It’s no secret that today’s consumers have real-time access to an incredible amount of information on your company and products, as well as all of the competing alternatives in the market. These digital shoppers are complex and ‘always-on,’ meaning they can find what they are looking for almost immediately.
With all the knowledge consumers have about your brand and all the digital footprints they leave behind across online, mobile and social channels, your typical customers now expect you to know and understand their interests and preferences. In fact, nearly 80 percent of consumers expect personalization experiences from the brands they engage. However, according to a PricewaterhouseCoopers study, 43% of businesses admit they gain practically no benefit from their data.
This issue is not as daunting as it sounds, though.
With each interaction customers have with your brand, they are becoming more and more transparent in their behaviors and preferences.
If the average brand manages four internal customer systems, like point-of-sale networks and ecommerce platforms, five social networking accounts and one mobile application, that brand is receiving a massive continual flow of data. As challenging as that may sound to get a handle on, the issue largely arises not in finding the data, but in centralizing and consolidating it in order to analyzing it for insight.
Traditional CRM software, which many marketers have been forced to rely on for their data management, are built for sales contact management and largely lack the data synthesis, analysis and campaign execution capabilities marketers require. This is driving brands to replace their traditional CRM with more advanced and adaptable consumer management platforms designed and engineered specifically for customer marketing.
The data synthesized by a consumer management platform creates a holistic view of your customer base, operating on a multidimensional level to reveal all of the ways your customers are interacting with your brand. The synthesized data is then segmented and scored to further identify and understand individual customers in order to gain a clear, detailed, cross-channel picture of them, helping your brand to design strategy and campaigns to influence and motivate their behavior.
Aside from adopting the right technology to advance an effective customer strategy, there are several steps your brand should take to reign in and manage your fragmented customer data across the disparate systems within your marketing technology stack.
Synthesize your organizations cross-channel data to drive strategic decision-making, customer understanding and personalized experience. Most consumer businesses are already collecting and ongoing a wealth of data.
The key is identifying and understanding your best customers by allowing your data to tell their story. From here, construct an array of customer dimensions including segments, profiles and scoring based on consumers’ interactions with your brand.
Design an exceptional customer strategy that includes both a customer engagement and an experience initiative. Leverage the segments, profiles and scoring you’re your data to drive this. Then apply the information from the previous two steps to create a strategy that motivates your customers.
Personalize engagements that are included in your design to motivate customers and deliver an exceptional experience to them at each touch point—focus on relevancy and value. Don’t simply focus on discounts, but rather let your data reveal what motivates your customers in order to guide your marketing engagements.
Optimize your campaign performance by understanding shifts with your dynamic customers and react to these changes in their behavior. Maximize engagement at each touch point, and stay focused on personalization. Don’t forget to focus on those lapsing customers to reengage them.
For more proven, in-depth steps to developing a data-driven customer marketing strategy for your brand, download a complimentary copy of The 25 Must Haves to Supercharge Customer Experience, which serves as an essential guide to unlocking your organization-wide data to benefit both your customers and your brand.
Article written by Mark Harrington
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