Finding more ways to be customer-centric is something marketers should have as an ongoing goal, according to Mark Klein, founder and CEO of Loyalty Builders.
“Most companies we see are product-oriented, which is the opposite approach to customer-centricity,” Klein told Loyalty 360. “Look at the customer and find out what would the customer likely want to buy. Recognize ways to really grow your business through cross-channel selling rather than acquisition.”
Klein said most companies he works with get most of their revenue from existing customers, but spend most of their money on customer acquisition.
“They don’t know how to do cross-selling and the reason is they don’t know what the customer wants to buy,” Klein said. “It doesn’t surprise me at all because they don’t know how to be customer-centric and don’t know how to deal with their customers,” Klein said.
If a business chooses to use a product from Loyalty Builders, Klein tells them: “A year or so down the road you’ll be doing more of a mix of customer-centric than product-centric campaigns.”
Successful cross-selling is about knowing what products to offer to each individual customer, Klein said.
Loyalty Builders just launched a new product called Longbow 2.0 -- the first cloud-based, self-service customer analytics platform for individualized marketing. It analyzes customers’ past behavior to develop highly-accurate predictions of future purchases at the individual account and individual product level. It then creates unique marketing messages that are highly relevant and targeted at each individual.
Loyalty Builders has developed proprietary algorithms that leverage transaction data to predict which individual customers are likely to buy or defect and what products they will likely purchase. It can then deliver offers based on those predictions. The solution can be put to use within minutes and without the need for advanced statisticians.
Longbow 2.0 takes in basic transaction data, such as a customer ID, which goods were purchased and total amount of a sale, and then identifies the best customers to include in individualized marketing campaigns and what to offer each one. To make deployment as simple and easy as possible, Longbow 2.0 also automatically creates lists of targeted customers and the specific offer recommendations that can be downloaded and shared directly with variable data printers, email service providers or other marketing partners who will execute.
“This analyzes behavior at the individual level,” Klein said.
Relevant communications can increase order magnitude significantly, Klein said, in the double-digit percentage range.
“Companies have to be able to identify their customers and that data comes out of their ERP systems,” Klein said.
Klein, who said his company deals equally with B2B and B2C clients, measures efficacy or response rates on a monthly basis by looking at purchases made, and then takes that data – customer ID, transaction date, SKU, quantity, amount -- and predicts what customers are likely to buy.
Subsequently, Loyalty Builders then identifies the best customers to include in individualized marketing campaigns and what to offer each one. Lists of targeted customers are created and can be downloaded and shared directly with variable data printers, email service providers, or other marketing partners.