In today’s digital world accurate customer insights are critical to delivering personalised customer experiences and driving marketing engagement. But while almost everyone in the industry agrees that personalisation improves customer retention and loyalty, recent research suggests that as many as 60% of marketers struggle to personalise content in real-time. This is not surprising given that today’s marketers struggle to keep pace with the growing customer expectations and the rapid adoption of digital technology by consumers.
To be able to respond to the emerging needs of customers and execute their marketing strategies successfully, marketers need access to accurate and complete data about their customers in order to gain actionable consumer insights and respond to the emerging needs of their customers.
But a number of technology challenges hinder the success of personalised marketing strategies. For instance, customer data is often stored in different places and companies struggle to integrate it. According to a recent report into the issue by Econsultancy and Montetate, nearly a third of marketers (30%) consider having disparate data sources within their current CRM systems as one of the top obstacles to personalising marketing content.
Moreover, new customer data types are increasingly difficult to manage and analyse. Many organisations have not yet determined how to extract value from the vast amounts of new structured and unstructured customer information such as social media data, machine data and user interaction data. And because these new data points are often not validated when they enter the organisation, they are rarely trustworthy or complete.
Marketers need faster access to reliable customer data in order to execute targeted campaigns that ensure customer retention and provide a competitive advantage. Therefore, it’s important that marketers take responsibility for customer data quality instead of joining the long queue of technical requests that the IT department can’t respond to in a timely manner.
To overcome customer data quality challenges, marketers can adopt a systematic data management approach that aggregates disparate customer data points, ensures data accuracy and validity, and creates a reliable single customer view that can drive targeted marketing strategies.
To be able to execute successful real-time targeted marketing campaigns, organisations need to ensure critical customer identification information is validated at the point of entry and consistently kept up-to-date. If organisations can ensure data points such as customer name, address and contact information are accurate and complete, they will be better equipped to ensure their marketing campaigns reach the right customers.
By improving data quality, organisations will be able to get more accurate insights from data analytics and BI systems and ensure CRM systems are more widely adopted across the organisation. This will allow marketers to drive more revenue from their campaigns and cross-sell and up-sell more effectively.
Additionally, by matching various data types such as purchase history, loyalty programme activity, and social media engagement to a single, accurate customer record, organisations can more easily segment their customer database and analyse customers’ preferences. For example, by matching social media IDs to an existing customer record, marketers can engage with customers in real-time and quickly address customers’ concerns or inquiries. Additionally, by understanding the location of a customer and their in-store activity, marketers can send targeted offers directly to their customers’ mobile phone.
Finally, by improving the quality of customer data, marketers can increase the adoption and reliability of data-centric applications such as CRM systems, analytics platforms, and marketing automation tools. If these tools run on a foundation of trustworthy customer information, marketers can drive more revenue from their campaigns and cross-sell and up-sell more
Ultimately, improving levels of data quality will enable marketers to not only achieve personalisation goals but also to drive incremental improvements in their campaigns and customer satisfaction rates. Marketers that take control of the quality of their customer data and ensure its accuracy and validity can more easily create the personalised experiences their customers expect and increase revenue, customer loyalty and satisfaction as a result.
By Denise LaForgia, Product Marketing Manager at Trillium Software.
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