USING THE POWER OF PRECISION MARKETING TO BETTER ENGAGE CUSTOMERS
Consumers today are deluged and overloaded with a plethora of unwanted direct marketing and promotional messages that are blasted out via email, or mass-produced and mailed in vast quantities, ending up choking mail boxes and filling recycling bins. In most cases, recipients ignore, or have become immune, to standardized commercial overtures. And with the advent of the Internet are seeking product information and affirmation from trusted sources and referral networks online.
Staying relevant, valued and connected to customers has become the number one challenge for marketers. This requires a new level of Precision Marketing base on deep data mining and customer analytics, transactional and behavioral insights, as well as effective listening and feedback systems. Tailoring and targeting communications on an individual level with mass customization technologies in print, digital and retail channels enables marketers to significantly improve consumer reaction and response to marketing campaign and continuity relationship building programs.
Continuing to grow and leverage knowledge and understanding of a customer across the life cycle of the relationship is essential to staying relevant, welcome and wanted. This is at the heart of Individualized Relationship Marketing and requires a strong commitment to customer data integration (CDI) and continuous tracking of life stage developments, customer value, purchasing activity, buying intentions, and up-sell and cross-sell opportunities.
In the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council report, Routes to Revenue, marketers identified critical tactics and strategies to deepening engagement. Nearly 60 percent said they intend to improve customer segmentation, profiling and targeting, while 30 percent reported they were embracing more personalized, multi-channel communications across all customer touch points. However, only 15 percent of marketers believe their companies are doing an extremely good job of integrating disparate customer data sources and repositories; 55 percent note there is room for improvement in this area.
When you consider that over 76 percent of survey respondents were not realizing the full revenue potential of their existing customer base, it is not hard to understand the desire to build deeper, more direct relationships with key customers. Adding to this challenge, and due in part to a weakened economy, marketers are under greater pressure to realize greater revenues and drive the bottom line growth, while reducing both head counts and budgets. Sadly, marketing also indicated that personalization might have greater challenges than the economy to face. Over 22 percent of marketers felt that their lack of real-time data and analytics was a critical roadblock to having customer insights into customer retention, profitability and lifetime value. While customer data continued to remain in functional silos spread across the organization, marketing found that what data was accessible was often incomplete and inaccurate. However, the need for marketing to engage in a more precise and directed manner was understood, the challenge, as stated in Routes to Revenue, was how.
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