For Niles Kinerk, CEO of horticultural mailer Gardens Alive!, keeping up with data is one thing. But being able to leverage it in a unique way to enhance customer engagement is the challenge.
“Data availability is exciting, but how to take advantage of it is an ongoing issue,” Kinerk told Loyalty360. “It is easy to get buried by the data and not find the ‘keys’ to unlock the profit potential held in our data warehouse. Of course, data integrity always has been an issue, and I suspect always will be. As changes and improvements are made to programs, it is surprisingly easy to suddenly find that one is sorting on the wrong field, or that there has been a change in how some part of the basic data is being calculated. Software companies will explain how this can’t happen with their systems, but somehow it does. Still, whatever the challenges are with data use, it has continued to be more important with each year.”
While his definition of loyalty is changing “around the edges”, in the end it comes down to one thing.
“In the end, it still comes down to repeat orders,” Kinerk explained. “With the increasing importance of the multitude of uses of the Internet, we use more of a contact strategy to encourage customers to come to us for information, and to stay engaged with the idea that this will result in more lifetime value.”
Technology is a huge component to success today, Kinerk said.
“Technology is very important in almost everything we touch in our marketing programs,” he said. “From the most basic merge/purge, to more sophisticated neural exploration of our data base. Technology will continue to be important as we attempt to present our customers with relevant information and products based on their purchase and search history. I believe that presenting our customers with product which we know they have a particular interest in, rather than making email blasts of the same product to our entire email file, should have a significant impact on customer loyalty.”