What is a Single Source of Truth (SSOT)?

A single source of truth, or SSOT, refers to the practice of aggregating all of your business data from a variety of systems into one centralized data platform. This enables all relevant teams to view, add to, and collaborate on the data to inform their own projects.

Within marketing, it’s important to have an SSOT where your entire marketing organization can have access to and share data, ensuring they are able to understand each customer’s marketing journey and purchasing behavior in depth. 

This article will look at why you need an SSOT and how to use it within your marketing organization.

Why an SSOT?

In many marketing organizations, data is siloed by team. For example, your demand generation team may not have access to the same data as your email marketing team or your mobile marketing team. This means your teams might not have access to information that would help them formulate more targeted messaging or demonstrate how well each marketing channel is working in tandem.

In marketing, an SSOT that draws in data from external systems, including but not limited to your website analytics, mobile marketing platform, email marketing solution, CRM, social media channels and ecommerce solution, will enable you to get a complete 360-degree view on each customer.

By ensuring that all of your data is synced in real time, you can rest assured that all of your marketing teams are relying on the most relevant and up-to-date information when formulating their strategies. It also means that they can set up triggered multi-channel marketing sequences based on real-time customer engagement, helping them provide exactly the right messaging on the right channels at the right time to maximize engagement and conversions.

How to Solidify a Single Source of Truth

To establish a single source of truth, you need to use a cross-channel marketing platform, like Iterable, that supports centralized data management. This solution should be able to pull in and share data with all of your different marketing, ecommerce, and customer support apps and systems. 

To get started, you first need to ensure your data in each platform is organized. From there you’ll need to work with your platform’s data migration team to migrate your existing data, schemas, and existing user and event streams into their data environment.

When the migration is complete, you should have access to comprehensive user profiles for both anonymous and identified users across all your brand channels, including web, mobile, email, and retail. You’ll have access to demographic, interaction, behavior, and preference data collected from your entire martech stack, which your marketing teams can use to develop highly targeted, personalized marketing efforts and track ROI on every campaign.

How to Use Your SSOT for Better Marketing Campaigns

Once you have access to all of this data in one centralized location, your marketing teams will be prepared to develop sophisticated cross-channel campaigns, at scale, that target users with personalized and highly segmented content across all of the channels they use.

For instance, if a customer has clicked on a product page from your Facebook page, but didn’t make a purchase, you can follow up with personalized email or mobile offers—depending on where they accessed your Facebook page—based on the specific product they viewed. 

By using the data from the customer’s user profile in the SSOT, you’ll have access to their personal details including name, location, and preferences. Therefore, you’ll be able to dynamically generate custom content that can, for example, showcase options to try out the product at their local retail location, or provide availability in their size and favorite color. 

You can also develop a sequenced cross-channel marketing campaign based on their actions across each channel. Say you start with an email promotion and the customer clicks on the email, you can then continue the sequence in that channel. If they don’t, however, you can then send a message with a link to a promotional offer via SMS, or via a push notification, if they’ve opted in to notifications. 

Armed with the data in your SSOT, you can provide the right messaging for every customer at every point in time—from the beginning of the buyer’s journey through to the post-purchase stage. With cross-channel integration that enables you to see when a customer has made a purchase, whether online, in-app or in-store, you’ll be able to instantly send a follow-up message to thank them for their purchase and solicit feedback. They can then join a post-purchase marketing sequence, in which you can follow up at a specific interval that’s either based on customary behavior or on the customer’s own past purchase behavior, encouraging them to place another order.

Tracking the ROI of Each Channel

Your SSOT also provides the necessary visibility to track the return on investment (ROI) of each marketing channel and analyze each campaign, both on a channel-by-channel basis and as part of an integrated whole.

When a customer converts, rather than attributing the sale or sign-up to the last channel they connected with, you’ll be able to understand the entire journey they took to get to that point. While a customer may have clicked on an email sign-up link as a result of a Google search that led to your company blog, they may have previously followed and engaged with an email promotion. Without data from your SSOT, you would attribute the entire conversion to your SEO efforts, neglecting the role that email marketing played in building the user’s trust and interest in your brand.

This data on ROI can help you understand which channels are resonating best with each individual customer, helping you to optimize your marketing campaigns with personalized efforts that focus on their unique needs and desires. That way, you’ll maximize customer engagement and get the best ROI out of every campaign.

Iterable’s extensive partner ecosystem and API integration capabilities enable you to pull in and consolidate data from your entire martech stack in real-time. That means you can use all of your data insights from every source to develop personalized strategies to reach your customers based on their exact preferences and stage in the buyer lifecycle, ensuring that your brand is able to foster genuine connections at every turn.