Understanding the Role of Marketing Operations in eCommerce
Discover the essential areas of expertise that every marketing operations department should possess, the key roles typically within this department, and the tools they commonly use.
About the Author:
Co-founder of Datacop, agency that fulfils marketing operation roles in large eCommerce companies such as OluKai, Melin, Roark, Visual Comfort and Company, Dedoles and others.
When someone asks me what a great shopping experience looks like, I always point to the brick-and-mortar IKEA shopping experience as a prime example.
I don’t know about you, but I know many people who genuinely enjoy shopping at IKEA stores. The way they've designed their customer journey is truly remarkable.
However, I believe the IKEA in-store shopping experience has one major limitation: physical space.
It doesn’t matter whether a customer owns a house with a garden and pool in the suburbs or lives in a two-bedroom apartment in the city center—the IKEA store experience is virtually the same for both.
This is because there's only one physical version of an IKEA store, making it a static experience for every customer cohort.
eCommerce, on the other hand, offers a unique advantage. Without the constraints of a physical space, we can tailor distinct shopping experiences for different customer cohorts in the digital realm. A first-time visitor to our store might see a completely different homepage than a returning customer who has placed multiple orders. To learn how we design these personalized homepage experiences, read the article below.
A digital IKEA shopping experience can be tailored to a customer's living situation—for example, someone with a house, garden, and pool might see more outdoor furniture, while a person in a two-bedroom city apartment would be shown space-saving solutions.
Creating these personalized experiences across multiple channels—like email, SMS, or websites—for different customer segments in the digital space largely falls under the responsibility of a marketing operations department, which is our area of expertise.
Companies typically focus on personalized shopping experiences because it is one of the key strategies for maximizing customer retention, a responsibility that again often falls under the marketing operations department.
In this article, we’ll dive into the marketing operations department: what its main areas of expertise are, who typically works in this department, and the technologies they rely on.
So without further ado, let’s get started!
Disclaimer: We primarily work with eCommerce companies, so our description of the Marketing Operations department will be framed within the context of eCommerce businesses with annual revenues between $25M and $2B. The functions of this department may vary in other industries.
Marketing Operations Department
We’ll start by outlining the key areas of expertise that define a strong marketing operations department. These areas can be structured into a three-tiered pyramid, each level representing a different aspect of expertise. Here’s what it looks like:
Data Collection & QA
Think about it—if you want to personalize the customer shopping experience, you first need to know something about the customer. This information is typically stored as data.
In eCommerce, several types of data are particularly valuable:
First-Party Data – This comes from observing how customers interact with our website and engage with our marketing activities.
Zero-Party Data – This is data customers share proactively, such as their preferences: “What is your shoe size?” “Which colors do you prefer?” or “What is your living situation?”
Contact Information – Typically an email or phone number, allowing us to reach customers through marketing efforts.
This foundational data is the bedrock of all personalization efforts, which is why Data Collection & QA sits at the base of the pyramid. The more robust your database, the more opportunities you have to understand your customers and execute effective personalization strategies.
We've decided to share much of our knowledge on these topics for free through our Substack, in the form of articles—just like the one you're reading now. We've already published several articles covering best practices related to the foundation of the pyramid, which you can find below. We hope you find them valuable!
First-Party Data Collection & Data Quality:
Zero-Party Data Collection:
Email & SMS Collection:
Data Analytics
Next, we have Data Analytics. We view data analytics as having similar utility and characteristics to vision. Just as vision helps you navigate the world, strong data analytics frameworks and tools enable you to clearly understand what’s happening in your business and identify the factors driving positive or negative outcomes.
We don’t view data analytics as binary—something you either have or don’t have. Instead, the quality of data analytics exists on a continuum.
It's much like vision. The world isn’t divided into those who see perfectly and those who are completely blind. Most people fall somewhere between these extremes. For instance, you might have mild nearsightedness, allowing you to see and understand your surroundings well, but with occasional blurriness. The same concept applies to data analytics. Any eCommerce company exists somewhere on this continuum, ranging from being nearly "blind" to having a crystal-clear understanding of the factors driving positive and negative outcomes in their business.
