Data-Driven Marketing: The Essential Steps to Get Personal

To keep up with today’s marketing game, which includes a rapidly growing customer demand, data-driven solutions are a must. Therefore, we’re sharing five crucial steps that you need to take on your journey towards a successful, personalised, and easy customer experience.

1. Reach the Next Level with Personalisation

As a result of technological development, with more channels and more devices than ever before, customers’ demands are evolving. We’re now living in an increasingly customer-centric marketing landscape, where people want and expect a tailored and unified experience across all channels.

In fact, statistics show that 76% of customers expect companies to recognise their individual needs. Clearly, one size does not fit all. So, to meet the high expectations from your audience, and stand out from your competitors, personalisation is key.

The core of personalised marketing is to provide ease through personal relevance. What you’re basically doing then, is presenting a selection of information that your customers have expressed interest in. By doing so, you’re simplifying, and thus, improving their customer experience by cutting out all the irrelevant information.

Let’s take product recommendations as an example. This is all about providing relevance by creating a personal purchase proposal based on behavioural, historic, and demographic data.

But – personalisation is not only beneficial for your customers. From a business perspective, it enables you to:

• Build stronger and deeper customer relationships
• Increase conversions
• Boost sales

To turn this dream into reality you need to collect your customer data into customer profiles. Simply put, these are data-driven stereotyping of your customers, based on demographic and psychographic data. And they are extracted and continuously (de)constructed based on new, retrieved customer data.

Based on your customer profiles you can create dynamic segments, which allows you to act on real-time data to create ever-changing groups of individuals. These groupings are key to understanding your customers’ behaviours, which is crucial to send out relevant and personalised messages to the right person, in the right channel, at the right time.

2. Unify Your Data to Create 360-Degree Profiles

Building your customer profiles can involve some challenges. Most companies do possess a great deal of data about their prospects and customers. However, the information tends to be contained in a number of different locations – making it difficult to create a 360-degree view of each customer.

So, to create a unified customer experience across all channels and devices, you need a type of software to unify your data from different touchpoints. And here’s where a Customer Data Platform (CDP) comes into play.

A Customer Data Platform, CDP, is a prebuilt, manageable system that captures data from multiple systems and sources, thus creating a comprehensive view of each customer. With a CDP you can gain real-time insights to optimise the timing, efficiency, and targeting of your messages. All and all; to create a unified customer experience.

3. Automate to Streamline Your Workflows

Data-driven marketing without a tool for automation is like a latte without milk. With marketing automation, which uses behavioural triggers to systematically and automatically communicate, you can automate your marketing activities across all your digital channels.

Marketing automation streamlines complex marketing processes between sales and marketing, such as lead generation and nurturing. And it also possesses the power to minimise your manual and time-consuming marketing activities, freeing up time for other, non-automated, tasks.

As a matter of fact, with the help of marketing automation, your sales productivity can increase by 14.5%. As a direct result, your marketing overhead will be decreased by 12,2 %.

To continue on this road of prosperity, a marriage between marketing automation and customer profiles is a matter of course. Merging these two grants a 360-degree view of your customers and prospects, and enables you to use dynamic real-time data to customise every step of the customer journey.

Now you’re all set to tailor your dynamic flows and send out personalised content, which is the key to engage your customers, and lead your prospects down the sales funnel.

4. Synchronise Your Activities with an Omnichannel Strategy

Next up is creating a strategy that goes hand in hand with your data-driven approach. As the internet has entered our everyday lives, it has created complex social cohesion and paved the way for a whole new arena of digital marketing. We’re now living in a world where your success boils down to your customers’ interactions - hence, a multiple channel presence is a must.

With a multichannel approach, where channels are treated as separate entities, valuable data is stuck in silos. So to map out the individual customer’s behavioural patterns across all channels, you’ll need an omnichannel approach. 

Omnichannel is a strategy of data-driven complexity as it synchronises all marketing activities over all touchpoints. The result? An integrated, seamless, and personalised customer experience.

But as you might have guessed, an omnichannel strategy isn’t created in a second. You need to involve all of your departments if you want to ensure and develop a strategy that assists and pleases the customer across all stages in the sales journey. It is all worth it though since the end result is highly-targeted campaigns with personalised messages.

5. Analyse to Gain Valuable Insights

The steps mentioned above are all crucial to become successful within digital marketing. However, to make the most of your marketing efforts, you need to analyse your data. This way, you’ll gain new, valuable insights along the way.

Think of your data as a great asset to get to know your customers. But, if you want to become their best bud, you need to measure their behaviours and interactions across your different channels and customer points. And this is the way to do it:

• Analyse cross-channel behaviours
• Track your conversions
• Watch audience trends

With your new-gained knowledge, you can turn your customer data into actionable insights. This is done by evaluating all of your activities to find out which ones are generating the most value. The outcome? The capability to make smart and strategic decisions, and allocate your marketing budget.

One Solution to Rule Them All

So as you can see, to meet the demands and expectations of your audience, your marketing needs to be data-driven. By utilising your data you can offer a highly-personalised customer experience.

When you’re walking down the glorious road that is data-driven marketing, these five steps are all essential to success. And the best part? Every single one of them is gathered in our new data-driven platform APSIS One.

Want to know more about our platform? Check it out here!