Customers are now more in tune than ever before with knowing what they want from a brand experience, and how they want to be engaged with. According to Accenture, 81% of consumers want brands to understand them better and know when, and when not, to approach them.
It’s clear that marketers understand this too because 77% believe real-time personalization through customer data is crucial. However, despite knowing this, only 33% of marketers admit to actually being able to truly personalize the customer experience in real-time.
The bottom line for an effective customer engagement strategy is the impact it can have on customer acquisition and retention rates. A happy customer is one that can browse your products easily and buy from you without any barriers. It is a person that comes back to buy more and shares their experience with friends and family. It is a person that feels that a brand understands their needs, sometimes better than themselves, and can resolve issues or complaints satisfactorily.
To ensure that the complaints department is as knowledgeable as the store assistant, the marketing team, or the fulfilment house, it's necessary to create a Single Customer View (SCV). This creates one holistic and clean record for every customer and a memory of every interaction, click, like, open, share, purchase, complaint.
A Customer Data Platform (CDP), provides this foundation by enabling marketers to unify all the offline and online touchpoints and feed a 'Golden Record' to every marketing channel, database or CRM system.
Here are some simple steps to consider when creating the foundation for your effective customer engagement strategy.
1. Combine your customer data
Nearly every marketing team experiences difficulty when it comes to unifying their customer data. We operate in world where we are collecting more data than ever before and this data is held in more disparate silos than ever before, meaning marketers are relying heavily on IT or third parties to provide this data in a clean, readable manner. In turn this makes it difficult and time-consuming for marketers to act upon any insight they gain from their data – let alone creating data-driven customer engagement strategies! However, a CDP such as BlueVenn gathers all the data from your data sources and matches, merges and deduplicates it to give you a single, clean 360 view of each customer. This will ensure you are working with trustworthy, reliable data on which to base your customer engagement strategy.
2. Analyze your customer data
Customer data analytics enable you to gain a deep understanding of who your customers are and what their needs are likely to be. BlueVenn enables marketers to analyze their clean, trustworthy customer data themselves with its suite of tools, facilitating them to gain the insights they need to create an effective customer engagement strategy.
3. Segmentation and targeting
Once you have unified all your customer data and analyzed it, you can use your findings to segment your customers into groups that should be marketed to differently.
BlueVenn uses pre-determined analytics and customizable RFV models to create unlimited segments for more targeted and engaging marketing initiatives. Its intuitive “drag and drop” interface gives marketers a better understanding of their customers, and the ability to drill down into precise audiences in granular detail based on demographics, lifestyle, attitudinal, value and more. This means you can create personalized content and offers according to the interests and needs of each demographic, thereby driving customer engagement levels.
Customer segmentation facilitates the next step of your customer engagement strategy – real-time personalization!
4. Real-time personalization
True customer engagement requires this fourth and final step – relevant and timely content, promotions and offers. The more contextually relevant they are, the more likely your customers will engage with your brand. Using the clean, unified data you’ve gained from your CDP, you can use BlueVenn’s omnichannel marketing automation and real-time capabilities to deliver personalized interactions and targeted offers when and where they are needed!
Personalizing in real-time is on the rise as more companies strive to deliver a customized and relevant experience. It’s no surprise either, as real-time personalization is proven to increase sales and revenue, enhance conversion rates and strengthen customer engagement. Delivering data-driven personalization through BlueVenn means you can provide contextually-relevant messages to each customer in real-time throughout every channel at your disposal, facilitating a frictionless customer experience.
Ebook: A Marketer's Guide to Customer Data Platforms
Making a CDP work for you and your business
To discover more about how CDPs unify data to help build successful customer experience strategies, download your copy of A Marketer’s Guide to Customer Data Platforms.
