Customers expect to be able to mold their personal experience with a brand to meet their exact requirements, and in the current climate that means a seamless online buying experience. As they go meandering through seemingly unlimited marketing channels - perhaps browsing on a mobile device, hitting independent review sites, heading into a store to examine the product (remember that time?!), before summoning up a discount code and placing an order over the phone - the marketer's challenge is to keep up with the customer, and predict these outcomes in advance so they can deliver the best customer experience at scale.

How can marketers stay one-step ahead of this seemingly random journey to push the customer towards a purchase? How can they measure what effect marketing efforts are having on the customer experience?

Customer journeys don’t come down to a single touch point. Customers control how they interact with you and may engage a number of times before a purchase. Single touch attribution doesn’t account for the full scope of the customer journey and attribute revenue appropriately. Multi touch attribution, when used effectively, allows the marketer to turn insights into profitable changes to the customer journey.

As an enterprise organization, do you know what your customers want? What they really want? Ask a corner shop owner and they can likely tell you everything about each individual customer’s behavior, needs and desires. They will be able to make recommendations based on that customer’s buying habits and family, and confidently cater to their needs or wants. Of course, smaller businesses benefit from an emotional, invested customer relationship, but how can you create this corner shop customer experience at scale for millions or tens of millions of individual customers?

Throw away your old metrics! Start thinking about intention, progression and aversion

Social media, mobile devices and more accessible broadband have changed consumers’ buying habits and flipped the customer journey completely on its head. Twenty-five years ago a marketer could send a campaign and measure responses and conversions in a chronological pattern, but now customers have a plethora of platforms to choose between and can meander any which way they choose, so it’s very hard to shepherd them along a defined path.

However, marketers are still clinging to old, linear campaign metrics (sends, opens, clicks and transactions), which do not accurately measure the journey of the modern, platform-roaming consumer. The truth is that this linear mind-set is highly ineffective when it comes to measuring the success or failure of a non-linear customer journey.

The Holy Grail. Originally a title given to the cup used by Christ at the last supper, which has been much sought after but never found, this term has come to represent something extremely difficult – perhaps impossible – to find or get. For many years, marketers around the globe have been attempting to realize their own Holy Grail of ‘real-time, cross-channel marketing’, yet many have failed in this quest. Now, a marketing tool has emerged that promises to make this dream a reality: the Customer Data Platform.

Poor quality data is the result of numerous errors that can progressively ruin the success of your marketing campaigns. In fact, according to IDG, poor data quality is one of the modern marketer’s biggest concerns, with 66% of those polled declaring data quality and accuracy as a “top priority”. 

Inaccurate names, addresses and contact details, along with duplicate records and decayed information, will distort your view of a customer, resulting in poor campaign results and inaccurate insights. Worse still, it creates a bad experience for your customers whereby they either miss out on a specific offer, are targeted wrongly or receive the same message multiple times.