Of course, we don’t claim to have created the perfect analytical tools or frameworks (which may not even be possible) that can answer every possible question.
Instead, we offer the best approximation of eCommerce reality that we’ve developed up to this point.
To learn more about our approach to data analytics, we recommend continuing with this article:
Data Activation: Revenue Generating Use-Cases
Finally, at the top of our pyramid, we have revenue-generating use cases. These can take many forms—for example:
Marketing Automation Campaigns – These can be either personalized or generic for all customers. (For instance, you can find an overview of automated email flows in this article.)
On-Site Personalization – Personalization tactics can be deployed at specific touchpoints, such as the website. (Example below.)
Unified Omnichannel Experience – Ensuring a seamless, personalized experience across multiple channels. (See the use case example below.)
These are just a few examples of how businesses can leverage data to drive revenue.
If you’d like to learn which revenue-generating use cases we’d recommend for your specific context, feel free to book a complimentary meeting here:
Marketing Operations Roles
The Marketing Operations Department typically sits at the intersection of the Marketing and IT Departments.
To bridge the gap between marketing strategies and the technical infrastructure that supports them, the marketing operations team must have a strong understanding of both areas. The diagram below illustrates key functions of the Marketing, Marketing Operations, and IT Departments based on our experience.
We believe there are five key Marketing Operations roles, which we also offer as a fractional, on-demand Marketing Operations department for our clients. These roles include:
Below is a detailed explanation of each role:
Website Personalization & CRO Specialist:
This role is ultimately responsible for optimizing the website experience for its visitors. The primary metric they aim to maximize is average revenue (or profit) per website visitor.
Note: Revenue per website visitor is a more insightful metric than conversion rate. For example, if you raise the prices of your products, the conversion rate might decrease, but revenue (or profit) per visitor could increase. This metric provides a clearer indication of whether the price increase was a good decision.
This individual should continuously consider how the website experience should be tailored for different website visitor cohorts. Every modification to the website should be A/B tested. If the test demonstrates a positive impact on visitor behavior, the change should be implemented; if not, it should be rolled back.
This role typically collaborates with a more technical team member (in our case, a Martech Engineer) who handles the coding for more complex website personalization use cases.
Owned Channels Specialist:
The Owned Channels Specialist is responsible for managing all automations across owned channels, including cart abandonment workflows, back-in-stock and low-in-stock notifications, and other automated campaigns. This role also oversees email collection strategies and personalization initiatives to optimize engagement and retention.
Key performance metrics for this role include:
Size of the active subscriber base for owned channels
Revenue per subscriber for owned channels
Additionally, this specialist leads the newsletter marketing strategy, ensuring that content is effectively personalized for subscribers. They are responsible for implementing personalization tactics within newsletter sendouts and developing strategies to collect subscriber preferences through owned channels.
Business Intelligence (BI) Specialist:
The Business Intelligence (BI) Specialist is responsible for the Data Analytics layer of the pyramid depicted earlier in the article. As mentioned earlier, we view data analytics as akin to vision—just as vision helps you navigate the world, a strong data analytics framework (and specialists) enables you to clearly understand your business and identify the factors driving positive or negative outcomes.
This specialist is the go-to person for analyzing business performance, uncovering key drivers behind success or underperformance, and translating data into actionable insights.
The BI Specialist plays a critical role in supporting:
Owned Channels Specialists
Website Personalization & CRO Specialists
Other departments, such as Performance Marketing, by providing the data-driven insights necessary for informed decision-making.
Data Engineer:
This individual is ultimately responsible for the quality and scope of the data collected by an eCommerce company. They define the data structure that needs to be captured, typically in the form of a tracking document (e.g., view_item and view_item_variant tracking documents), and ensure that the data is consistently and accurately collected. To achieve this, they oversee data quality processes, such as maintaining Slack notifications for monitoring data integrity.
