All upside no downside 📈

This month, we’re zeroing in on data strategy and how marketers should be using it to supercharge their customer experience, personalized brand touchpoints, and more. Plus, we dig into how to unlock the transformative power of AI with The Loop.

In this edition 📥

• We hosted the first-ever GrowthLoop Live this week! Did you make it? If you pre-registered, check your inbox for a follow-up email with links to videos, slide decks, and more. If you forgot to register, you're in luck: You can still register to download our GrowthLoop Live companion guide and get access to all the sessions on-demand. Hear insights directly from successful marketers and industry leaders like The Kansas City Royals, CHG Healthcare, and NASCAR.
• Introducing The Loop: Your New Secret Weapon for Smarter Marketing Marketing success isn't just about clicks—it's about driving real revenue. The Loop, GrowthLoop's latest innovation, changes the game by giving marketers a crystal-clear view of how every campaign impacts sales. With The Loop, you’ll stop guessing and start knowing exactly what’s driving your bottom line.
• Data strategy: What you need to know Companies of all sizes need a data strategy to be successful. Learn how to take your data strategy to the next level with a centralized source of truth, and discover where AI fits into your data architecture. 

Our feature focus this month 📸

It’s all upside when you access the GrowthLoop Live sessions

Did you join us earlier this week for the first-ever GrowthLoop Live? This virtual event brought together your peers in marketing and data to share their first-hand experiences, growing pains, and solutions on topics like data implementation, change management, unifying teams, and more.

If you missed the event, sign up here to receive the GrowthLoop Live Companion Guide, an all-access pass to every session!

Check out recordings and slides from sessions featuring NASCAR, Priceline, CHG Healthcare, The Kansas City Royals, and a keynote from Scott Brinker .

Psst: Watch a clip from Scott's keynote below.

Newsworthy notes 📰

Introducing: The Loop

We recently launched your new secret weapon for smarter marketing. What can The Loop do for you?

• Complete campaign insights: See the full picture of your marketing performance and understand which tactics drive the most revenue.
• Actionable recommendations: Leverage AI-driven insights to fine-tune your strategies and optimize faster than ever before.
• Real results, fast: The Loop links your data across every channel, revealing what works—and what doesn’t—so you can double down on winning strategies.

Ready to see what’s possible? The Loop is live and ready to transform your marketing.

• Check out this preview from our Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer Chris Sell .
• Learn more about The Loop in the official press release .

This Month’s Leadership Lens 🔍

5 key areas to unlock the transformative power of AI

It’s no secret to modern marketers that companies are using AI to deliver personalized customer experiences. Tameem Iftikhar , CTO at GrowthLoop, explains how the true power of AI is not just in its capabilities but in the data strategy that fuels that AI . Having that well-structured data strategy in place enhances AI’s effectiveness and boosts real business outcomes, including increased ROI, improved customer loyalty, and quicker decision-making processes.

Tameem posits that marketers should focus on five key areas to unlock AI’s transformative power:

1. Unifying data. Your company should create a single source of data truth by using a single cloud data warehouse. Rather than having separate data sets for different types of marketing engagement, having a single cloud-based data set helps set up AI for success with your customer data.
2. Leveraging first-party data. Always prioritize using your company’s own data about your customers. This includes data from website browsing, loyalty programs, and mobile app use. Armed with this, AI can craft truly personalized offers and serve up meaningful content rooted in the consumer’s actual experience with your brand.
3. Using a composable architecture. This sits on top of your cloud data warehouse and serves as the “activation” layer. Rather than being locked into one specific vendor or software moving forward, a composable architecture gives you flexibility – including in your use of AI. 
4. Standing up grounding and retrieval mechanisms. Every marketer’s worst fear with AI is that it provides content to consumers that is inaccurate or even damaging to their company. That’s where grounding and retrieval mechanisms come in. Grounding mechanisms work to ensure that AI outputs relevant, current, and accurate data. Retrieval mechanisms work to access and integrate this data back into your AI operations.
5. Focusing on data quality and governance. Now is not the time to slack on your data quality or governance workflows. In fact, keeping your data squeaky clean may be even more important than ever if you’re relying on AI to serve up strategies based on distilling that data. 

Read the full MarTech View article

Create a data strategy to drive business success

Today’s marketers often have a surplus of data at their fingertips – and they may not always know where to start in using it most effectively. So, how can marketers turn an onslaught of valuable but raw customer data into ROI with personalized campaigns? According to Alex Sotis , director of data at GrowthLoop, the answer is to start with a comprehensive data strategy. 

A data strategy is your organization’s plan for how you use data to generate value. That plan defines the technology, workflows, and data management tactics that support specific business goals. Watch the video below to learn how a data strategy benefits marketers.

Wondering how to get started with your organization's data strategy? Alex suggests breaking it down into five steps:

1. Define your business objectives, such as optimizing marketing qualified leads (MQLs), setting KPIs, identifying customer journey pain points, or informing product development.
2. Identify your data sources and decide which ones are relevant to those objectives.
3. Establish data governance models to ensure compliance with data collection laws, especially in highly regulated industries like healthcare and financial services.
4. Build out a technical architecture to support data collection, storage, access, and maintenance.
5. Make the data accessible to your entire organization, preferably through easy-to-use visualization and activation tools that empower non-technical users.

Read the full article from Alex

Retail media networks: The next frontier

A relatively new entrée to the ad space, retail media networks (RMNs) refer to major retailers who use their first-party customer data to create and operate their own advertising platforms. The biggest of these retail media players is Amazon, which earned $46.9 billion from advertising last year.

RMNs use first-party data to strategically engage customers at the right time in their customer journey. For example, a common tactic is to push a digital coupon via loyalty programs right as the customer is making a purchase. These coupon programs have been highly effective at boosting revenue. Or, consider the approach that retailers take when they sponsor certain products on e-commerce sites, connecting consumers with relevant products.

These networks aren’t without their challenges. One of the main challenges is a lack of transparency in reporting. Companies spending ad money need to know what exactly is moving the needle – and today’s retail media networks aren’t always delivering granular information in this area. Learn more about RMNs and how to connect them to your data cloud for better data and reporting outcomes.

Catch the hot take on David Joosten 's LinkedIn page.

Join the conversation 🗣️

There’s even more to explore on our LinkedIn page. Catch some of our favorite recent posts:

• Catch Chris Sell 's hot take on why we need to say goodbye to closed-loop marketing and hello to the unified loop
• Learn about our secret sauce for highly targeted, personalized marketing campaigns
• How marketers should be using AI for rich data analysis work