Between websites, mobile apps, email outreach, social media, loyalty programs and the like, consumer data is flowing into your systems from a growing array of consumer touch points. Integrating this data to create a single customer view and activating it to drive true omnichannel marketing impact can be challenging.
Marketing clouds can be a great first step in helping you uncover and activate granular insights from this data. But many marketers are still having trouble unleashing their full potential. Indeed, even sophisticated brands and agencies often struggle to collect the right data and build meaningful segments. Here are a few guidelines to help get your efforts heading in the right direction:
1. De-silo your data
Legacy systems create data silos—separate databases or data sets that are not integrated across the organization. Build richer audience segments by centralizing the customer information you collect from every one of your touch points. This approach allows you to, for instance, deliver email messages that are informed by what you’ve learned from your social audience. Or leverage CRM data to help better target a digital video ad campaign. And from a more CFO friendly perspective, it also helps eliminate redundant data systems and even potentially reduce third-party data costs.
2. Supercharge your customer profiles
Identify high-value audience segments by studying the “sales indicating” actions your customers take when they interact with your websites, apps and ads. From there, you can expand your customer data pool beyond the limited amount of information you’ve collected by fleshing out your customer profiles with validated third-party data. When matched with your first-party data, this new source of information should give you a far more detailed view of your customer base across all their devices, media interactions and buying behaviors. Instead of knowing a few things about an individual, you should know thousands of things that will make your marketing outreach far more accurate.
3. Pinpoint your next wave of customers
Identify new prospects by analyzing the customer profiles you’ve already built. This isn’t yesterday’s look-alike modeling, which was overly simplistic and inherently inaccurate. Today’s audience modeling is light years more advanced. For one, it’s driven by machine learning—which means that the audience models you build can learn from and adapt to every new behavior exhibited by prospective customers. The recency of this customer data enables you to deliver more timely and relevant content throughout the consumer journey. It can also help you reduce media waste, improve the customer experience and drive more sales. Even day-old information can upset your marketing campaign, especially in segments with short customer purchase cycles such as CPG or apparel.
4. Give each website visitor a personalized experience
Use your new, highly detailed audience segments to show audiences different content and advertising based on exactly what combinations of customer behavior and attributes will most likely result in a sale. Extend that personalization across your different channels. If a middle-aged male executive has visited your website looking for an expensive tie, you don’t want to be delivering email offers for women’s jeans.
5. Deliver a unique experience on every device
Build integrated omnichannel campaigns by tailoring your ad experiences to the contextual environment of the device you’re targeting. As an example, people watching content on a connected TV might be willing to see a longer ad, but they might not have a way to make a purchase. A mobile viewer might want a shorter ad with a clearer path to conversion.
6. Execute smarter messaging with real-time feedback
Collect real-time data from every channel, and then funnel your insights back into your creative strategy. This allows you to set frequency caps so that a person doesn’t see the same ad over and over. It also helps you guide people through the purchase cycle with content sequencing—creating a seamless linear story between devices that align content and offers to where they are in the purchase funnel, regardless of where they are viewing.
7. Use brick-and-mortar sales data to measure conversions
Don’t settle for campaigns that merely reach your target audiences. By linking third-party credit card and store-level purchase data to the people who were exposed to your campaigns, you can find out for sure whether your cross-device marketing is improving your bottom line. Additionally, location data can help better understand those who made it to the store, but never closed the deal.
Success in a digital economy is driven by the efficacy of your marketing and customer-care initiatives. The more data points you have and can leverage, the more efficacy you’ll enjoy. But, it’s not the volume of data that you have, it’s how you use it, making it critical to centralize all of your data. Doing so will empower you to optimize your marketing initiatives and serve your customers better.
