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In this first edition of our podcast, CrossEngage Co-Founder Manuel Hinz explains the reasoning behind CrossEngage and shares valuable insights on the evolution of CRM and marketing. If you want to know what CrossEngage can do for your business and which factors you should pay attention to besides tools, listen in.

Traditionally, the major bottleneck for CRM and marketing teams was lacking possibilities to access and utilize data. Sure, a few years ago, there were already a lot of different data sources available. In some cases, a business intelligence team even consolidated all available data in a data warehouse.

But for non-technical marketers, this was of little use. If you aren’t a tech-savvy data specialist, you probably won’t be able to access that data or even build sound segments. So CRM and marketing teams were almost forced to only work with the data available in their respective channel tool. But even if you knew how to write SQL statements and work with databases or if you had business intelligence resources at your disposal, utilizing data for CRM and marketing purposes involved a lot of manual work hindering efficient workflows. You had to build segments in a data warehouse, pull lists, and upload them to each channel tool. Most teams simply didn’t go the extra mile.

Data Is the New Oil

In the last few years, these issues got worse, according to Manuel Hinz. The number of data sources as well as the amount of data increased massively and continues to do so. In addition to conventional customer data like email addresses and names, companies now also have behavioral and response data at their disposal.

Being able to track user and customer behavior on your website or in your app brings new possibilities to CRM and marketing. If you know which pages, products, or categories users were looking at, if you know how they reacted to messages, and if you know what they are doing in real time, you can tailor content to their needs. But you still need to access that data and be able to use it for marketing purposes. And there are already new data sources on the rise, increasing complexity even further. With the dawn of IoT, virtually every device gets its IP address and produces behavioral data.

Channel Thicket

Just as the number of data sources has risen, so has the number of available marketing and CRM channels. Each channel, in turn, means additional data and exponentially growing complexity. While several years ago, companies mostly used email and maybe had a second channel to keep an eye on, nowadays, they have to use several channels to account for the needs of their target audience. New devices, channels, and ad formats paved the way for communicating with customers almost on a one-to-one basis. Today, customers can be approached via a plethora of channels like Facebook Custom Audiences, messengers like WhatsApp, or programmatic display ads.

Bridging the Gap

Taking all this into account, the gap between available data and channel execution became bigger. Due to the increased complexity in both areas, it became even harder to bolt them together and to turn data into customer engagement.

CrossEngage sets out to bridge this gap by making data easily accessible and actionable even for non-technical CRM managers and marketers. The platform co-founded by Manuel Hinz conflates all data points at a central place and generates comprehensive 360-degree customer profiles. Based on these profiles, you can build customer segments in just a few clicks–no BI support, no list pulls, no uploads to channel tools. All data and segments are available across all channels and tools you are already using or want to use in the future. Based on this data, you can automate campaigns and actively shape individual customer journeys in real time–even with massive amounts of data.

By bridging the gap between data and engagement, we aim to unchain the potential of CRM and marketing. We provide you with the creative leeway you need to adapt your approaches independently. No matter how crazy your campaign ideas are, with CrossEngage, you can put them into practice with ease.