10 Reasons Businesses Should Integrate Content, Commerce Systems

By Nathan Eddy

On average, heads of e-commerce and marketing departments paint a relatively rosy picture when it comes to collaboration—in total, 86 percent of survey respondents indicated that collaboration between e-commerce and marketing teams is very or extremely high when it comes to creating unified customer experiences. However, the collaboration picture becomes less rosy depending with whom you speak.

For instance, the vast majority (94 percent) of the senior-most business or technology decision-makers for marketing and e-commerce teams feel that collaboration is high or very high. In contrast, director, manager and individual contributor-level employees on those teams claim that collaboration is high at 20 percent less of a rate than their more senior counterparts.

Less than a third (32 percent) of businesses surveyed are on an entirely shared technology system. The survey strongly suggested that even companies with shared leadership fail when technology for content and commerce based experiences are disconnected.

Nearly 60 percent of companies surveyed have siloed marketing and commerce departments, with just 30 percent reporting a single departmental head. Less than one-third said that strategic leadership is shared between marketing and commerce teams.

The study revealed marketing teams most frequently report to marketing leaders and e-commerce teams report to business leaders. In fact, more e-commerce teams report to corporate IT (23 percent) than report to a marketing director (19 percent), which indicates that alignment between commerce and marketing teams is lacking—separate teams mean separate goals.

When separate teams successfully share common technology systems, collaboration satisfaction soars. Of those organizations that share technology platforms, more than half (53 percent) rated collaboration between commerce and brand marketing teams extremely favorably, compared with only 19 percent when technology is not shared between the groups, a 34 percent difference.

For split teams that share technology, at least 75 percent said they believe collaboration positively impacts a wide range of process and user experience metrics, including campaign times, workplace culture, product development, operational and service processes, percent of revenue spent on technology and conversion rates. Even more telling, teams that don’t share technology systems are 16-26 percent less confident about their collaborative efforts positively impacting these metrics.

Just over half (51 percent) of teams that share technology between marketing and commerce anticipate moving toward more collaboration by year end, while only 22 percent of teams with separate technology expect their relationship to change. The report notes that looking further out, this divide appears to carry a healthy dose of inertia as teams that don’t share technology don’t anticipate catching up even by the end of 2016.

Less than half of the firms surveyed have implemented even the most basic form of data personalization. Results suggested this limited adoption is not due to lack of interest, as no less than two-thirds of firms surveyed are planning to implement or expand every type of personalization investment. However, while senior management is generally optimistic about what personalization their organization can skillfully leverage, middle management is less confident in what can be leveraged—particularly third-party data.

The report concluded that for companies creating unified digital experiences for customers, e-commerce and marketing organizations must collaborate more closely on both organization and technology strategies, with current levels of collaboration indicating a positive effect on many key business efforts, especially conversion rates and operational processes. One manager with responsibility for creating unified experiences was quoted in the report as saying, “We are seeing progress as a result of our integrated system, with customer services improvements which are driving new customers and improved customer retention.”