Most marketers would agree that creating targeted campaigns based on clean, deduplicated customer data is a highly effective way of improving your marketing efforts. But when you ask the average marketer what their biggest problems are, you can be sure that a lack of clean, useable data will be nearly always be at the top of their list.
However, a way to overcome this issue is with a Single Customer View (SCV).
An SCV, or "golden record", is the end result of your Customer Data Platform, which combines all your data sources to provide you with a single, unified view of your customers. Each record is further enhanced by linking other pieces of information, perhaps from third party sources, to drive intelligence and insight.
The SCV sits at the heart of your marketing efforts by presenting all of your unified customer data in a structured, easy-to-read manner.
Here we look at the ways in which having clean data enables you to improve your marketing efforts and why unified data should be in every marketer’s arsenal.
What are the benefits of a Single Customer View?
An SCV is responsible for several functions that boost the effectiveness of your campaigns:
1. To extract, transform and load data from various sources and prepare in a standardized format. For example, if your organization collects transactional data in multiple currencies then it is the responsibility for the SCV to ensure a consistent currency can be viewed for comparing ‘apples with apples’.
2. To remove inaccuracies and cleanse the data to provide you with the most trustworthy insights which, in turn, allow you to make the best and most well-informed marketing decisions.
3. To merge duplicate customer information from different silos, centralizing data from online and offline channels to provide a refined, comprehensive view of each customer.
4. To integrate with marketing technologies to easily visualize and analyze data at speed to identify the perfect target audience.
Better Data = Better Marketing
Poor quality data contains numerous errors that can devastate the success of a marketing campaign. Inaccurate names, addresses and contact details, along with duplicate records and decayed information, will distort your view of a customer. This will make your campaigns less effective, less efficient and lead to displeasure from your customers. Nobody likes to receive irrelevant messages and mailings, least of all multiple times.
For example, can you tell if the dozen or so ‘James Kelly’ entries you have in your database are the same person? Are your customers still receiving emails addressed to ‘FirstName’? Are you wasting unnecessary money posting the same promotions through a single letterbox?
A single view of the customer provides an organization with an accurate, fully formed record of their customers and prospects, this means trustworthy data to form the foundation of your 1-to-1 marketing efforts.
From this base, analytics tools will allow you to ask questions of your database in order to achieve your ultimate marketing goals:
Better segmentation of your customer base: Clustering groups through any combination of demographic, geographic, transactional and behavioral data will allow you to target the right customers with products and services that are more relevant to their needs and wants.
This will lead to higher conversion rates, encourage retention and long-term revenue from existing customers and add increasingly useful additional data for future campaigns.
To make campaigns more personalized: If your database is filled with inaccuracies, it will severely undermine any effective attempts at personalization and speaking to your customers as individuals.
Using a correct name will get your promotion off on the right foot, while linking the right customer to the correct transactional history allows for relevant recommendation messages and targeted advertising.
Want to know more? Download The Ultimate Guide to Single Customer View eBook to discover more about the benefits that an SCV can bring you.
Marketing has evolved considerably over the last few decades but the mission has remained the same: to build better relationships with customers and encourage them to spend more with you. With these customers now spread across the globe, interacting 24/7 on a wide variety of devices, a unified view of the customer is critical to identify, understand and communicate with them.
