In a Frost and Sullivan study, it was determined that by 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator. This means that marketers should be striving to create the best customer experience throughout each stage of the buying journey – and after. With the amount of customer data that is available for today’s marketers, there should be no excuse for not delivering a solid customer experience. Unfortunately, this is not always the case because many marketers aren’t able to use their customer data in an actionable way to influence their marketing.
Even with limitless customer data, if marketers don’t have insight into the data, they will undeniably make mistakes that could possibly drive their customers crazy – or worse – drive their customers away.
Personalization gone wrong
Boston winters are brutal, so anyone who has endured a winter here knows how important finding the right winter coat is. I’m a transplant from the South, so until last year, the perfect winter coat was never really something that I needed to put much thought into. After researching the best coats and browsing multiple brands, I finally decided on the perfect purchase. As luck would have it, we had a sudden cold snap and I knew that I couldn’t wait on shipping so I went into my local brick and mortar to purchase the coat.
This seems like your typical shopping experience, right? Research online, but purchase in store for convenience and speed. There was just one problem – because I had abandoned my online shopping cart and gone into the physical store to make my purchase, I suddenly began receiving endless emails from the retailer asking me if I still wanted to make the purchase. Had this retailer had a customer data platform at the center of their marketing stack, they would’ve been able to integrate in-store POS data with digital behavior, and then override the cart abandonment campaign.
This means that rather than focusing on trying to get me to purchase a coat I already bought from them, they could have sent out a promotion code for a matching hat and gloves in an effort to increase my total lifetime value.
Redundant direct mail within a household
As any marketer knows, sending direct mail is a very expensive marketing strategy. This approach has been a tried and true method for many years, but it too can be improved with insights from customer data. A mistake that often happens is having multiples copies of the same direct mail piece sent to a single household. Just last week I received two promotion fliers from a food delivery service. One was addressed to me and the other to my husband. Yes, that is only two fliers that were sent out, but how many households got multiple copies of the same promotion within this single campaign? And how much did this cost them?
While most marketing platforms only have the ability to roll-up to a single contact or e-mail address, a CDP is uniquely positioned to identify households, helping marketers make smarter and more economical decisions for direct-mail campaigns.
Same offer. Two Channels.
In today’s retail environment, consumers have the ability to shop across so many channels, and marketers have more promotional channels than ever. While this is great for consumers, it has made the job of marketers increasingly confusing, challenging and siloed. A mistake that is often made as a result of multichannel marketing is having email and direct mail that include the same offer and are sent to the same people. We have all seen this happen time and time again – a promotional offer in an email that you seize immediately, then essentially, a printed version of the email waiting in your mailbox that goes straight into the trash. This practice is a bright red flag to customers that a brand does not have an understanding of who they are or how to reach them. By bridging the gap between physical and digital marketing channels with a CDP, marketers are able to know their customers’ buying habits and better target their customers.
In today’s competitive market, consumers have what seems to be endless choices when making purchases. A smart and sophisticated brand experience is no longer a nice-to-have – it’s an imperative. In order for a brand to survive this consumer-driven market, marketers need to understand their customers, how to best reach them, and how to personalize marketing at-scale.
Ready to learn more about how a Customer Data Platform can support your business? Let’s chat.
