The battle for consumer’s mindshare and wallet is intensifying. And to ensure a win, organizations are looking to transform the way they do business with their partner network in big ways, armed with high-quality data and modern toolsets. All too often, though, the vision is hardly supported with existing mindset, technology, and enterprise design to engage in a people-based marketing strategy. Further, with the growing number of data across myriad key marketing channels—such as direct mail, website, social, email, search, paid, and mobile, companies need to think beyond the customary ways. And this change of approach starts with laying the right foundation; moving focus from channel to audience; and employing right integration technology.
Laying the Right Foundation
For any organization, the ultimate goal is to increase revenue and productivity. This can be achieved after the necessary groundwork has been laid. Meaning that companies need to use modern tactics to:
- collect data
- analyze the data
- make the data more accessible
Data Collection: Companies need to gain a 360-degree view of the customer in order to comprehend their needs, requirements, and mindset in entirety. Once the details such as name, address, email and other demographics have been retained, users can add important transactional details including orders, invoices, payments to refine it further. All this information is vital for evaluating customers’ experiences to deliver better value.
Data Analyzation: Users need to analyze the data using analytics in order to measure and make decisions (based on the quality-based insights extracted from data) accordingly.
Data Accessibility: For better operations, applications need to access data. Whether it is the customer service applications, email programs, or enterprise decision-making system, users need to make sure that all their marketing channels have access to the data. This will help users take consistent decisions with speed and precision.
Putting Focus on Audience
After laying the foundation, users can move toward using data. However, a lot of things have to be taken into account to accomplish this. First, users have to consider that they have more than a single customer type and many paths to purchase. To create customer journeys and map out experiences from end to end, companies need to adopt a channel-agnostic approach. In doing so, they need to focus on two aspects:
- message anywhere
- measure everywhere
Message Anywhere: Companies no longer are constrained to using top-performing deciles for direct marketing or emailing “active” people. They can gain proper data access to move information between channels with speed and ease.
Measure Everywhere: Business users need to able to measure the key performance indicators across all channels and evaluate their influence on each other so that they can make informed decisions with confidence.
Employing Right Integration Technology
After building the foundation and moving the focus from channels to the audience, users need to use modern integration technology to:
- integrate data in a unified way
- automate data exchange and sharing mechanisms
- streamline communication and interoperability
Enterprise Data Integration: By integrating data from myriad sources and channels, companies can create a unified view of customer data with no difficulty. This helps companies access data quickly and extract quality-based insights for making informed decisions and ultimately offering delightful customer experiences. Modern integration platforms use a self-service approach to allow users (even the non-technical ones) to integrate data without any intervention. Meaning that users can integrate data without exhausting IT resources.
Automate Data Exchange and Sharing: Automating data exchange and sharing mechanisms across business ecosystems help users reduce the possibility of human errors, decrease bottlenecks and delays owing to manual processes, simplify data transfer processes, enhance transparency and control, and become easier to do business with.
Streamline Communication and Interoperability: As integration unifies data and simplifies data exchange and sharing, communication across the ecosystem becomes better than ever. And as communication becomes more transparent, interoperability problems disappear. Organizations’ ability to offer delightful customer experiences increases, which helps them drive more sales and make more revenue.
To conclude, organizations need to establish the right foundation, focus on the audience, and employ right integration technology to streamline data usage and drive efficiency for maximized returns.