Tech Meets Truth with Dana Teahan
Dana Teahan — Founder & CEO of Divide By Zero
AI Tools
How are you integrating AI Tools into your marketing automation workflows, and what measurable improvements have you seen in campaign performance?
AI tools (machine learning) have been integrated into workflows for a long time – product recommendations, personalisation, and 'next best action' features all rely on principles underpinning AI. We've seen measurable (i.e. many $M uplift) benefits for people integrating these tools into marketing automation and customer experience. When it comes to Generative AI, it's early days – some tools are baking in generative elements for subject lines, copy, and images, but we've yet to see its benefits.
Personalisation
2. What's your strategy for balancing personalisation with data privacy compliance, especially considering stricter regulations and the phase-out of third-party cookies?
The issue isn't that privacy is a bad thing; the issue is that people ran riot for years on data they really shouldn't have relied on – it was a lazy way of doing marketing. If we go back to the basics of personalisation – it's about understanding the customer and delivering relevant experiences. If you provide clear benefits and advantages for customers to hand over their data (which generally they do) and clear ways for them to control the experience (permissions, preferences), then you ultimately comply with privacy laws and deliver a better experience.
Attribution
3. Which marketing attribution models have you found most effective for understanding the customer journey across multiple channels, and how do you handle cross-device tracking challenges?
Deep topic. The challenge to a specific answer is that the best models work depending on your sophistication. If you're maturing as a marketing team working with limited channels, then starting with simple single-touch attribution is fine but limited in understanding your true marketing effectiveness. Some form of multi-touch attribution is probably a good middle ground.
That said, we have advanced clients who are relying on more sophisticated machine learning/data analytic approaches for greater depth in marketing attribution.
Regarding cross-device tracking – if you have your tracking in place (which is critical for multi-touch attribution), then much of the cross-device tracking can be solved.
However, it needs a consolidated approach to customer identity and reasons to identify to ensure that the tracking tools work effectively. So, it's a combined approach between digital, customer, product, and marketing teams to ensure effective attribution – long gone are the days that you can secretly stalk your customers.
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Dana Teahan is a true change agent and leader — a highly experienced technologist, specialising in the integration between data, business, marketing, technology, strategy and delivery.