MarTech Engineer:
The Martech Engineer is responsible for integrating the marketing tech stack, including Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), email and SMS automation platforms, website personalization tools, and other marketing automation systems. This role also involves creating and maintaining data warehouses and pipelines that connect these systems.
As the most technically demanding role, it typically requires strong proficiency in SQL and Python for managing data infrastructure and automation.
Beyond integration, the Martech Engineer plays a critical role in implementing advanced personalization use cases, often handling the necessary coding for these integrations. For this, expertise in JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and a strong understanding of web technologies is essential.
Backend vs. Frontend Martech Engineers
In practice, we typically have multiple Martech Engineers with different skill sets:
Backend Martech Engineers specialize in marketing tech stack integration and data warehouse management, focusing on data pipelines, automation, and system connectivity.
Frontend Martech Engineers specialize in website personalization use cases, requiring strong JavaScript, HTML, and CSS skills to optimize user experiences and dynamic content delivery.
Marketing Operations Roles - Final Thoughts
We believe that the marketing operations team should function as a cohesive unit, closely collaborating across all areas. From our experience with eCommerce clients, we’ve often seen separate teams handling different aspects of marketing operations with minimal communication: one team manages owned channels, another handles website experience, and a third oversees business intelligence. This siloed approach can lead to friction. For example, the owned channels team might want to include a 'subscribe to newsletter' checkbox at checkout, while the website team opposes it to maintain a clean user experience. Sometimes these teams focus more on optimizing their specific KPIs rather than considering what’s best for the overall customer experience.
We believe that this separation can result in an inconsistent customer experience across different channels, which is far from optimal. Since there is only one customer experience delivered across multiple channels, the teams should have a unified objective and work closely together to achieve it.
This is one of the reasons we favor Bloomreach Engagement as a tool. It integrates six different tools into a single platform, ensuring that all marketing operations roles work within the same system, which naturally fosters collaboration at least on some level.
Flexibility in Datacop’s Solution
We offer our service as a monthly subscription that you can cancel anytime. With a single subscription, you gain access to all five specialists described in this article, with the smallest package starting at 80 hours per month (equivalent to a part-time commitment).
What truly sets us apart is the ability to reallocate specialist time from month to month. One month, you may need extensive support from an Owned Channels Specialist to craft automated email campaigns. The next, you might shift your focus to data quality assurance, requiring the expertise of a Data Engineer.
If you were to build an in-house team, you would likely need to hire a dedicated specialist for each of these roles. With our solution, you don’t have to. Instead, you can adjust the allocation of hours across specialists as your needs evolve—offering a level of flexibility that’s incredibly difficult to achieve with a traditional team structure.
We act as an extension of your internal marketing operations team, ensuring you get the right expertise, exactly when you need it—every month of the year.
Marketing Techstack
It’s also crucial to highlight that the tools these specialists work with make a significant difference. Our extensive experience with various marketing tech stacks has shown that there are huge differences in tool capabilities and the speed at which certain use cases can be deployed.
We’ve seen real-world examples where the same use case took just 2 hours in one setup but required 40 hours in another—a staggering difference.
That’s why we believe choosing the right technology is critical. The tools you select will have a huge impact on the number of hours required from each specialist when deploying use cases. A well-chosen tech stack can significantly enhance efficiency and reduce operational overhead.
In this article, we shared our insights on different approaches to marketing tech stack infrastructure. We outline the key pros and cons of each setup and explain why we favor one approach in particular. We hope you will find this article useful!
For a deeper dive into the tech stack we typically recommend, check out this article:
Use-Case Repository & Prebuilt Solutions
One of the key advantages of our services is our repository of 100+ marketing operations use cases across the areas of our expertise.
In addition, Datacop offers ready-made solutions for many common challenges faced by eCommerce companies. These prebuilt solutions significantly reduce delivery time while ensuring that the first version is built on industry best practices.
One example is our Revenue Loss Prevention Notification System, which you can learn more about in this article:
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