Author: Deepak Hangal
In today’s rapidly evolving digital footprint, organizations are inundated with customer data spread across platforms, devices, and repositories and managing this data has become a crucial aspect of successful business operations. Data fragmentation hinders organizations’ ability to operate from a single view of the customer, leading to high costs, inefficiencies, and compliance risks.
With 73% of customers expecting companies to understand their unique needs and expectations and deliver better personalization (State of the Connected Customer by Salesforce), CMO’s are hard pressed to get a 360 degree view of customer data and leverage the same to activate personalized one on one engagement. Now, more than ever, CMOs need to access to real time customer data, so that they can tailor engagement with consumer based on live interactions with the brand.
For example, if a consumer is browsing a website for smart watches but hasn't made a purchase, a promotion appears instantly on her browsing page, increasing the likelihood of conversion. Or a website / app content gets adjusted in real time based on the customer's current browsing behavior, preferences, and past interactions.
CMO’s aiming to gain a unified view of the customer need to adopt a multi-faceted approach to aggregate live customer data and make it shareable across the enterprise and channels.
Integrate Data Sources: The first step is to integrate various data sources. This includes CRM systems, social media interactions, transaction histories, website analytics, and more. By integrating these sources, CMOs can gain a comprehensive view of customer interactions across different touchpoints.
Invest in Customer Data Platforms (CDPs): CDP can help make sense of the exploding volumes of customer data generated across the organization. They are a marketing technology solution intended to provide a central repository for customer information and help in creating a persistent, unified customer profile. While there are several leading CDP platforms in the market, the right CDP platform for an enterprise depends on its strategic goals, unique business needs, the existing tech infrastructure, interoperability, scalability, performance, level of customization and the expected ROI.
Robust Data Quality: You are as good as your data. Need to ensure the data collected is accurate, up-to-date, and relevant. This might involve cleaning up existing databases, implementing data governance policies, and using tools to automate data quality management.
Compliance with Privacy Regulations: Managing customer data from numerous channels raises concerns regarding data privacy, security, and compliance with regulations such as GDPR or CCPA. A comprehensive data privacy strategy allows for respectful and legal use of customer data while still achieving marketing objectives.
Leverage AI: The use of Artificial Intelligence can transform the way businesses interact with their customers and optimize their marketing strategies. Advanced analytics and machine learning algorithms can extract meaningful insights from the integrated data, which can help in understanding customer behavior, preferences, and purchasing patterns. This aids in targeting customers with products or offers they are most likely to be interested in.
Personalization: Marketers can not only use the unified data to segment customers more accurately based on behavior, demographics etc., but also enable dynamic segmentation that can adapt in real time as customer data evolves. Tailored content and offers, based on individual customer data, can significantly improve customer engagement and loyalty.
Last but not the least, the marketing team needs to constantly refine the understanding of the customer with regular updates to customer profile based on new data and insights.
By implementing these strategies, a CMO can effectively tackle the challenge of obtaining a single, unified view of the customer, leading to more informed decision-making, improved customer experiences, and ultimately, stronger business outcomes.
Please share your thoughts / comments.
In my next post, I will cover how an enterprise can leverage Salesforce Data Cloud coupled with Marketing Cloud and Einstein AI, to deliver an exceptional customer experience.
コメント