Tag: CLV

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Good customer analytics starts with good data

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The Importance of Comprehensive and Correct Customer Data

Consumer data helps companies a great deal to improve nearly every aspect of their business. With proper data analytics and a data-driven marketing approach, brands are able to gain actionable customer insights, generate quality leads and increase customer loyalty, among other things.

According to a survey done by Harvard Business Review, 58% of enterprises have experienced a hike in customer retention and loyalty by making the right use of customer analytics. 

Elevating the quality of your customer data can benefit your business in a number of ways and here are a few thoughts on aspects you might want to consider:

The enhanced customer experience (CX): There is evidence to suggest that businesses that are customer-centric tend to be way ahead of their competitors. To follow a customer-driven approach, you need access to comprehensive customer-specific data. The gathered and enhanced customer data can be useful in being able to understanding and predicting customer behaviour which in turn can be used to improve customer experience through customized offerings, messaging, interaction and services. Without the data, it is hard to provide anything more than a generic message or offer which may not resonate.

Precise targeting and lead generation accompanied with a lower CAC: Effective marketing can translate into a shorter sales cycle, greater sales volume, or appeal to a wider customer audience. For a marketing campaign to be effective though, it needs to have good data to support the estimation of the potential target market or market segment. Having good customer data opens up the opportunity to segment based on customer demographics, showing where the customers are, their age group, their gender, education, likely income, potential disposable income, and other critical traits that you might consider for targeting.

Drawing customers in for multiple engagements or appealing to new customers is made more likely with comprehensive and correct customer data that allow your business to focus on customer-characteristic-based marketing strategies to generate quality leads.

According to Thomas Griffin Co-Founder and President of OptinMonster in a piece on Forbes – customer acquisition cost (CAC) can be lowered if you have the right targeted message aimed at the right audience, whether it be PPC or contact-based marketing campaigns. To have that message, you need to know something about your audience, particularly if you’re running contact-based campaigns

Brand Improvement: Customer feedback and reviews form an important part of customer data but for this kind of data to be really useful, it needs to be tied to the best possible customer master data. To run effective customer review and survey data analytics you want to be able to paint a complete picture of respondents. Survey submissions that support uncovering the strengths and weaknesses of your brand and offerings can be effective in isolation by conveying a sense of general measures of customer satisfaction but they ultimately reduce their usefulness without reference to customer data.

Survey responses may impair your ability to derive maximum value from responses by being unable to tie them back to the respondent’s lifetime customer value. The CLV model informs you on whether the commenting customers are actually high-value customers or one-off customers who bought on a deal or opportunistically and that may never buy from you again.

Tools matter: we’ve talked about tools before, principally tools like your Customer Data Platform (CDP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution where you store large amounts of data and consumer profiles. You may even have an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system or a CDM (Customer Data Management) platform. Your business may in fact have all of these., but the question of whether they are fit for purpose or suitable for all the jobs that your business needs to undertake needs to be carefully considered.

We’ve observed that there is a lot of enthusiasm about using AI for data collection accompanied by scraping tools and social media trawlers and transaction aggregators to increase the volume of data collected.  What we’ve also observed is that some of the fundamentals of knowing your customer remain missing or incomplete. This is partially due to poor data collection, collation, and assessment processes but it is also a function of the nature of the tools. Some tools are better suited to transaction processing, interaction or engagement, etc. Very few of the tools that we’ve mentioned, are suited to mastery of the digital customer and if they are, it is typically in the service of a specific application objective.

Customer data is presently experiencing a revolution in the business world. Data for every kind of business, from B2B sales and eCommerce brands to digital content creators, service and hospitality, healthcare and financial services, and a number of others too. All depend on gaining a source of appropriate and correct customer data to increase their leads, opportunities, and ultimately business., Knowing the audience, creating personalized marketing strategies, generating quality leads, and reaching a wider audience is the brass ring that leads to business success.

There is no exaggeration in saying that in today’s world of digital advancement, your company cannot survive without the best possible proper and relevant customer data. We believe you can achieve that with a Customer Master Data Management (CMDM) platform like that offered by Pretectum.

Contact us today for more information.

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Why you should think of your Customer Data as Important.

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Data is nothing more than a collection of different types of information that businesses use to add value to their goods or services.

As consumers, we might wonder how that’s is possible, but it’s true, and as business owners and officers, it is important to know how businesses can benefit from that consumer data.

Let’s take a look at how customer data could help you increase your business’ value. Let’s start by understanding the special characteristics of customer data.

Customer data attributes

Various types of consumer data differ in their features and can be useful in different ways. Consumer data can also be gathered in many different forms:

Fundamental Information: this includes basic information about the consumer, their name, email address, demographic data, etc. This does not include tracking any of the behaviours of the consumers.

This fundamental information is most often considered Customer or Consumer Master Data.

Interaction Data: This data includes how the customer is involved with a product, which websites they perhaps visit, which eBook they download, etc. This offers potential for helping to personalize the services that a business may offer or consider offering by understanding the behaviour of the consumer.

Consumer Attitude Data: This is often first-hand information obtained by companies by conducting surveys. It helps a company to understand the personal qualities, preferences and opinions of the consumer which can then be used to tailor services towards those consumers.

Your business may have some of this data already or may also be looking to leverage mechanisms to get access to data like any one of these data types. The real question, is after you have this data, what can you do with it and what is it worth?

How could consumer data add business value? 

Here are some thoughts on how your business could take advantage of the data that it has and derive the most business value.

