According to James Bayhack, Sub-Saharan Africa Director at CM.com, for companies aiming to curate a unique customer journey and personalise their client communications to increase customer satisfaction and retention, personalisation is not just another marketing buzzword − it’s an essential part of the marketing strategy and a critical driver of success.
If you work in marketing, or your business has a marketing function, you will have heard about personalisation – marketing material or content that meets the customer’s particular need or preference.
Investing in customer data and analytics
If your business has seen a significant drop in campaign and customer engagement, you’re not alone. With mass marketing increasing and brands fighting for the same audience’s attention, it has become more challenging for marketing messaging to hit home. Today’s digitally savvy customers expect an increasing level of personalisation and will choose to buy from brands that can tune in to their specific needs. As part of a recent research study, we found that customers value relevance in terms of marketing messaging, with 68% of respondents claiming they appreciate it when businesses keep them updated on new product releases, sales, and special offers relevant to what they have purchased in the past.
But it is impossible to leverage the power of personalisation without having access to reliable first-party data. To deliver highly customised customer experiences, you need real-time insight into the customer journey. Without the relevant data, you will be operating in the dark about what your customer is like, what they need, how to help them effectively, and how to build long-lasting relationships. The good news is, this is where a centralised customer data platform (CDP) steps up to the plate.
CDPs − Making real personalisation possible
Because our brains apply selective filtering to all information we take in, only things that are relevant to us will be noted consciously. The rest will simply be ignored. As a marketer or business owner operating in a digital world, you can increase the chance that these filters don’t reject your communications by ensuring the messaging is relevant and received by the right person at the right time and on the right channel. A CDP will help you achieve this.
The Customer Data Platform Institute defines a CDP as ‘packaged software that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems’. Unlike most database software, CDPs are designed to seamlessly manage large volumes of ever-changing customer data, including basic customer data, behavioural data, buying behaviours, data from customer service interactions, and data analytics from past campaigns. Primarily engineered to focus on owned and trusted first-party data, a CDP will connect all offline and online touchpoints, build smart customer segments, recommend products and services, enhance online advertising audiences, and automate omnichannel marketing.
Using behavioural data to identify value
A CDP brings all marketing data together to build a complete profile of your customers. By giving your teams access to rich, 360° customer profiles, your CDP can automate communication with your customer base. And, because it stores marketing data into profiles, you can use these profiles to orchestrate meaningful conversations with customers. These systems pool and analyse structured and unstructured data. Algorithms can then identify behavioural patterns and analyse them to feed that information into user-friendly dashboards.
If you build your own database of individuals, you will be able to create focussed segments. Combined with real-time data about behaviour, this could lead to an ideal scenario where every person could be treated as their own segment, and sent a truly personalised message at a preferred place and time through a personal channel. CDPs integrate data from various sources and use it to create a single comprehensive view of each customer. Thanks to their ability to collect and store data on customer buying behaviours, CDPs can identify repeat customers — especially high-value repeat customers. The data stored by a CDP can also be used for targeted, omnichannel marketing campaigns designed to engage customers across every touchpoint. But, beyond tracking and notifying, the real value of a CDP lies in its ability to automate the delivery of support messages to any dissatisfied customer, and automatically notify a customer service agent to reach out to the customer in question.
Get ready for the future of personalisation
Despite collecting extensive customer data, most companies aren’t equipped to create a unified, comprehensive view of each customer. Nor can they easily share this data across different systems. For many, customer data sits untapped across multiple systems. This means marketing teams only have a fraction of the insights they could have into their customer base — impacting their ability to target and personalise marketing initiatives at a granular level. Given the potential impact of personalisation, it follows that businesses across various industries should be eager to optimise personalisation efforts. The first step is to reach out to reputable partners to help businesses and their teams assess quality data and its sources. The next step would involve developing and implementing a secure and centralised CDP.
Making the most of what CDPs and hyper-personalisation have to offer can help you move away from communicating yet another marketing push. Instead, turning each potential interaction into a golden opportunity to engage with and respond to customers in a meaningful way.
CM.com
https://www.cm.com/
