How to Gain a 360-Degree View of the Customer

We’ve all heard the advice: meet customers where they are. But what does that actually mean for modern marketers? Years ago, this strategy was fairly easy to execute as brands could focus on a handful of channels (e.g., billboards and direct mail) and retain loyal customers. Today, the marketing landscape is far more complex. Customers have nearly unlimited access to brands through hundreds of channels and multiple devices. So, how can marketers unify data under one customer profile and build loyalty?

Developing lasting relationships with modern customers requires marketers to think beyond any single channel. Instead, it requires analyzing activities and behaviors across all channels. This will enable brands to create hyperpersonalized experiences at every touchpoint. Unifying all of your disparate data sources in order to execute off a unified customer profile is key.

Think Beyond Any One Channel

Today, there are nearly unlimited ways to reach your customers. There’s in-store, online, email, social, mobile apps, SMS, direct mail and more. With all of these options at your fingertips, it’s crucial you create a cohesive brand experience for customers at every touchpoint. Not doing so will result in lower customer retention and lost sales opportunities.

Leverage Data From Every Touchpoint

Providing a seamless customer experience across touchpoints is a great start, but you shouldn’t stop there. Brands must collect permission-based data and preference insights via unique value exchanges, and record customer behaviors during all interactions with the brand. Then, analyze the data to reveal insights that can be used to create personalized campaigns, messages and offers.

The sheer number of touchpoints that happen in a day between brands and consumers is what results in a massive amount of customer data. If marketers are collecting data across multiple platforms (social media, email, mobile) and across multiple platforms and solutions in their marketing stacks, it’s impossible to leverage all customer data in a cohesive, unified manner. Communications with customers will be disjointed and erratic, not the smooth, seamless experience they're looking for.

Unify Data for Actionable Insights

With new platforms cropping up every day, it can be easy for brands to end up with a piecemeal marketing stack. Unfortunately, this strategy results in data silos when these platforms don’t integrate and share data in real time. It becomes impossible to get a bird’s eye view of your customers across platforms, segment audiences, analyze the data, and pull out actionable insights and intelligence.

Instead, leverage data from a multitude of sources, including mobile apps, customer care and e-commerce, by unifying your data via one comprehensive marketing platform. Consolidation saves time by allowing you to reuse content, audiences, and business rules, as well as provide customers with a consistent brand experience across every channel.

According to a Forrester survey of marketers who use enterprise marketing technology, nearly 50 percent agreed they want to reduce the number of vendors that supply the technology. The report recounts, "Marketers don't need another system to store customer data; what they need is the ability to make data smarter, actionable, and connected across online and offline channels."

Utilizing one comprehensive marketing platform is as unified as it gets. It can help you not only understand customer preferences and behaviors, but execute on that data across channels in real time in ways that aren’t possible when using multiple marketing platforms. It can also provide a 360-degree view of the customer, helping you unearth missed or unexpected connections between your business goals and the habits of your key audience segments.

Judd Marcello is the executive vice president of global marketing at Cheetah Digital, the largest independent enterprise marketing technology company in the world.