When it comes to making strategic decisions, marketers turn to numbers and data to help them know where to focus their efforts. One integral source of this data is the very group brands are trying hardest to attract: the customers, or potential customers, themselves. Customer data opens the door for marketers to take scientific steps based on numbers, rather than just going by pure guesswork.
Here are four ways that marketers can leverage customer data to increase conversions, clicks, and (ultimately) revenue. Let’s get started:
1. Create a Unified Customer Profile
When incoming customer data is collected and stored in holistic customer profiles, it immediately starts informing both decisions and strategy. For B2C marketers especially, it’s crucial to know exactly who your audience is, what they are looking for, and what drives them to make buying decisions. Collecting customer data at every touchpoint, including email clicks, in-store campaigns, website browsing history, mobile interactions, and so on, gives marketers the chance to build these unified profiles across the customer’s entire buying journey.
Marketers can leverage these customer profiles to optimize campaigns and ultimately increase customer purchase revenue. With rich customer profiles, it becomes easy to send the right audience the right message, at the right time, when one takes into account all of the data housed in these profiles. This includes recognizing returning online customers and presenting relevant information for maximum conversions.
2. Know Exactly Where to Focus
Collecting, analyzing, and leveraging customer data also enables marketers to know exactly where to focus their time and effort in order to gain higher returns. Knowing where to focus can be helpful when it comes time to build high-level content, determine campaign messaging, or even decide to scale back on certain initiatives. Analytics and number crunching can be done by machine learning or even artificial intelligence platforms, leaving marketers free to focus on these big-picture strategies and future ideas.
It’s possible, for example, for a brand to discover through customer data that an overwhelmingly high percentage of customers who are active on social media are actually converting to paying customers in a brick-and-mortar store. A revelation like this gives decision makers hard numbers and specific data points to reference when rolling out a new social strategy, or perhaps deciding to cut back on another campaign that isn’t converting quite as highly.
3. Track Interactions Across Channels
Today’s consumers interact with brands across multiple platforms and channels, and as such, brick-and-mortar stores are no longer the king of commerce. This means that marketers must be ready to interact with customers at every single point along the way. Rich customer data allows marketers to understand where consumers are engaging with their brand and leverage this interaction to the fullest.
Tracking interactions across channels can also create a fuller, more complete picture of a consumer or a specific audience. Creating these highly focused segments allows for even more targeted campaigns. Marketers can include channel, response, and device data to customer profiles for deeper insight into their target buyers. All of this data serves to help marketing campaigns perform better and increase ROI.
4. Personalize the Customer Journey
Now, with these comprehensive customer profiles in hand, marketers can begin to personalize the customer journey. Personalizing the buying journey, from product recommendations, automated social ads, and even dynamic content, is key to maximizing customer engagement. If content is engaging and relevant to a customer’s particular buying habits, they are much more likely to engage, click, and convert into loyal shoppers.
The more robust each customer profiles is, the more detailed and personalized campaigns can be for that targeted individual. When data points such as location or preferred store, are included, marketers can run local offer campaigns, or even highlight certain items that are available as a consumer gets closer to a specific geography or location, such as a brick-and-mortar store.
Final Thoughts
Customer data allows marketers to better track, understand, and communicate with consumers in order to increase revenue and make better decisions. The key to truly leveraging this data for maximum returns is being able to visualize and take action on this data.
Emarsys is the leading B2C marketing platform for collecting and unifying customer data in holistic profiles. Request a demo of the Emarsys platform here.
Related Articles:
