Is Your Customer Data Powerful?

by | Apr 1, 2022 | Marketing

One of the primary goals of contemporary marketing is determining how to use customer data to deliver personalized customer experiences. Customers want to hear from you about what your business offers that is relevant to them. Start with collecting or updating your information with accurate (correct format and spelling) customer data. The right data will help you build personal relationships in business with a vast number of customers consistently over time. Ask yourself how you use your data.

To execute marketing successfully, select the most suitable Martech (marketing technologies) platform keeping in mind your business marketing goals and technical and operational capacities within the business. Given the demand for more personalized marketing content, companies should choose Martech applications that enable them to orchestrate the customer journey. Martech organizes customer data from various touchpoints in the customer journey.

The customer journey is the full experience a customer has with your business. Customer journey orchestration is concerned with influencing the customer journey thru a real-time approach to engaging with specific customers. Concrete benefits of data, personalization and customer journey orchestration include:

Data integration and organization

  • Modern marketing requires a unified view of different channels and sources of customer data.
  • Unify customer data from disparate systems (CRM; POS; mobile, website, email data, etcetera).
  • Organize disparate data points to create a holistic customer profile, enabling personalized communications across the business marketing channels.

Following up with new customers

  • Integrating and organizing data makes it easier to segment businesses’ target market and apply analytics.
  • This information is also able to support businesses in identifying promising new leads.

Increased efficiency

  • A cloud-based approach to data processing improves customer response times while improving the efficiency of business decisions.

Increased ROI

  • Businesses can better understand the performance of specific marketing campaigns and refine future campaigns.

Improved customer insight

  • Use machine learning to predict better and analyze customer data to understand the customer journey across channels better.
  • This process reveals trends to improve the customer experience.

Improved customer experience

  • Accurate customer data helps to ensure consistent engagement with customers across the customer journey, which provides additional customer lifetime value.

Marketing improvements rely on data and the right marketing technologies to manage data and communicate with your customer. Start with assembling data by gathering customer information from various sources and touchpoints of your businesses. Make this information readily available to external marketing tools (like Mailchimp) or marketing agencies. Enhance your data with data analytics. Use analytical applications to understand customer behavior and perform data modeling to determine the “next best action” to communicate with specific customers successfully.

Netflix is an example of a business that has successfully utilized and managed customer data. Its algorithms collect essential data on what subscribers watch and enjoy before providing tailored recommendations—over 75% of user activity is based on Netflix’s personalized recommendations (Dixon, 2019). Netflix’s approach to utilizing algorithms to analyze user profiles ensures its ongoing success.

Deliver customer service. Without good customer service, the marketing effort is wasted. The more relevant data your business has, and the more adept your business is at utilizing that data, the greater the opportunity to ensure that your services respond to customer needs and experiences. You need relevant data to create and send personalized messages, interpret results, and adjust. All this can assist a business in improving its profitability.

The rise of digital interaction has increased available customer data. Customer experience is derived from multichannel campaign management, customer journey orchestration, and real-time coordinating customer experiences and service. Deliver personalized experiences to build relationships over time.

How Do You Engage Your Customers?

How Do You Engage Your Customers?

by | Feb 1, 2022 | Marketing

You know you must step up your game to increase business. You know you should continue to reach out to your current customers. You know what you must do to reach potential customers. Thru business experience or education, you know what you must do. You have the who, what, when, where, and why.

Now you need the how and the effect!

How do you engage your customers? What effect does your customer engagement have on your business? The days of depending on yellow page ads, installing a great sign over your business, and putting a smile on your face – are still essential.

We typically think about service and support rather than customer engagement. It may feel overwhelming to attract new customers and convince existing customers to spend more money. Messaging can become transactional and quickly be ignored or deleted. Building your ‘How’ and monitoring your ‘Effect’ starts with demonstrating a commitment to your customers by using engagement strategies to:

    • Build your brand awareness.
    • Create content based on customer history.
    • Meet customers where they are in a digital world.
    • Build relationships with incentives.

Engage the customer wherever they are

If the customer finds your business in the yellow pages – that’s good. If the customer is in front of your store and they see your sign – even better. If the customer is in your store and sees your beaming smile – you are on the right path to good customer engagement.

Managing customer relationships becomes complex in the digital world. Digital engagement is vast and time-consuming. How can you communicate with multiple customers, over numerous touchpoints, using personal messages with enduring product and service recommendations?

DIY, Agency, or Platform?

Marketing is all about being personal and omnipresent! When your customers are thinking about the products and services your business offers, you need to be first in their minds and make it easy to engage. Sending personalized messages is not just adding their name to the message. It’s about consistently building messages related to their personal lives relative to your products and services. You and your customer experience teams need to consistently communicate with your market.

You will need to learn the fundamentals of marketing. Select and learn to use several marketing tools. Tools will be complex and challenging to set up and use productively. You have a steep learning curve ahead if you are a do-it-yourself type.
Consider a marketing agency and harness their resources to do it for you. Agencies have experienced people and applications in place. With your input, an agency can help you through the tedious multitude of steps required to communicate with your customers.

Also, consider a customer engagement platform. Highly automated platforms tirelessly churn away day and night, weekdays and weekends communicating with customers and potential customers. Using the right toolset could be a time saver and a moneymaker.

Customer Engagement Platforms work for you

Customer engagement platforms automate the work it takes to engage customers personally. Personalization sets customer engagement apart from other marketing tactics. Consistent personal attention can help you earn trust, loyalty, and sales by delivering fast, personalized service to reach customers where their attention is. In short, a customer engagement platform will make it possible to:

    • Manage, analyze, and optimize your customer’s journey with your business.
    • Collect customer data from multiple endpoints like POS, Facebook, and your website.
    • Deliver highly personalized experiences to wherever your customers hang out online.
    • Gain real-time insights into how the platform is performing.

Are you ready?

Customer engagement strategy creates an offer of value beyond your products and services. Outstanding products and services attract customers; relevant content keeps them around. You can assess yourself to determine if you need a customer engagement platform by asking these six questions:

    1. Do you have detailed insights into your customers?
    2. Do you use insights to create personas that enable you to reach out to prospects?
    3. Do you reach out to prospects and customers using multiple touchpoints?
    4. Do you consistently deliver personalized messages to all your customers?
    5. Do you measure your efforts?
    6. Do you see a return on investment?

Customer experience starts with strategies focused on delivering the right message to the right customer at the right time. Customer engagement is the process of consistently interacting with customers through various touchpoints to strengthen your relationships. Develop great strategies and deliver the best tactics to optimize your return on the time and money you invest in marketing.

Strive to save time and money while increasing sales by building stronger customer relationships. Building relationships with a customer engagement platform can make a big difference with your business.

Do You Offer A Rewards Program?

Do You Offer A Rewards Program?

by | Nov 1, 2021 | Marketing

Most businesses continue to tap into the traditional marketing strategies that have served them well for years. In a digital world, effective marketing strategies are dependant on customer data. The more data you collect, the more transformative your marketing approach will be to expand sales, improve profits and understand your return on investment (ROI). Marketing to a diverse group of customers requires an approach that leverages technology, creativity, and an entrepreneurial mindset.

Businesses need to increase sales and customer spending by deploying various marketing strategies. Most companies do not have the time and resources to tailor their marketing materials to the customer.

One marketing strategy is to reward customers who buy your product or service to incentivize them to buy more of your product or service. An effective rewards program can be a challenge to implement and use. What can an intelligent rewards program do for you?

Analyze Customer Behavior

Your company has essential data, and that is customer data. With the right toolset and customer data, you can analyze your customers’ behavior to improve your products and services and increase sales and profits! A customer is more likely to buy from someone they have a relationship with, which applies to all businesses. If you work for yourself and your business is your life, it’s in your best interest to connect with your customers on an ongoing basis. Analyzing your customers’ behavior is one way to better connect with your customers. You need to know what they like, dislike, and have issues with to serve them based on their feedback effectively. In turn, this helps you improve your product or service and increase sales while providing more value to your customers.

Analyzing customer behavior is essential for creating an effective sales and marketing plan. Studying customer behavior has the power to change your business in positive ways, and it will help you obtain new customers and bring old ones back into your fold. It’s no longer enough for companies to hang a sign above the door, put ads in a newsletter, or email offers. Today’s businesses must analyze and incorporate a deep understanding of how your customers engage your business.

Modern marketing and sales processes are more data-driven than ever. Every time a customer interacts with a business (online, offline, or in-store), customer data, both past, and present, help the business better understand exactly who the customers are on a personal level, what they buy, and more importantly, how the customer is better served. A comprehensive marketing analysis can help you choose how to spend your marketing budget in a way that will engage more of your customers and increase sales.

Engage Customers Based on Their Transactional Data and History

There are two different ways to engage customers based on their transactional data and history. The first is a transactional analytics approach, and the second is a conversion approach. The transactional practice focuses on looking at your customer’s data points and determining what actions they took that generated leads or sales for you. The conversion approach looks at everything from the marketing cost of the product and service you provide to determining how effectively you engaged with each customer.

Your customers have become your brand. A powerful, engaged brand that drives your sales. You need to re-engage customers repeatedly, not just for the sake of keeping them happy but because it’s suitable for expanding business. It’s hard to build loyalty when your customer experience is constantly evolving. Harnessing your customers’ transactional history and conversion data builds customer loyalty and helps you understand your marketing ROI.

One of the easiest ways to reset your mind and reset your finances is to engage customers on a transactional and conversion basis. Understanding a customer’s past behavior and then adapting your offer or product based on their behavior.

We know you want to reconnect with your customers on a more personal level and have them return as frequent purchasers. An intelligent rewards program will allow you to collect more data to create personalized interactions to help your customers engage.

Measure the Rewards Program Performance

One of the most fundamental ways to build long-term customer motivation is to measure a marketing program’s performance and adjust. Look at the overall customer satisfaction rating and how it has changed over time. Look at how often a customer engaged your business over multiple media channels. There is a lot of value in being connected to your customers. Rewarding your customers can build trust and credibility, which can lead to deeper relationships over time.

Creating a meaningful relationship with your customers isn’t just about giving them the essential core components: good products or service, courteous customer care, and competitive pricing. If you’re going to build a company that lasts and grows, especially during a pandemic, you need to tailor your offerings to make more profound, more memorable connections. A great rewards program tests how much customers value those core components, then leverages those successes to provide even more value. Take some basic steps to take your rewards ideas to the next level and unlock new growth and customer retention opportunities.

Engage Your Customers Successfully

An intelligent rewards program provides you with more knowledge about your customers to better engage with them and, in turn, increase sales. A combination of tightly integrated marketing technologies will provide your business with more sales and a known ROI.

Your business needs more customers, higher average order values, and repeat sales. An intelligent rewards program will generate more data to personalize and automate a series of steps that brings customers back into your business. Contact me for more information.