Learn about the facts and perils of unconnected customer data. Then, discover how, with the right tools and a single view, you’ll save time and money with your marketing efforts and focus your spending on acquiring the right customers.
Quenching your thirst without drowning
The problem
Driving potential customers to your website is relatively easy, but high traffic doesn’t always translate into revenue. A certain proportion of that traffic will never convert – no matter how good their experience is. The trick is keeping this proportion as small as possible. You can optimise your search terms and targeting demographics, but if you’re doing this without a single view of customer data, you might as well be using tea leaves.
The consequences
Without unified customer data in a single coherent view, you’ll most likely drown in non-convertible leads before you satisfy your thirst for new customers – and that can lead to wasted budget on:
- Targeting existing customers with acquisition experiences
- Leads that will never convert
- Experiences that drive away even your most loyal customers
The ideal scenario
What data do you need to ensure your acquisition efforts are as effective as possible?
It all comes back to what you know about your existing customers. As you know, selling to an existing customer is much easier than acquiring a new one. Or, in the case of digital marketing, it’s easier to sell to someone who is like one of your existing customers. With a single view of all customers and shared data insights, organisations can:
- Send relevant messages to their customers
- Know the best time to talk to their customers
- Invest in the right channels to acquire the best-fit customers
- Waste less time and money on marketing to existing customers
- Have lower acquisition costs
All of this is easily achievable when you invest in the right tools and services to develop a single view of customers.
The solution
To know your customers, you need to create a single customer view (SCV) and mine this for the data you need to optimise your acquisition activities. The best way to achieve this is to deploy and configure a customer data platform (CDP) that takes all your customer and behavioural information and generates a live SCV that you can use to:
- Generate insights about how you acquire your customers – keywords, demographics and content
- Create segments of your customers to produce lookalike audiences
- Use your conversions to optimise your ad targeting
- Report on your successes and identify your failures
1. The only way to ‘improve’ is to ‘know’ your customer
Total customer knowledge (TCK) is an approach that identifies individuals at every touchpoint in their customer journey – before and after they become actual paying customers.
To do this can require capturing new information to complete the customer data you already have, for example, customers signing up with an email address or mobile number before they can proceed through the purchase journey. These customer insights may also inform new experiences, touchpoints and opportunities to continue to evolve TCK data.
2. Modernise data acquisition and tracking infrastructure
For some organisations, that infrastructure may be entirely lacking, and for others, it may be underutilised. However, for most, it exists in separate data sets, and organisations typically lack the infrastructure to effectively stitch these data sets into a single unified customer view.
Some will work around this manually by throwing a data analyst at the task, but the smart ones will look for software platforms that can do this for them, such as a CDP.
3. To ‘move the dial’, you must embrace a journey-based mindset fully
Engagement is not measured by volume but rather by the quality of each customer’s experience. Only once a customer experience culture is firmly embedded in your organisation – and SCV is being used to deliver truly compelling, relevant and timely experiences to your customers – will the benefits of TCK be fully realised.
Get in touch today to see how n3 Hub can deliver results to your marketing team.