How Do I Advance Customer Analytics Maturity in

Marketing?
Published 17 April 2023 - ID G00774457 - 15 min read
By Analyst(s): Rachel Smith, Chad Storlie
Initiatives: Marketing Operations; Marketing Data and Analytics

Customer analytics can be a powerful tool to align marketing

programs to customer needs. Marketing operations leaders must
increase maturity using a step by step approach, navigating
technological and change management hurdles surrounding
customer data usage.

Overview
Key Findings
■ The 2022 Gartner CMO Spend and Strategy Survey found that 27% of surveyed
CMOs did not dedicate any budget to customer analytics. This indicates a
competitive advantage for organizations that invest in customer analytics, but is
also likely a reflection of the difficulty in advancing and ultimately getting value from
these capabilities.

■ Customer data collection, integration and activation stand out as significant barriers
to advancing maturity. 70% of respondents to Gartner’s 2022 Marketing Data and
Analytics Survey agreed that access to unified customer data is a major barrier to
success.

■ Less mature marketing analytics teams struggle to outline a realistic roadmap to

advance their practice’s maturity in stepped improvements that align with
organizational goals.

Recommendations
As a marketing operations and analytics leader advancing customer analytic capabilities,
you need to:

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■ Establish customer data use cases for your current maturity state and for the future
level of maturity your organization needs to reach in order to fulfill its long-term
goals.

■ Audit the marketing organization’s current state with respect to customer data
quality and integration, analytic outputs, skills, people and tools.

■ Identify capability gaps and build a roadmap to enhance your analytics maturity.
Balance short-term wins with longer-term strategic initiatives to keep sustained
momentum.

■ Translate maturity levels into actions. Create segmentation plans, audit customer
data, and outline the goals of optimization models, for example. See Table 2 at the
end of this research for detailed examples.

Introduction
While customer and marketing analytics share some key overlapping characteristics —
such as their dependence on outcome-level data like sales and new customers — they
also have core distinctions important to understand when roadmapping a plan for
maturity (see Figure 1).

■ Customer analytics leverages individual-level customer data to understand the

composition, needs and satisfaction of the customer. This enables marketing to
segment buyers into groupings to determine trends and develop targeted marketing
and sales activities.

■ Marketing analytics leverages aggregate marketing performance data to optimize

marketing and advertising by better understanding prospect and customer behavior
across channels.

Customer experience (CX) analytics sits within the broader category of customer
analytics. It focuses more narrowly on using customer data collected via voice of the
customer (VoC), listening tools, and survey instruments to consistently deliver positive
experiences across the customer journey.

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Figure 1: Breaking Down Customer and Marketing Analytics

See Table 1 for examples of how the three different types of analytics help answer
different types of questions.

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Table 1: Example Questions Answered by Analytics

Type of Analytics Example Questions Answered by Analytics

Customer Analytics ■ Which customers are reading more or

less of the available content?

■ Which of our customer value segments

should we target for the upcoming
campaign?

Customer Experience Analytics ■ Are customers receiving the marketing

content in the communication medium
they requested?

■ Are customers likely to recommend us

after using our website to make a
purchase?

Marketing Analytics ■ Which pieces of content do customers

read prior to placing an order?

■ Which channel is most efficiently

bringing unique visitors to our
website?

Source: Gartner

Analysis

The maturity levels depicted here are a component of Gartner’s marketing maturity
assessment: SCORE. The marketing SCORE is a strategic planning tool for the CMO and
the marketing leadership team. It provides an assessment of maturity and importance
that facilitates prioritization of process improvement efforts across a wide range of
strategic marketing activities. The recommended tactics below are critical, sequential
steps on how organizations can improve their customer analytics maturity while
delivering the advantages of improved customer insight and internal operations.

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Key Activities to Advancing Customer Analytics Maturity
Begin by identifying where your organization currently stands in developing customer
analytics capabilities (see Figure 2), and then discuss with relevant stakeholders (e.g., in
CX, marketing, and IT) what this capability needs to look like in the future for your
marketing function to achieve its goals. Customer analytics supports the greater outcome
of generating useful marketing insights to enable data-driven marketing that aids the
organization in goal achievement and marketing effectiveness.

Figure 2: Customer Analytics Activities by Maturity Level

For detailed examples of how different business models may take action on the maturity
activities outlined above, please see Table 2 at the end of this note.

