Developing and maintaining unshakeable customer loyalty is as elusive as it is paramount for the modern enterprise. To create a loyal customer base, businesses must deliver more value to their buyers than anyone else. But rock solid customer loyalty requires enterprises to deliver a stellar customer experience -- one that embodies consistently relevant, timely and highly personalized information and value.
This is no easy feat, as customer expectations are continuously on an upward tick. In fact, a recent survey by Accenture revealed that the incentives important to customers are constantly in flux. Last year, the promise of a deal or discount was the top driver, whereas, in 2017, 58% of customers find marketing programs that are highly tailored to their needs much more enticing.
Marketers are now meeting this demand for personalized messaging and offers by shifting from mass marketing to highly targeted, contextual marketing based on customers’ web search terms and data from browser history. Unfortunately, one of the main ways marketers respond is also the most inhibitive. They deploy a different strategy for each channel -- website, social media, email, ads -- and all are delivered from each channel’s different data silos. What’s the result? Using a fragmented picture of the customer delivers an inconsistent customer experience before they even engage a brand.
When it comes to contextual marketing, the data is only as good as the infrastructure that supports it. If your landscape is littered with data silos, then it’s time to consider a modern approach to achieving a single source of truth with all your data in one location -- a data warehouse built for the cloud. Let’s explore a few ways this model, which provides one central location for all your data storage and analysis, can help an enterprise outpace the competition with more comprehensive and effective contextual marketing campaigns, turning browsers into buyers and driving customer loyalty.
A Complete Line Of Sight
Customers interact with different web-based channels in different ways. For example, one customer may "like" all of a business’s Instagram posts but only visit the website to make an occasional purchase. Viewing each of these channels backed by siloed data would deliver very different contextual marketing experiences to this customer. With a built-for-the-cloud data warehouse, silos cease to exist so marketers can obtain a full line of sight into their customers’ activity and behaviors for cross-channel analytics that better inform how to approach the customer and drive increased revenue.
Real-Time Data Access
Stale, outdated data is about as good as no data at all. As customer expectations for instant gratification continue to soar, marketing must react in real time to meet these expectations. It all starts with real-time data access and analysis. What’s more, having the latest data in the hands of marketers enables them to predict their customer’s next steps and deliver the right content at the right time along each buyer’s journey.
Attribution Visibility
Understanding why your customers interact and behave across your channels is one of the most critical facets of delivering timely and highly personalized contextual marketing. This is near impossible in a siloed environment. By removing silos, marketers can better uncover the causal relationship between a user’s cross-channel behaviors, and they can make smart, data-driven decisions for approaching and interacting with customers, as opposed to gut-based decisions.
Ability To Tailor Loyalty Programs
Delivering highly personalized messaging and offers are becoming more and more of a deciding factor when it comes to customer purchase decisions and customer loyalty. By having all customer data in one central location, marketers can get a single and consistent view to drive personalized, contextual conversations and create loyal customers.
As a single source for all your data analytics becomes more and more critical to contextual marketing campaign success, cooperation and cross-department knowledge sharing between the data team and marketing operations is crucial. With the right solutions and the right team mix in place, marketers will be well-positioned to increase the success of their contextual campaigns and drive customer loyalty.
