drive immediate conversions.
The Pain Point: The majority of website visitors browse without making a purchase or signing up, leaving marketers with a massive blind spot in the customer journey.
The Data to Activate: Behavioral data
Behavioral data is information about what users do on your site, the pages they visit, what products they search for, and how often they return.
For example, marketers can mine their website data for behavioral triggers to identify unknown users based on their activity. For example, a visitor browsing running shoes could trigger a real-time, in-app offer with a personalized discount if they buy today.
The Solution:
- Iterable’s Catalog feature transforms static product lists into dynamic personalization engines. These enable marketers to deliver real-time recommendations featuring product details like images, descriptions, and prices.
- The Catalog feature also powers web and in-app embedded messaging. This helps to dynamically surface the exact products a shopper just viewed, ensuring offers are always relevant.
The Lesson: When relevance is real-time, conversion follows.
| Customer Example: Using Iterable and Catalog-driven personalization, Stanley Black & Decker achieved a 7% increase in clicks to its e-commerce stores — a substantial increase for a company worth over $10 billion. |
Ready to give it a shot on your website? Check out our Behavioral Triggers Cheat Sheet for practical playbooks.
Fintech & Financial Services: Harnessing Long-Term Data History for Customer Trust
The Priority: Build customer trust, navigate regulatory complexity, and stand out in a crowded, commoditized market.
The Pain Points: Customer trust is earned through precision, and fintechs often struggle to differentiate their products and personalize at scale. Over-frequent marketing content and generic messaging can degrade customer sentiment and brand perception, leading to churn.
The Data to Activate: Transactional data
Transactional data, like purchase history, transfers, and bill payments, all provide insights into a customer’s financial habits. Marketers can leverage these data points to deliver more personalized, accurate content to every user.
Financial companies often have access to years of historical data patterns. Using this information in a more targeted way can help the company understand its customers and what they need to remain loyal.
For example, a customer’s first credit card purchase could trigger a personalized message offering financial tips or rewards, based on trends you see in historical user data. This reinforces trust and partnership by giving the new customer exactly what they’re most likely to want at this point in their relationship with you.
The Solution:
- Iterable’s unlimited data retention enables fintech brands to leverage years of their transaction history when making marketing decisions. This helps teams craft more personalized strategies for building long-term engagement.
- Instead of treating every customer like the same generic “new lead,” marketers can build continuity into their journeys, ensuring every message feels relevant to each individual user.
The Lesson: It’s not just about knowing your customer. It’s about remembering what they’ve told you and proving it through every message.
| Customer Example: Blockchain used Iterable to activate years of customer data that it wasn’t using previously, achieving a 32.4% increase in engagement from personalized subject lines and an 8.8% increase from first-name personalization. This shows how fintech teams can achieve powerful outcomes with superior data activation. |
B2B: Unifying Data for Account-Based Excellence
The Priority: Creating unified customer profiles across siloed data sources to enable account-based marketing strategies that resonate with entire buying groups.
The Pain Point: B2B companies often have fragmented data scattered across CRM systems, support tickets, and website interactions. Without a complete picture of an account and its stakeholders, outreach can become generic and disconnected, hurting your sales efforts.
The Data to Activate: Firmographic and Unified data
Firmographic data, such as details about a company’s size, industry, and revenue, can help you understand the best way to target it moving forward.
Unified data profiles aggregate firmographic, behavioral, and transactional data into a single, comprehensive view is the goal. This enables teams to tailor their engagement strategies to match each account’s specific needs.
Pro Tip: Unified profiles can also help to reduce bottlenecks between marketing, product, and support teams. It’s another way that using them can help you avoid delays and get more done.
The Solution:
- Iterable’s Smart Ingest and Centralized Data features automatically unify data that’s currently fragmented across your tech stack.
- Instead of static, siloed records, marketers get access to dynamic profiles that update in real time. These make it much easier to build and target individualized customer profiles when compared to data lakes.
The Lesson: unified data isn’t a back-end benefit but instead a front-line differentiator in the age of buying committees and ABM.
| Customer Example: Asana used Iterable to centralize customer data from multiple sources. This gave employees access to more complete buyer profiles, improving their interaction speed and helping them lift click-through rates by 8%. |
Media & Entertainment: Maximizing Engagement with Consumption & Sentiment Data
The Priority: Deliver hyper-personalized content recommendations to reduce subscriber churn in a highly competitive market, where knowing what your audiences want next is crucial to your survival.
