Customers are engaging with your business across an increasing number of touchpoints - websites, social media, in-store, mobile and tablets. But regardless of how they engage, they expect a customized, personalized, and consistent experience.This expectation continues to be a challenge for brands, who have to manipulate enormous amounts of data to try and understand how to effectively engage with each individual. In this landscape, data needs to be collected and analyzed in real-time, and any data needs to be instantly actionable.Without these capabilities, marketing messages are less compelling and response rates fall. Conversely, those brands that embrace real-time contextualization through powerful and flexible big data see huge uplifts in campaign responses.Marketers are now recognizing the imperative of these omnichannel, contextualized communications with their prospects and customers. The more personalized the experience, the happier the customer. And a happy customer isn't just a customer who wishes to purchase more, it's a customer that is retained, upsold to, and who becomes an advocate for your brand.How many times have you heard your peers complain that they don't have proper analytics capabilities, meaning they are limited in ROI view, and in progressing the digital experience? Or that connecting all activity and data across multiple channels and departments, and unifying them for monitoring measurement, evaluation and future marketing activity is challenging? Also that disparate data silos makes it hard or even impossible to personalize campaigns and react to up-to-the-second customer data?There are powerful analytics tools that enable marketers to understand their customer's behavior not just by answering questions, but by answering questions they didn't even know needed answering.Questions to ask yourself about your customers:Do you know how many people visited your stores, purchased, or left without buying?Do you know how long it takes for a customer to make a return purchase, and then another?Do you know when a customer becomes inactive or lapsed?Do you know what your most loyal customers look like and how to find more of them?Do you know how to apply what you learn about your customers - what when where - and turn that into personalized conversations?Do you know how to monitor changes in consumer behavior and act on this quickly?Do you know how to use affinity reports to not only determine the knowns, ie. people who buy this also buy that, but also the unknowns - affinities which don't conform to a set behavior, but proffer new marketing opportunities through those affinities, brand, product or otherwise?Do you know how to shadow customers to determine when the right time is to contact them - learning their propensity to buy?Do you know how to track trending behaviors, such as identifying repeat refunders or repeat returners - for example customers that buy three items online and return two in-store?Marketers need to be able to act on data and quickly, not just pore over numbers in spreadsheets - there is a difference between a data question and a data-driven targeted call to action. Understanding what is relevant, what are customer indicators and churn indicators, and how to action all of this in an automated fashion is vital.Ask yourself - if you knew that 40% of customers who shopped in the last 3 months were new to your brand, and out of those, 10% have bought again and most within 2 weeks of their initial purchase - would that be a valuable insight?And if you could then use a tool that identifies all new customers who have not repurchased within those 2 weeks and automatically re-engage with them, leveraging relevant content using your digital marketing, would that be beneficial to your business?If the answer is yes, you need to consider using technology such as The Message Cloud to enable you to provide relevant and timely content and marketing messages to prospects and customers. Ultimately, building your marketing strategy on a solid customer data foundation will pay dividends for years to come.
