In a recent blog post, we wrote about how to get all your marketing channels working together to seamlessly move your customers from one channel to the next - ultimately driving them towards a purchase.
In that post we focused on the importance of creating a cohesive marketing strategy between channels, especially between online and offline channels. Today, we are focusing on the foundation of any successful multichannel marketing strategy: accurate and complete customer records with historical and real-time data.
Without an infallible understanding of your customers' habits, preferences, and engagements with your organization, you can’t consistently target them when and where they are, rendering your multichannel marketing program DOA. However, multiple factors – such as inefficient or ineffective systems can affect the accuracy and consistency of data – can have a negative impact on your ability to successfully market across channels.
Implement technology and processes for long-term data quality
Modern businesses generate large quantities of valuable data through the multiple channels, but if the customer data is kept in disparate data silos, its value is diminished because it’s difficult to develop a single and accurate customer view.
This is why forward-thinking marketing teams are turning to Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) to integrate customer data from multiple systems and stitch it together into unified customer profiles. QuickPivot’s Customer Data Platform enables you to collect data from anywhere in order to build a unified view of the customer.
It’s built to handle hundreds of customer attributes, can easily accommodate large volumes of all kinds of data, and allows you to query and analyze the data in real time.
It doesn’t stop at the technology though. In order to maintain data integrity, marketers must also think critically about how they obtain and record information in the first place. There are certain business rules and processes that must be taken into consideration in order to accurately integrate data between different systems. Additionally, marketers need to have a base-level technical understanding of how their CDP approaches data cleansing, normalization, and matching and merging processes so they have a reliable set of customer data.
Use a CDP with identity resolution to create a unified customer view
Identity resolution is the process of combining multiple customer identifiers across devices and touchpoints (where there may be duplicate data) with data points collected along the customer journey to build a cohesive, omnichannel view of your customers.
A customer data platform with a good identity resolution process will resolve known customer identities across systems and channels, including cross-device identification, to allow you to understand your customers’ behavior across multiple channels. Ultimately, this create a 360-degree, unified view of your customers.
A 360-degree view of the customer ultimately supports more meaningful, more personalized and successful interactions with customers; it helps them feel as if your company sees them for the real people they are. A unified view of the customer will provide you with revenue boosts that come from:
- Improved insight into customer behavior and lifetime value
- Improved customer analysis and customer segmentation
- Improved results using your existing technology assets
Relying on customer data that is out-of-date, incomplete, duplicative or otherwise inaccurate means that you’re leaving potential revenue on the table when it comes to your marketing campaigns. CDPs like QuickPivot help marketers match and merge the information to form a single, accurate record for each customer. And that means deep understanding of your customers’ behavior and preferences, which allows for more effective cross-channel marketing.
