A Single Customer View is the Key to Data-Driven Engagement
You may be under the impression that the more technology you use for customer engagement, the more information you're gathering about your customers. However, more data doesn't necessarily mean better data; in fact, more data coming from different sources makes analysis and action far more complicated. Data from one solution might be telling you one thing, while data from another contradicts it.
According to Ensighten, only one-tenth of marketers have been able to successfully group data together from email, social, web, and in-store behavior, while 83 percent of companies believe that achieving a single customer view is critical to long-term success. Leveraging a singular platform, you can paint a detailed picture of your customer that makes insights and action items clear for engaging your audience across channels as well as stages in the customer journey.
What is a Single Customer View?
The concept is rather self-explanatory; a single customer view gives you all relevant information on a customer’s interaction with your brand, such as transaction history, email and social interactions, visits to your website, mobile app usage, and so on, all in one interface. It takes data from each source to create a comprehensive profile on which you can base your marketing efforts. This enables better strategic planning at the onset while promising better return.
Why is This Important?
While you might think of manually collecting this information from all the programs you use, leveraging a single customer view provides a number of benefits, including the following:
- Aggregates data from various sources: By implementing a tool that brings together data from different platforms, you can see every interaction an individual has had with your brand and how each relate to one another. It also gives a clearer understanding of what specific marketing messages had the most and least impact, allowing marketers to iterate and refine their strategies moving forward.
- Gives insight into direct impact of marketing efforts on customer behavior: Your email reporting likely shows the open and clickthrough rates for all the promotions you send, but do you know what actions a customer took after clicking a link within that email? Did they purchase something, or exit your website right away? A centralized customer view fills in the gaps between engagements and transactions, offering a touchpoint-by-touchpoint look into what led a person to make a purchase.
- Offers a more personal experience for customers: Two-thirds of brands expect at least a 6 percent incremental lift in revenue from personalization, according to Boston Consulting Group. The full and clear understanding of customers that a single view provides enables marketers to create unique experiences for them based on interests and past behavior, increasing engagement and retention rates.
- Simplifies marketing operations: Most marketing teams are still using manual processes rather than automation to carry out their daily responsibilities. Not only is this inefficient, it’s also time consuming and costly. Consolidating separate functions into one tool makes it easier to access, analyze and leverage relevant information strategically.
Through tech consolidation and aggregate customer data, marketers can do their job more easily and effectively, therefore providing personalized communication to customers and creating an optimal experience. Cutting down on the platforms you use for marketing and data collection is a win for both you and your customers.
Ross Andrew Paquette is the founder and CEO of Maropost, the only unified customer engagement platform designed from the ground up that connects companies with their customers at every step of their journey. Providing a single customer view, Maropost creates unified, personalized customer experiences, helping brands increase conversion and brand loyalty.
