Importance of Using Data-Driven Insights to Optimize the Customer Journey

It’s clear that customer expectations are changing, with almost 90 percent of consumers wanting more meaningful relationships with brands. This has meant marketers are moving away from traditional marketing tactics to prioritize a customer-centric approach as failing to build relationships with consumers can be a costly mistake. To do this, marketers need to understand their customers' journeys and take clear action from their data insights to drive success. For businesses, the first step involves creating opportunities for more personalized, relevant and consistent messaging across all touchpoints by optimizing the customer journey with data-driven insights.

Single View of the Customer

For brands, optimizing the customer journey with data-driven insights involves building a single view of the customer to better understand how the purchases, interactions and behaviors will drive future actions. Therefore, businesses can target them more effectively with the right messages at the right times. This will drastically improve the quality of every customer engagement and craft content that resonates with them in the long term. To take this one step further, businesses need to share this single view across the organization to ensure that everyone understands the customer journey and how this shapes their experiences.

Contextually Aware Interactions

With infinite opportunities to engage with consumers, brands need to ensure that they interact with them in a contextually aware manner. This means delivering customer interactions in the highest degree of relevance possible. Most importantly, marketers need to use their data-driven insights to understand and demonstrate why their product or service will provide value to their customers. This involves considering why they need it, why it differs from other solutions on the market, and how they will interact with it.

Delivering Consistent Messages

In addition, it’s critical to ensure that businesses are delivering consistent messaging, taking advantage of data insights to address customer needs at each stage of the purchase journey. This involves ensuring that different teams across the organization aren't running separate messaging across multiple channels and instead are utilizing the same view of the customer journey. By improving the understanding of their customer, marketers can bolster lead generation, drive conversion rates, and identify new opportunities to add value throughout the customer’s journey.

Drawing the Customer Journey

Companies can also use data-driven insights to map sentiments and customer buying behaviors to create models that link to long-term success, helping to predict the next steps in the customer journey and keeping it moving forward seamlessly. Over time, businesses will be able to fully understand what the next steps are to better predict success and avoid disruption to the customer’s journey. This will result in improved marketing strategies, campaigns, and product or service development, leading to increased sales. Advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) tools will help gather a higher volume of data, improving precision and predictive capacity in the longer term. Therefore, brands will benefit from faster and more accurate predictions of customer needs, market challenges and new opportunities, helping them to successfully optimize the customer journey.

Enabling Future Success

For many businesses, optimizing the customer journey is still a challenge. However, it’s now time for brands to use data-driven insights to overcome these hurdles across all touchpoints. Every marketer needs to understand how creating a single view of the customer and delivering consistent messages in a contextually aware manner is important in the competitive marketplace. This will support the company’s approach to mapping the customer journey to bolster customer experience management and the opportunities for success with data-driven insights.

Nick Phipps is CRO strategist at Rawnet, a digital marketing agency.