Data-Driven Personalization: What is It and Why You Need It?
Gone are the days when you could randomly send promotional messages to your potential or existing customers. To successfully increase customer conversion rate, you need to be specific, personal and strategic with your marketing campaigns. Thus, marketers are continually shifting to data-driven marketing strategies to gather enough information about their customers to be able to deliver personalized and relevant content to them, at the right moment. Consistent understanding, analyzing prospects and customers to create a personalized customer experience is important to build engaging customer relationships.
Data-first marketing or data-driven marketing strategy makes calculated marketing decisions that can optimize campaigns to customer data. Marketers need to use reliable and accurate customer data to identify customer profiles better and enhance customer segmentation by making use of diverse marketing data management platforms and deliver personalized customer experiences.
Organizations need to follow the data-first marketing policy to build sustainable customer relationships and for the overall business success. This involves a consistent process of developing, understanding and getting to know the customers. By implementing and optimizing marketing campaigns based on customer data sourced from various data sources, organizations can leverage accurate and updated data in the marketing decision-making process. Data-first marketing strategy assists marketers to understand and analyze their customers’ better, enhancing segmentation and targeting them to increase the impact of messages and results.
Why do you need data-driven personalization in your marketing strategy?
Analyze and integrate customer data for better customer experience
As marketing automation allows you to collect all the metrics related to a customer journey, you need to make sure that you integrate that data wisely. Ensure that all the important data that boosts the experience of your automated customer lifecycle is in place. To target the right customers with the right messages, you need to know how interested they are in your company and its product, how satisfied they are with your services if they are a good fit for further engagement, what’s the current customer lifecycle stage, how often they bought the product, and more. Analyzing and integrating the right customer data at the right place helps you bridge the gap between CRM and marketing automation systems. Moreover, with the collected data, you can gain repeat sales by incorporating upsells and cross-selling. This helps you to keep your converted customers engaged for future business, by sending them information on your previous and upcoming products that they might be interested in or compliments their previous actions.
Bi-directional customer engagement capability
Marketing is all about gathering and analyzing customer data to improve your services and customer experience. A data-driven marketing approach helps you capture customer information throughout the customer lifecycle. Thus, it not only processes your old data to put it to best possible use but also has bi-directional integration with the CRM that you are already using. A bi-directional integration ensures that customer information is automatically updated on both tools, existing and new, simultaneously.
Targets every anonymous visitor
Since not all visitors convert to leads, the moment they visit your website or landing page, integrating data-driven targeting converts them into successful leads. It targets and nurtures all the anonymous visitors to your landing page to convert them into potential leads. By using browser fingerprint technology and Chatbots, and tracking all your anonymous visitors based on their source and behavior, data-driven marketing approach enables you to collect basic information like name and email address, which is important to target an anonymous website visitor.
Provides the right analytics to fix existing gaps
You can only improve yourself when you get a result of your effort. Traditional marketing never gave the marketers an option to check on how their strategy is working for the ultimate marketing objective. But the unified system of data-driven marketing helps you measure data reliably across marketing and sales teams by tracking the result of every digitized marketing stage. By analyzing the response of every target audience towards your marketing strategies, such as if the recipient opened your message and when, number of links clicked and from which web page, number of forms submitted, it helps you measure ROI and optimize your strategies accordingly to meet and exceed the desired result.
Enables you send messages at the right time
The beginning of the success of your marketing strategy is when the open rate of your messages increases and thus it is very important to monitor the metric related to the open rate. If you analyze that there is not much growth in this area, maybe you are not sending marketing messages at the right time. The right time to send marketing messages vary based on the target market and the product, but it is your responsibility to experiment with message sending times and figure out the best time that sees more open rates. With digital marketing ruling every platform, your target audience’s inbox might be getting flooded with promotional messages and if you are not sending messages when they are more likely to open it, there is a high possibility of your message getting lost in their pool of unread messages. Data-driven marketing helps you understand the customer lifecycle so that you can deliver messages at the right time.
Aids you select the right communication platform
With the effect of digitization spreading rapidly, your target audience might be using several platforms for communication. So are you aware of which channel to target your market in, to generate the best results? If not, then maybe this is where your marketing automation is facing a bottleneck. Data-driven marketing makes a thorough research on your customers to find out their most-used platform and target customers via such platforms.
Capturing the right data, then cleaning, protecting, and enriching it in real-time, helps you keep track of different kinds of data ranging from customer names, addresses, contact details, and special days, which help boost customer experience. Supervise all your data management plans and policies to protect, control, deliver and enhance the quality and value of organization data and to keep your data-driven marketing on point.
Customer engagement forms the backbone to any business success and thus, maintaining a healthy customer relationship throughout the customer lifecycle is crucial. But as your business grows and it gains more leads and customers, it might get little difficult for your marketing team to keep up, manually. To cater the increasing need for personalization in marketing, a data-driven approach can bring your business immense success.