Goodbye, closed-loop marketing: Why it's time for the unified loop

Marketers face an all-too-common existential question: Does what we’re doing even matter? 

Our teams put hard work into every email, social media ad, and blog post. We’re continually looking to engage customers in personalized ways on more channels than ever. But how do you know if those efforts are making a meaningful difference for customers — and achieving the business goals to justify your marketing budget?

The 2024 State of Marketing found that while nearly every marketer believes personalized experiences drive sales and repeat business, only one in four says their marketing data is fully integrated with their tools (which is essential for high-quality personalization and automation). 

This disconnect amplifies some of the top marketing challenges:

• Understanding customers and their needs

• Aligning sales, marketing, and customer experience 

• Tracking marketing success to business success

The idea of “closed-loop marketing” has been applied for decades in an attempt to bridge the gaps between siloed systems and teams, but evolving technologies and a radically different customer channel landscape demand a more modern approach: the unified loop. 

Let’s explore how unified-loop marketing fulfills the promise of closed-loop and what it takes to activate the full potential of your data. 

Closed-loop marketing explained

Traditional closed-loop marketing is familiar concept to many. It prioritizes alignment between sales and marketing teams with frequent check-ins and shared reporting, following a recurring set of questions: 

• Which customers do I want to target?

• Which channel do I want to target them on?

• Did they interact with my message?

• Did they take the desired action?

These insights allow for continual strategy and messaging improvements, including A/B testing.

Closed-loop marketing is a valuable endeavor. If your team can’t close the loop from the customer side, you don’t know if your marketing works. It’s like receiving no feedback from a friend on how you’re interacting together. You have no facial cues. You can’t tell if they’re getting tired. You’ll never know if they are actually interested in something else and really want to tell you about it. Eventually, they’ll just give up on listening to you. 

Read more: Why customer data platforms need to evolve to meet industry demands

Why closed-loop marketing falls short

Closed-loop marketing hit the mainstream in the early 2000s, but its principles stretch back to the earliest days of shopping when channels were limited and incredibly easy to track. (Think solely in-store shopping and then direct mail and phone orders.)

We now have 20+ different channels, and siloed systems make tracking customers extremely difficult and resource-intensive. Consider this small glimpse of the tools required to facilitate closed-loop marketing:

• Analytics and reporting tools provide insights into how campaigns are performing.

• Attribution tools track and tie customer actions to specific marketing efforts. 

• Content management systems (CMS) manage and publish content that attracts and engages visitors.

• Customer relationship management (CRM) systems track interactions with leads across touchpoints.

• Marketing automation platforms (MAPs) automate repetitive marketing tasks like email campaigns, social media posting, and lead nurturing.

• Survey and feedback tools gather direct feedback from customers about their experience to improve future offerings. 

These tools are siloed by default, meaning they hold their own copy of data and don’t communicate with other tools, essentially trapping the channel’s work and valuable insights. Siloed solutions also make it difficult to prove ROI and measure a channel’s ability to drive business results.

Breaking down these silos requires manual setups and processes to ensure data flows seamlessly across the other marketing, sales, and analytics systems. The key, too, is to unify data across systems in real-time so every human and AI-powered automation is acting from a single source of truth on each customer.

But most organizations can’t do this. 

Data lives within each system, and teams rely only on the information they can access. At best, organizations employ an analyst or data scientist who follows a campaign across each step to measure its results. 

When you need more than a data analyst, organizations look to creating a software or cloud-based solution for closed-loop marketing. But building an effective closed-loop marketing system comes down to whether you have 18 months and $10 million to create the right stack. Most organizations can’t afford this — and those that can should instead route their resources in a more effective, futureproof way. 

Unified loop is the future of marketing

Organizations need to orchestrate data harmoniously across all channels and teams and bring that data back in for continual analysis and improvement. This is the only way to get a clear picture of how marketing efforts are driving business results and which personalization tactics and channels are most effective in driving customer engagement. 

This starts with a new data infrastructure, but that doesn’t mean ripping and replacing your existing investments. Unified-loop marketing empowers teams to use their preferred tools, as long as two things are in place:

• A single, unified customer data layer in the cloud data warehouse

• A composable customer data platform (CDP) with the ability to loop campaign results back to the data cloud 

All marketing, sales, customer success, and other data tools should sync seamlessly with the data warehouse to ensure they are working from accurate data and can activate that data across channels. This foundation greatly accelerates success through data-driven campaign iterations and enables marketers to see the sales they produce for each audience across any channel or campaign.

The tools will constantly feed data back to the warehouse to perform ongoing maintenance and analysis functions while preserving the customer 360. 

With all your data living in one place, you can understand dollars driven next to every marketing report because all the data sets are tied together for the first time, from audiences to marketing responses to purchases. It’s a surprisingly easy switch in strategy that delivers significant advantages by leveraging your existing investments — and it can be set up within a few days with the right technology partner.

Composable solutions allow optimal flexibility and cost management

Another key component of unified-loop marketing is composable solutions. Composability in your martech enables your team to combine different best-in-breed tools for agile and efficient campaigns. 

Composable CDPs like GrowthLoop are especially powerful for activating data across your marketing tools. Coupling a composable CDP with your data warehouse allows you to drastically reduce your costs in any downstream platforms.

• SaaS contracts often charge by the amount of data in the tool. You can perform audience creation directly in GrowthLoop and send just the necessary data to the channel tool. 

• Applying AI and generative AI capabilities within the CDP amplifies the success of all campaigns and outreach, instead of relying on capabilities within an email marketing tool, social media management tool, etc.

Marketers and AI are creative partners

Unified-loop marketing brings a clear understanding of who you should target, what customers interact with, and whether they make a purchase. And this knowledge — all stored in the cloud data warehouse — unlocks incredible potential for AI to amplify the results of your existing closed-loop system. 

As it taps into the data in your warehouse, AI will play a major role as a brainstorming partner for marketers and provide suggestions based on the audience, marketing response, and purchase data. AI can deliver a suite of campaign recommendations for the marketer. 

The model makes human roles even better and more strategic. Instead of chasing teams for data, marketers will brainstorm and make decisions with AI because the data’s already available. It’s crucial for a human to always be a part of this process, but a unified loop empowers your teams to accomplish far more than they can today. 

And that analyst who was previously following campaigns? They can now focus on finding ways to improve business processes and accelerate every team’s success. They want to predict who's likely to churn. They want to predict what somebody is likely to buy next. They can now use AI along with a single source of truth in the data cloud to surface those predictions and make it easier for the business to access them. 

Unlocking the potential of your customer data

With the right data strategy, your team can have the freedom to use any marketing tool you want and take full advantage of the power of generative marketing. 

A composable CDP on top of the data cloud dramatically streamlines and simplifies the closed-loop marketing process by centralizing data, automating integration, and providing advanced analytics and visualization tools. This also reduces reliance on multiple standalone tools and eliminates countless manual processes, allowing marketers to focus more on strategy, creativity, and high-level decision-making. 

Unified-loop marketing will open up cohesive programs that aren’t even possible today — and quickly separate the customer experience leaders from the rest.