In order to survive, marketers must be able to find, reach, engage and acquire customers in a competitive environment where other brands are rushing to do the same.
Leveraging data effectively can give your brand a competitive advantage in building a unified customer view in order to better understand the customer journey. Great marketing campaigns stem from building a complete picture of your customers and thoroughly recognizing their buying and channel preferences. But targeted marketing isn’t easy!
In fact, 83% of marketers say they struggle to create a single customer view with data being the culprit, according to a recent report by Forbes Insights. Company marketers stated that improving the customer experience was their top goal for using data in their marketing initiatives.
Poor data quality or missing data are often cited as obstacles for developing a unified customer view in order to provide 1-to-1 communications and a seamless customer experience. Remember, while traditionally used for new customer acquisition, third party data also can effectively be used to boost customer retention and improve your customer experiences with more relevant and targeted communications.
For example, a company may know details about a consumer, but learning something new such as age, income, purchasing preferences, occupation or lifestyle, could allow marketers to upsell, cross-sell or improve customer relationships.
Most importantly, marketers will want to find a third party data provider that uses a variety of sources such as public records, consumer surveys, purchase transactions, real estate data and questionnaires.
Here are 3 types of data sets you will want to use to ensure you have a unified customer view:
Consumer demographics
Add details to your existing database in order to better understand your customers, including:
- Date of birth
- Home Ownership
- Age
- Gender
- Purchase Behavior
- Lifestyle Interests
- Presence of children
- Ethnicity
- Marital Status
Email Append & Validation
Add opt-in email addresses to a customer database to be able to reach your customers with their preferred communication method. And if you have only email addresses and names in your customer database, you may want to do a reverse email append to get additional contact information.
Phone & Reverse Phone Append
Compiled consumer and business telephone numbers including newly connected numbers can ensure that you have the correct contact information for customers. A reverse phone match can add names and addresses for telephone numbers of your customers.
With the wealth of data available, marketers will need to blend first party and third party data for a robust in-depth view of their customers. Third party data can help marketers strengthen customer insights and develop personalized messaging to win today’s shoppers.
Do you have gaps in your customer data that are preventing you from segmenting offers to relevant groups? If you need helping deciding what are important third party data elements to add to your existing customer file, or if you just want to discuss ways to create a unified customer view, please contact the data experts at AccuData Integrated Marketing.