Consumers are connected to the brands they use in more ways than we could have imagined just five years ago. Today, consumers are reaching out to the brands, and no longer wait for brand initiated conversations.
A market advantage exists for those brands that handle customer-initiated interactions well. But how do the best brands succeed?
If your customer data exists in multiple locations, if it is not usably, intelligently accessible, and optimized to increase your revenue potential, your representatives – of every kind – don’t stand a chance.
Customers reach out in all sorts of ways: a call into a call center, a click on the chat function on your website, walking up to a kiosk. When a customer chooses to interact with a brand, they see it as one entity. It doesn’t matter if your website and your retail locations operate as two separate companies (Target, looking at you) or if the corporate office hasn’t sent the store the latest promotions. Consumers neither understand nor care about your organizational silos. They have a problem or want to place an order. They expect you to know how to fix their problem, how to meet their needs. Failure to do those things can have a dire impact on that customer’s relationship with your brand. Multiply that by a percentage of total daily customer interactions within a large company and you have a serious problem.
Your representatives exist in many forms and they all need to be empowered with information about the customer and the power to anticipate their needs successfully. An omni-channel marketing strategy can empower all of those representatives with the same tools. To make that strategy truly successful though, it must be fed with the right data makes it as successful as possible.
Companies with data-driven marketing programs are 55% more successful through the completion of the customer development cycle. According to data from Forbes Insights, only 21% of companies have fully implemented a data-driven marketing program. For everyone else, improvement means increases in everything from profitability to brand loyalty, from customer engagement to retention.
A data-driven approach is particularly useful for industries with a high volume of consumer interactions, namely retail, telecommunications, media and consumer goods. Despite the opportunity that available to these industries, the majority of companies are not capitalizing on data-driven marketing. Less than 20% of media or consumer goods companies have successful data-driven strategies in place. The retail industry is not much better; 63% of retail companies have substantial room to grow these types of campaigns.
Implemented correctly, data-driven marketing empowers your representatives of all kinds to speak intelligently and proactively to your clients. At its best, data-driven marketing helps you identify, keep and maximize the potential of your best clients.
We put together an infographic highlighting the advantages companies who implement a data-driven approach have on those who do not. You’ll find it here.
