To meet the needs of their customers, modern marketers must be agile to foster quality personalization and engagement. But most marketing teams struggle with fragmented martech stacks, siloed data, and outdated workflows that limit their ability to act on real-time insights.
Breaking free from these limitations requires smarter data activation—a strategy that ensures marketers can leverage customer insights dynamically, without relying on slow-moving data processes,
In this post, we’re partnering with our friends at Hightouch to discuss how customer data platforms (CDPs) and customer engagement platforms (CEPs) can be combined to achieve data maturity, ensure a two-way data flow, and enable better decisioning.
For even more expert recommendations powering customer engagement with data activation, download our full guide with Hightouch.
What Happens When Data Gets Stuck?
Marketing technology keeps evolving, but one thing remains constant: customer data is at the center of everything. If this data gets stuck in disconnected platforms, its value diminishes. Marketers need data maturity to be able to not only collect and store customer data but to activate it in real time for optimized engagement.
What does it mean to be data mature?Companies that are data mature effectively use data to guide decision-making, ensuring that insights drive personalization, automation, and business growth. They collect, unify, and activate data seamlessly across systems, enabling faster, smarter marketing execution.
Why Data Maturity Matters
Data maturity is critical because it allows marketers to act on real-time insights rather than stale data. In fact, brands that activate more of their data achieve 2.5x better business outcomes, including higher revenue, better efficiency, higher NPS scores, and customer lifetime value.
With a data-mature tech stack, marketing campaigns can evolve and improve based on actual customer behavior, not pre-set rules. Without one, the cost of fragmented martech is high.
The Cost of Fragmented Martech
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Marketing Impact |
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Broken Workflows
Marketers must switch between multiple logins and disconnected tools just to execute customer communications.
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Reduced Marketer Agility
Marketers file JIRA tickets for data access, slowing down their ability to deploy customer communications at the right marketing moments and drive real-time decisioning.
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Disconnected Data
Customer insights remain siloed, making it difficult to orchestrate seamless, personalized experiences across channels.
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Backlogged Data Teams
Data teams must allocate bandwidth to support marketing with extraction and integration versus transforming data into valuable signals or predictive models.
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Lagging Performance
Even when data is accessible, it’s often delayed, leading to missed opportunities for timely engagement.
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Increased Organizational Spend
Internal inefficiencies and missed engagement windows drive up spend on re-engagement and manual workarounds. Budget that could be allocated to customer acquisition, headcount, and more is spent on technology.
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To overcome these obstacles, businesses need a two-way data flow that connects insights with engagement in real-time.
What Is a Two-Way Data Flow?
A two-way data flow ensures that customer data moves freely between storage and engagement platforms, creating a continuous feedback loop.
Instead of data being collected, stored, and left stagnant, a two-way system enables automated personalization, better customer engagement, and real-time decisioning.
What is decisioning?
- Decisioning: The process of using data-driven insights to determine:
- Audience: Who gets the message?
- Content personalization: What does the message say?
- Orchestration and optimization: When does it go out?
- Channel: How is the message delivered?
How CEPs and CDPs Work Together to Achieve Smarter Data Activation
Many companies attempt to solve their data challenges by implementing either a customer data platform (CDP) like Hightouch or a customer engagement platform (CEP) like Iterable.
- CDPs: Collect, unify, and store customer data across multiple touchpoints, creating a single source of truth.
- CEPs: Activate this data by orchestrating personalized, cross-channel customer experiences in real-time.
However, to truly break free from martech siloes, businesses need both. A CDP ensures that data is consolidated and accessible, but without a CEP, that data remains unused. Conversely, an engagement platform without unified data leads to inefficiencies and poor personalization.
By integrating Iterable with Hightouch, brands can create a seamless two-way data flow that:
- Eliminates duplicative storage and inefficient workflows
- Empowers marketers to build campaigns with IT bottlenecks
- Delivers smarter, dynamic automation, powered by real-time computed data
Ready to Activate Smarter Marketing?
We at Iterable and Hightouch believe that the old way of marketing is extinct, and the days of fragmented data and siloed platforms are over.
Brands that embrace composable martech stacks with seamless data activation gain a competitive advantage—delivering timely, personalized, and scalable marketing that drives real results.
Get the full insights in our whitepaper with Hightouch: The Future of Martech Is Composable.