The Pain Point: Audiences today have an endless array of choices for digital entertainment. Without tailored recommendations, customers disengage from platforms quickly, making retention an uphill battle.
The Data to Activate: Consumption data
Consumption data explores the content users view, their consumption history, and data showing their preferred genres and actors.
This data enables better real-time recommendations. For instance, when a viewer finishes a series, consumption data can help a company recommend a similar show and link to it directly within the app.
Pro Tip: You can pair consumption data with sentiment signals like reviews and social mentions. This is a great way to cross-check the recommendations you make and reduce churn further.
The Solutions:
- Iterable’s Brand Affinity™ feature generates user labels that reflect brand engagement levels. This helps media & entertainment marketers segment audiences more effectively by criteria like sentiment, reviews, and other social signals.
- Iterable clients also get access to Data Feeds. These provide a real-time stream of structured user data to ensure that recommendations, news, and programming updates are always up-to-date and relevant to the users’ interests.
The Lesson: It’s not just about surfacing content. It’s about stitching moments together into an experience your audience actually wants.
| Customer Example: A+E Networks activated its consumption and behavioral data to build a highly personalized cross-channel viewing experience. By incorporating program-specific content directly at the moment of engagement, they reduced campaign build times by 75% and doubled monthly output. The strategy directly increased linear tune-in impressions and led to measurable engagement gains that supported the company’s business goals. |
The Technology You Need To Succeed
To activate customer data at scale, you’ll need a marketing stack that features several core technologies. The gold standard for this is called MACH architecture, and Iterable is a MACH-certified platform. This means you can count on us to provide you with everything you need to start activating more of your data. That includes each of the following technologies:
- Cloud-native architecture: You want a system designed from the ground up for cloud architecture, not retrofitted from older software. This enables real-time responsiveness at the scale you need to achieve your business goals. It enables your team to act on customer signals instantly, instead of after it’s already too late to push for conversion.
- APIs & SDKs: APIs connect the various tools in your marketing stack, while SDKs are toolkits for developers that facilitate seamless data flow across these connections. If an API is like a waiter in a restaurant (receiving and delivering orders), the SDK is the recipe book, with all the necessary tools and ingredients, to help the chef create the dish perfectly. Using the right APIs and SDKs can lower your integration costs and shorten your time-to-market for new content strategies.
- Partner network: MACH-certified platforms, such as Iterable, are designed to support a wide range of applications, from data warehouses to analytics tools. This network of pre-built integrations allows you to choose the best tool for your specific needs without being locked into a single suite.
Learn more about Iterable’s technology partners here.
Data Activation FAQs
What Types of Customer Data Should Marketers Prioritize?
The customer data you prioritize will depend on your industry and business goals. For example, transactional data is essential for e-commerce platforms. But consumption data matters more for media companies.
Other forms of customer data you may want to prioritize, depending on your goals, include:
- First-party data (purchases, site visits)
- Behavioral data (browsing activity, clicks)
- Contextual data (location, seasonal, or cultural signals)
- Catalog data (product listings)
How Does AI Improve Customer Data Activation?
AI helps companies get more value out of the data they collect. It provides fast and deep insights that can help teams predict user behavior, optimize content timing, and make every engagement more contextual and personalized at scale.
What Happens When Brands Don’t Activate Their Data?
Brands that don’t activate their data face higher customer acquisition costs and slower growth. They miss valuable revenue opportunities and allow their competitors to capture the advantages they’re missing.
From Data Collection to Lasting Connection
Most companies today recognize the massive value of user data. But many are more focused on collecting it than activating it. If your data isn’t driving real-time decisions, it’s not delivering value. Activation isn’t optional; it’s your edge.
Whether you’re in retail, fintech, media, or B2B, the message is clear: the traditional campaign is dead. The future belongs to brands who can turn data into action, at scale, in the moment.
| Learn how leading brands are building tech stacks to activate data as a competitive advantage in our guide, The Future of MarTech Is Composable. |