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Increasing investment in your current state may not affect outcomes. Increasing maturity,
however, brings about different kinds of work and workflow that alters outcomes.
Depending on your business model, strategic priorities, and use cases for customer
analytics, you may not need to ever reach Level 5 maturity. In other scenarios, reaching
Level 5 may need to take a back seat in order to better resource a different key marketing
activity.

The goal is to take a balanced approach that helps you increase capabilities without
creating gaps along the way (for instance, avoiding purchasing the newest technology if
you don’t yet have the people to utilize it). To evaluate those trade-offs, take the Gartner
B2B Marketing Score or B2C Marketing Score Assessment. The Score Assessment will
diagnose your current resource prioritization against your strategic priorities.

Harness Customer Data to Address the Critical Gap in Customer Analytics

Effectiveness

Regardless of maturity, customer data collection, integration and activation stand out as
barriers preventing organizations from both establishing the foundations of customer
analytics as well as advancing capabilities.

Most organizations have deep comfort in analyzing aggregate performance data. For
example, how many website views or email opens by customers were there in a given
period? Or, what were the most revisited product pages from unique visitors? However, for
deep customer insights and analytics, customer data must be analyzed at a more
granular level. This granular level of customer insight detail answers questions such as
“Were the customers who opened an email and came to the website more likely to make a
purchase than those who came to the site organically?” This requires different data, as
well as for data sources to be joined to one another through common variables. This
change in data usage forces teams to take different approaches to analysis and insight
delivery than many organizations have previously managed.

Suggested Resources to Overcome the Critical Gap:

■ 5 Action Steps for CMOs to Leverage Customer Data to Lead Customer-Centric

Organizations

■ How Successful Digital Marketing Teams Approach Customer Data Management

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The next two sections of this research are broken into “Establish the Foundations” and
“Advance Your Function” in customer analytics. Follow the guidance in the section most
relevant to your organization’s current maturity level. Each section provides key
considerations across people, process, data and technology, which serve as key elements
to making significant and enduring advances in maturity.

Establish the Foundations: How to Reach Level 3 Maturity

People: Customer analytics requires individuals comfortable with analyzing (and often
querying) online and offline customer data, and who have an understanding of how the
data needs to be prepared for further analysis or activation. Customer modeling and
predictive analytics skills are typically in demand to enable the deployment and analysis
of customer profitability or CLV models.

Process: Build customer performance scorecards with metrics that link to organizational
strategy. For example, you may begin with a customer lifetime value (CLV) metric to
classify the value of your customer base as well as direct customer retention efforts. The
key to success is ensuring the right stakeholders have access to and understand the
decision-making value of the metrics on the scorecard.

Data: Attributes are at the heart of any customer segmentation exercise. Many marketers
err on the side of throwing too many attributes at a segmentation model. Focus on
investing in attributes that support your objectives and use cases, because most available
attributes will have little or no impact on the segments.

Technology: Customer touchpoints are often cross-channel, cutting across departments

that are not always well-integrated within a company (e.g., disparate departments might
include individuals responsible for call centers, mobile apps, website, store point of sale,
and customer experience) which can result in siloed access to customer data based on
the channel in which the interaction took place. Organizations at early maturity levels may
not have a large enough amount of customer data, or enough use cases for the data, to
benefit from technology like a customer data platform (CDP). Rather, they may analyze
across disparate data sources and pull insights together into Microsoft PowerPoint
presentations to share findings.

Suggested Resources to Establish the Foundations:

■ How to Build Actionable Segments for Digital Marketing

■ A Guide to What Is — and Isn’t — a Customer Data Platform

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Advance Your Function: How to Reach Level 5 Maturity
People: Change leadership talent is needed to bring the impact of customer analytics to
the next level. Organizations face two significant cultural challenges when it comes to
customer analytics: bringing the organization on board with customer-centric decisions,
and bringing the organization on board with data-informed decisions.

Process: Customer analytics analysts may have created optimization models that predict
and direct marketing activities. But marketing leaders should prepare for challenges in
building credibility and trust in those models as they can contradict the way work has
traditionally been done and deliver insights that defy conventional wisdom. Leaders
should leverage change management guidance (see Use Gartner’s ESCAPE Model to Lead
Change in Marketing) to co-create the vision and bring the organization on board with
what can be substantial changes to the way work is done.

