Are You Creating a Seamless Customer Experience?

January 20, 2016

In a world in which customers increasingly expect to move seamlessly from channel to channel, 78% of customers still receive a fragmented channel experience, according to Accenture. How can you provide a better experience? How can you connect the dots so that your customers receive a consistent, relevant message regardless of the channel—print, email, social media, mobile?

It starts with having good, complete data that provides a holistic picture of who your customers are and how they behave. What types of data can you draw from?

First Party Data

This is your data—all the data you’ve collected from your various systems. This includes your mailing list, your email list, your CRM system, and any other data gathered from social media and mobile interactions with your company.

Second Party Data

This is first party data you rent, purchase, beg, or borrow from someone else. This might be data you purchase from a data house or that you share with a noncompetitive company with which you have a strategic relationship.

Third Party Data

This is data you have gathered from other third parties, including websites and social media.

Oracle gives an example of how a company might use these types of data to help in a multi-channel campaign. In its white paper “Modern Marketing Essentials Guide to Data Management,” the company gives the example of an airline that wants to market its credit card. Here are places the airline might mine data to define its target audience:

• Members of its loyalty program (sourced from CRM)
• Customers who frequently purchase travel online (sourced from the airline’s website)
• Consumers in the market for travel credit cards (sourced from third-party data marketplace)
• Customers or prospects exhibiting high engagement with monthly newsletters (sourced from email)
• Consumers posting/tweeting about travel credit cards (sourced from social media)

Gathering and consolidating this data helps the airline define a highly targeted audience. It also helps it more closely customize and target the messaging based on each consumer’s behavior and relationship with the company. Other market verticals can use similar strategies, mining information from their own loyalty programs, website inquiries, and email newsletters, as well as third party data including specialty credit card inquiries, magazine subscriptions, or catalog purchases.

Once this data is gathered, it can be centralized so it’s all in one place. You clean it up, determine what data will provide you with the most actionable intelligence for your marketing goals, and fill in any holes. Now you can begin incorporating that data consistently into all marketing channels to provide customers with a seamless, personalized experience.

TO THE TOP