What is Customer Marketing Analytics? Challenges, Best Practices, and More - NGDATA

Customer marketing analytics is a solution for gaining customer insights to deliver superior customer experiences tailored to customers’ preferences and needs. Customer marketing analytics tools combine data to give you a complete view of the customer and generate actionable insights to increase customer lifetime value.

Challenges with Customer Marketing Analytics

Companies that gather and store Big Data in silos struggle with fragmented data that does not reveal a complete or accurate picture of consumers. Without a comprehensive, atomic-level view of customers, it’s difficult to personalize service and deliver optimized experiences; competitors who leverage tools that gather data from all sources and deliver insights in real-time have a distinct advantage.

Incomplete customer data leads to inferior customer experiences, which translates to damaged reputations for companies, especially now that customers write and share negative reviews across myriad online sources – from social media to Yelp, company websites, and beyond. One study shows that 95% of people usually tell at least one other person about a bad customer experience, and 54% share it with at least five other people. Additionally, the same study found that 88% of consumers are influenced by online reviews when making purchasing decisions. The bottom line is, with incomplete customer data or a customer marketing analytics solution that does not address siloed data, your bottom line will suffer as you deliver experiences that fail to live up to customers’ expectations.

Benefits of Customer Marketing Analytics

Today’s customers are savvy. They know that companies collect data on them, and they expect companies to personalize interactions with them as a result. They also expect to receive relevant information and offers in a timely manner. Customer marketing analytics is the one solution to all of these customer demands because it encompasses predictive modeling, data visualization, information management, and more. The stronger your analytics, the better your chances of delivering the right experience at every step of their customer journey through personalized interactions, making the right offers at the right time, and tailoring experiences that go above and beyond expectations.

Just as poor experiences hurt your bottom line, superior experiences have a positive impact. Customers now place such a high value on great experiences that 85% of them claim they will pay more for a better customer experience; in fact, one report shows that it will overtake price and product as key brand differentiators by 2020. Having the right tools makes it possible for you to gather data from all sources in real-time so that you can not only meet, but exceed customer expectations at every step of the buying journey.

Specific benefits of a comprehensive customer marketing analytics solution include:

• Increasing customer loyalty
• Increasing customer retention rates
• Increasing customer lifetime value
• Knowing which customers are in danger of churning
• Delivering the right message at the right time on the right channel
• Gaining a complete view of customers across channels
• Becoming customer-centric and proactive rather than reactive
• Personalizing interactions with customers
• Engaging customers in real time
• Gaining actionable insight

McKinsey & Company has found that customer marketing analytics significantly drive value: “companies that make extensive use of customer analytics are more likely to report outperforming their competitors on key performance metrics, whether profit, sales, sales growth, or return on investment.” Companies that strive to create a culture that values data-driven decision making reap more benefits. And, the more senior management is involved in customer analytics, the more successful companies are.

Best Practices for Effective Customer Marketing Analytics

To get the most from your data, implement the following best practices:

• Eliminate data siloes – Leverage tools that aggregate data from a multitude of sources to better identify trends and patterns that reveal consumer sentiment, customer pain points, and needs at various stages throughout the decision-making journey.
• Leverage real-time data – Real-time data and insights make it possible to deliver targeted, personalized messaging that meets consumers’ needs at the right time and at the right touchpoints throughout the buyer’s journey.
• Translate raw data into actionable insights – Raw data is only as useful as the insights you’re able to derive from it. Utilize solutions that make it easy to glean actionable insights from your data to drive decision-making.
• Deliver a consistent experience across channels – Today’s consumers are engaging with brands across myriad channels and touchpoints. Focus on creating a consistent experience across all channels such as email marketing, social media, video, and every touchpoint through which consumers interact with your brand.
• Focus on the individual – Segmentation was once a valuable strategy, and while it can still prove useful, today’s consumers expect to be treated as individuals. Customer-centric organizations can only achieve this level of personalization when they have an atomic-level view of every consumer.

By putting the customer at the center of your marketing strategy and leveraging advanced, comprehensive analytics tools, delivering the experiences consumers demand and outpacing the competition is within reach for organizations of all sizes.

Additional Resources

For further information leveraging advanced analytics to enhance marketing, visit the following related posts:

• Next Best Offer Marketing is Customer-Centric Marketing
• Retaining Customers Requires Understanding Customers
• 27 Customer Experience Pros and Business Leaders Reveal the Single Most Important First Step in Developing a Successful CX Strategy