Data: Similar to the tendency to collect as many attributes as possible for segmentation,
marketers also err toward wanting to integrate all customer data in pursuit of the 360
degree view of the customer. Research shows this pursuit to be expensive, rarely
successful, and to deliver diminishing returns. 1 Instead of aiming for a 360 degree view,
design clear use cases for integrated customer data (see Innovate Marketing Technology
and Data Planning With Clear and Measurable Use Cases). You may require unified,
deduplicated customer profiles to fulfill your customer analytics use cases, but for a
specific use case you may only care about certain attributes.

Technology: Many technology markets exist to support customer analytics, including

CDPs to unify, manage and activate customer data and customer journey analytics (CJA)
to track, analyze and visualize the way customers and prospects use channels. For CX
analytics, VoC applications collect voice of the customer feedback, and social analytics
platforms collect and interpret posts and interactions on social media. Beware the
overlapping features of these technology categories, and ensure investment in evolving
people and processes in concert with technology (see Build a Winning Martech Team:
Findings From the 2022 Marketing Technology Survey).

Suggested Resources to Continue Advancing:

■ What Marketers Need to Know About Customer Journey Analytics

■ The Mirage of Data Integration: Results From the 2022 Marketing Data and
Analytics Survey

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Plan Your Future: What’s Still To Come in Your Customer Analytics Efforts?
Today, the current state of customer analytics remains largely backward-looking. However,
disruptions in the form of market, competitor and customer-mix changes show that
impacts to the current state loom in the immediate future. Experts and practitioners
continue to advance the practice of customer analytics. The creation of forward-looking,
probabilistic models geared toward accomplishing specific business objectives (e.g.,
loyalty, satisfaction, advocacy, next likely purchase) will allow organizations to preidentify
and better shape positive customer commercial outcomes.

As you plan your future, keep stakeholders abreast of emerging best practices in customer
analytics. In the near future, Gartner hypothesizes marketing will be able to predict and
shape customer performance and the allocation of marketing resources to achieve
commercial objectives in a scaled, dynamic manner.

Plan Your Journey— Illustrative Examples of Taking Action on Maturity Activities

Figure 2 introduced five maturity levels and several activities that indicate advancement
from one level to the next. Table 2 below translates those maturity levels into example
actions across various business models. Marketing operations and analytics leaders can
build similar versions of this action plan tailored to their specific use cases and maturity
path.

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Table 2: Translating Maturity Levels into Actions
(Enlarged table in Appendix)

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Evidence
2022 Gartner Marketing Data and Analytics Survey: This survey was conducted to
explore the characteristics of marketing analytics teams and the role of marketing
analytics in decision making. The research was conducted online from May through June
2022 among 377 respondents from North America (n = 211), Western Europe (n = 147)
and the Nordics (n = 19). Respondents were required to use marketing analytics to inform
decisions and were screened for their level in the organization, primary function and scope
of responsibility. Fifty-five percent of the respondents came from organizations with over
$2 billion or equivalent in annual revenue. Respondents came from a wide variety of
industries, including financial services (n = 63), healthcare (n = 55), consumer products (n
= 52), retail (n = 48), manufacturing and natural resources (n = 39), IT and business
services (n = 36), media (n = 34), technology products (n = 29), and travel and hospitality
(n = 19).

2022 Gartner CMO Spend and Strategy Survey: This survey looked at top-line marketing
budgets and identified how evolving journeys, C-suite pressures, and cost challenges
impact marketing’s strategies and spending priorities. The research was conducted online
from February through March 2022 among 405 respondents in North America (n = 190),
Western Europe (n = 181) and the Nordics (n = 34). Respondents were required to be
involved in decisions pertaining to setting or influencing marketing strategy and planning,
as well as have involvement in aligning marketing budget/resources. Seventy-four percent
of the respondents came from organizations with $1 billion or more in annual revenue.
Respondents were from various industries: financial services (n = 66), tech products (n =
38), manufacturing (n = 49), consumer products (n = 42), media (n = 35), retail (n = 40),
healthcare providers (n = 57), IT and business services (n = 35), and travel and hospitality
(n = 43).

Disclaimer: Results of these surveys do not represent global findings or the market as a
whole, but do reflect the sentiments of the respondents and companies surveyed.

