Tackling ‘The Coding Gap’, one integration at a time...

Tackling ‘The Coding Gap’ one integration at a time

To coincide with the integration, we launched our latest research report, Addressing The Coding Gap, conducted among senior marketers in both the UK and France. The findings identified that nearly nine in ten marketers believe their work would be improved if there was better integration with the developer team. This rises by 10% amongst marketers who work frequently alongside developers.

While there’s barely any instance of marketers describing a negative relationship with developers, nearly a third of marketers are not speaking with their own developer team more than once a month. With the vast majority describing a positive relationship, it’s a matter of poor integration rather than incompatibility.

The cost of miscommunication

More than half of the respondents believe that the gap in coding knowledge between the marketing and development team makes their company less agile. This is felt most keenly by those who work frequently with the developer team, the majority of whom express that this knowledge gap makes them ‘a lot less agile’.

Another effect of this miscommunication may well be marketing’s view on internal hierarchy. Most marketers expressed a clear belief that one of the departments is valued more widely by the senior management team than the other. In the UK, less than a third saw them as having the same value for different reasons. This falls to a fifth in France.

Addressing the barrier

Marketers in France attribute the lack of communication to a siloed structure whereas marketers in the UK emphasise the teams communicate in different ways and find it hard to understand one another.

Common ground rests in the perception of developers’ schedules, with marketers in France and the UK arguing that developers are too strapped for time and marketing is the bottom of their priority list.

Moving forward

Well, we’re not quite there yet, but there’s good news on the horizon. The majority of our survey respondents shared a strong belief their roles will merge with the developer team as marketers improve their technology skills. Tied to this, 87% of marketers think it will be important for marketers to gain developer's skills over the next five years because technology is driving marketing intelligence and innovation.

Frequent interactions with the developer team have a transformative effect on coding confidence. Marketers who rarely, or never, engage with their developers struggle to rate their coding ability for responsive email; something marketers in frequent communication found far more easy to do.

This all hints at a correlation between the frequency with which marketers are working with their developer teams and the potential for campaigns built on close integration to succeed. With an ability to work more closely with developers through access to new tools, marketers can deliver campaigns that are responsive, adaptable and measurable more easily.

Have you already tried using MJML in Passport? Are you working closely with your developer team? Tell us about it on Twitter using the #EmailMarketing.