Insights about market and customer choice: The more comprehensive and complete the data that you have for your customers or prospects, the more appropriate your understanding of the market and customer choices will be. In the absence of data, your understanding of the market can only be guesswork. You can rely on the statistics of sales and service to tell you about customer choice but if you don’t have good statistical data then you will have to make a lot of assumptions about customers’ preferred choices and market preferences.

Improved Decision Making: Consumer data, when aggregated, summarised, sliced and diced, assists a business in making informed decisions. Decisions that can increase business productivity and efficiency. You could, for example, more easily understand which of your products is more in demand, this could, in turn, lead to a focus on targeted marketing or promotion strategies that will drive increased sales and revenue. Quick and effective decisions call for fast and accurately delivered data.

Personalized Approach: In order to maximize the potential revenue or engagement of customers and prospects a degree of message customization will bring tremendous advantages. Personalized communication has never been more appropriate or affordable and can jumpstart marketing and sales campaigns. Marketers can now create and send individualized emails to specific target groups with specific needs. A personalized approach gives a business a better understanding of the audience which puts an emphasis on relevance and should be expected to drive more engagement and business opportunities.

Don’t allow your marketing campaigns and business plans to stagnate because you continue to labour under the traditional model of underutilized business data.

Instead, start with upgrading to a newer and better Customer Master Data Management approach with the Pretectum CMDM – contact us for more information.

LY

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Harnessing Customer Data to Boost Monetization

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Businesses across the world are looking at future prospects of customer data to harness consumer preferences to boost sales. This will not only help individual businesses but large and small corporate houses as well.

This trend seems to be catching on fast! This is a positive move toward helping burgeoning economies in third-world nations boost their overall economic progress.

Let’s analyze how customer data management (CDM) will affect people from a business perspective and how being armed with the right laws, rules and regulations we can ensure overall growth, prosperity and harmony for both business owners and consumers.

How do businesses collect data?

The “Customer is King” and “customer satisfaction”, are mottos often used by large and small organizations. They collect, analyze, organize, report and share their data within business units and perhaps even with other organizations. This data is systematically maintained by accessible and cost-effective software, often stored in on-premise systems and “in the cloud”.

For big or small retail businesses to thrive, customer satisfaction must be their prime modus operandi. In order for this to occur, customer data must be obtained, reviewed, refined and verified or validated by the organization.

To understand the mental and psychological behaviours of the customer, and how they choose, buy and spend on goods and services of their choice the data under study has to be considered relative to where it comes from.

Enterprises have many mechanisms by which they collect data from customers. The varied sources may include the customer’s IP address and even device IDs.

Another way of harvesting data is through day-to-day engagements with customers and prospects on business websites and social media websites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and many more.

The third type of data collection is through the movement of the ‘mouse’ or cursor on the computer screen. E-commerce sites such as Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra and much more use this method to gather insights. This may throw light on purchase histories and preferences.

Lastly, behavioural data such as actual purchases may be gathered and aggregated and sorted, to give valuable insight and information on consumer metrics such as retail purchasing and product satisfaction.

Effective use of customer data to boost monetization

Companies that capitalize on the data that they have can also profit from it. Data brokers harvest bulk data of consumers from e-commerce companies.

Data brokers then use that customer data to process the most important information required by banks, financial institutions and insurance companies to verify customer background and credit history. This helps them to sanction loans more easily.

This channel presents itself as data management companies, that generate their own cash flow from reselling the aggregated insights that they have regarding customer activity.

Advertising and marketing companies may use customer data to improve website functionality by creating customized promotions and special offers on products and services uniquely designed for individuals.

Such companies capitalize on their marketing competencies and behavioural intelligence derived from years of experience in handling and understanding customer behaviour, sentiments, needs and trends.

Staying compliant

According to Max Freedman, Contributing Writer at the Business News Daily, “So much consumer data has been captured and analyzed that governments are crafting strict data and consumer privacy regulations designed to give individuals a modicum of control over how their data is used.“

The European Union’s General Data Protection Requirements (GDPR) lays out the rules of data capture, storage, usage, and sharing for companies, and GDPR regulation and compliance doesn’t just matter for European countries – it’s a law applicable to any business that targets or collects the personal data of EU citizens. Companies that ignore GDPR compliance and fail to abide by their legal obligation to uphold consumer privacy may face fines of up to 20 million euros or up to 4% of annual revenue, whichever is higher. Business News Daily

Data privacy has made it to the U.S. in the form of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). The CCPA is, in some ways, similar to Europe’s GDPR but differs in that it requires consumers to opt out of data collection rather than putting the onus on service providers to make sure that consumers “opt-in” or give their consent to data collection and use.

Privacy Acts in the US also require the individual states to develop applicable data law rather than a company’s internal decision-maker.

Doubtless, data collection by businesses is here to stay. However, as more and more consumers demand their privacy rights be protected, businesses will need to accept that will need to adopt new regulations and laws to clear the miasma surrounding their customer data management.

Customer Data Management (CDM) is a potentially powerful tool for businesses. It can be an added advantage to monetize customer data and protect customer accounts.

This valuable information and all the associated privacy considerations need to be well thought out to avoid data mismanagement. Businesses will need to think through their data handling ethic, their business practices and data management policies while avoiding falling foul of any legal requirements.

As consumers, we should be able to look forward to a world where the ethical and legal use of our data ushers in a new era of positive progress and prosperity across the globe.

SR

Pretectum’s cloud-based Customer Master Data Management platform is designed with policy and regulatory compliance and suitable data governance and control in mind. Curated, accurate and appropriate customer master data support business in the best possible customer interactions. To find out more contact us.