1
Gartner’s Customer Data Survey: The 360-Degree View of the Customer Is More Myth
Than Reality

Recommended by the Authors

Some documents may not be available as part of your current Gartner subscription.

B2B Marketing Score

B2C Marketing Score

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Marketing Score for Customer Experience
Use the High-Value Customer Staircase Framework to Direct Customer Retention Efforts
Quick Answer: Is a Digital Twin of a Customer the Future of a 360-Degree View of the
Customer?

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Table 1: Example Questions Answered by Analytics

Type of Analytics Example Questions Answered by Analytics

Customer Analytics ■ Which customers are reading more or less of the available content?
■ Which of our customer value segments should we target for the upcoming
campaign?

Customer Experience Analytics ■ Are customers receiving the marketing content in the communication
medium they requested?

■ Are customers likely to recommend us after using our website to make a

purchase?

Marketing Analytics ■ Which pieces of content do customers read prior to placing an order?

■ Which channel is most efficiently bringing unique visitors to our website?

Source: Gartner

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Table 2: Translating Maturity Levels into Actions

Level Subactivity Example of How to Take Action

1 Marketing links the organization strategy to Agree to use a dedicated customer segmentation
customer performance strategy to drive customer retention efforts. In a
B2B organization, a high-value customer may have
their pricing request or RFI responded to within the
workflow faster due to their commercial value. In
this example, the organization responds to pricing
requests based on the value of their customers.

2 Marketing identifies common customer data for Identify and agree upon data sources for key
location and quality entities like customer name, total profit per
customer and total number of purchase
transactions. A B2B2C organization may wish to
conduct a campaign to its high-value distributors
to reach their high-value end customers. If the
organization does not have common data
agreement, centralized data storage and a
standard definition of quality then the campaign
cannot proceed because the available data will be
too disjointed.

Marketing leads an audit between strategy and A B2C organization audits what information can
available data serve its basic customer insight standards today
and then designs a customer loyalty program that

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 will help deliver the marketing information it needs
to meet future goals.

3 Marketing creates customer scorecards of key Identify a sequence of customer activities (e.g.,
performance metrics requests for information, scheduling a meeting
with sales, etc.) that lead to retention, growth,
cross-sell or upsell. You may have different
scorecards for different segments — for instance, if
you have segments based on usage patterns, there
may be different activities to improve retention for
a segment of already highly engaged customers
versus customers with lower engagement.

Marketing gets feedback on scorecard to ensure A B2B CX team may see the completion or lack of
actionability completion of a series of activities along the
customer journey as significant drivers that lead to
improved retention and the lack of completion may
signal declining customer retention. The
integration of the CX team’s insight improves the
scorecard with precise and actionable activities.

4 Marketing creates an optimization model using A B2B organization creates a customer model that
scorecard data uses AI to find customer drift. The analytics team
identifies: (1) a customer logging in less often; (2) a
customer downloading less content; and (3) a
growing rate of invoice dispute as key drivers
within the AI model that explain customer drift. The
model results are placed within the CRM system
with action items for sales and customer success

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 employees to check and mitigate customer drift
immediately when they see significant customer
drift activities occur.

Marketing aligns optimization model to functional A B2B marketing communication organization

activities used a CDP to build a segment of drifting
customers for a pilot communication campaign.
The drifting customers were divided into a control
group (no activity) and a campaign group. The
drifting customers were sent triggered marketing
campaigns to their preferred channels to create
more content, product, and digital engagement.
After two months, the control group and the
content group commercial and engagement
results were compared to determine how well the
drift reduction program performed.

5 Marketing continues to test and validate the A B2B marketing pricing team discovered that
optimization model customers who had received a price increase in the
last six weeks were three times as likely to place a
customer complaint than customers who had a
price increase 12 weeks ago or longer. The
marketing team adjusted the optimization model
against a control group to focus on more face-to-
face interactions and customer success manager
interactions that would reinforce the value and
“human touch” the client received following a price
increase.

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 Marketing does ongoing assessments to ensure A B2B organization discovered that accounts that
customer retention have external communications going to customers
specific to their role were 50% more likely to renew
and expand their existing commercial relationship.
The marketing team scheduled and staffed
quarterly CRM assessments and role-to-content
alignment to ensure expanded and ongoing
success to provide customers with role specific
content.

Source: Gartner

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