Social Media Optimization or SMO is not a tool but it is today’s internet culture. With the Social Media Optimization sites on internet, people have got a good platform to become more social, more interactive and more communicative. What is SMO? Social Media Optimization doesn’t only allow discovering and reading the content and information but also encourages you to share the knowledge what you have. It is no more a one-way process but is a two way communication..
What is SMO?
(You have to Watch this Great Video on Youtube Now!)
Email marketing allows businesses to reach current and potential customers in the place they go every single day – their inbox.
But how do you make sure that your emails are opened when they reach your subscribers?
You can create brilliant and engaging content, but if people do not open your emails, then they will not become your customers.
Even if your business already has a quite strong open rate, once numbers start to slow down, you’re probably wondering what you can do to push them in the right direction.
Today, I will help you improve the open rate of your next email campaign.
What is the open rate in email marketing?
Email open rate is the percentage of subscribers who open a specific email. These rates usually vary depending on the email subject line and the relevancy. Let’s take a look a the best open rate strategies which will boost your business.
Today I will analyze a case study of an Etsy seller who produces cute, handmade stickers. Every month, this seller sends a newsletter with her stickers catalog, discounts, and journaling ideas/tips.
This Etsy seller improved her email open rate and sales when she tried these 6 strategies.
1. Create engaging subject lines
As mentioned before, your subject line is one of the essential parts of your email; this is the first thing your subscribers see when they open their inbox. Like an article headline or the tagline of an ad, your subject line is meant to draw attention and get someone interested in what you have to offer.
Invest some time in your subject line and analyze previous email campaign metrics before hitting send. Here are some ideas to help you get started:
Question: Using a question in your subject line is a great way to engage and make a more personal connection with the subscribers viewing your emails.
For example:
Command: Sometimes, it pays off to be direct with your subscribers and tell them what you want them to do.
For example:
Tease: Believe it or not, but people love to be teased sometimes. And if the teaser stimulates interest, then it will attract subscribers to read on.
For example:
Listing: It’s easier for people to consume the information if it is listed.
For example:
Announcement: If your email’s goal is to announce something new, then you don’t have to make things complicated.
For example:
2. Check your sign-up process
People will open your emails only if they subscribed themselves for it, and your newsletters fulfill their expectations. It’s your responsibility to make sure that your subscribers understand what they are signing up for.
Make sure that your subscriber understands this:
What value they will get from your newsletters
How often they will receive your emails
What they can expect to get
Here’s a good example of a subscriber sign-up form:
3. ‘From’ subject line
The from field lets subscribers know who the email sender is. If you’re not considering carefully the information you write in this field, you could be making it difficult for people to recognize your email.
People are usually skeptical of emails when they don’t know the sender, which creates a possibility to mark your email as spam.
Use a familiar from name and from email address that represents your company.
Also, use an email address with your business’s name rather than a personal email, Hotmail, Gmail, etc.
4. Know your audience
You may know and understand your consumers’ needs, but how much do you know about the subscribers on your email list?
Do you know why they joined your mailing list? Do you know what topics they’re interested in? Do you know how you could help them?
Understanding your email list is crucial for better results. You can start to target your contacts with more relevant information when you learn more about your mailing list. Here are some ideas to help you:
Poll: Ask readers to take a quick poll. One question should be enough.
Survey: Send an extra short 1-3 question survey to find out what topics your subscribers are interested in.
Ask: If you have people who unsubscribed from your mailing list, ask them why they are leaving to understand the reason and how you could improve.
Metrics: Always analyze your email campaign results to understand why people are more interested in some topics.
The easiest way to find the best time to send your newsletters is to split your list into two or more equally sized groups and send the same email during different times of the day (morning, evening, etc.). After a while, you will have the data of what time works for your mailing list.
For example, the Etsy seller above was sending her emails every Monday at 10 am because she saw that her subscribers loved to journal and plan their week at that specific time.
Also, if you are using an email marketing tool like Sender then do not forget to schedule your email campaigns, because 10 am in the USA and Europe is different, and you have to act according to your subscribers.
What is email automation? The use of predefined commands to trigger email communications based on specific actions that consumers take.
For example, a welcome email that is sent when someone signs up for a mailing list or a reminder that a client placed a product in their cart but never finished checking out.
Email automation takes repetitive tasks off your list and improves the open rate. It improves open rates because it sends emails according to subscribers’ actions, and they expect to get an email from you.
The Etsy seller above saw a 32% improvement in open rates when she started using email automation. Let’s analyze what she changed:
She automatically sent follow-up emails to subscribers who didn’t open her newsletters.
She automatically sent sign up confirmation forms to new subscribers with a message of what they can expect from her emails.
She automatically sent her new product’s catalog newsletter to subscribers who clicked on the link in the previous email campaign.
These three email automation examples not only improved her open rates but also increased her sales.
Wrapping up
If you see that your email open rate decreases, don’t give up on email marketing yet, you can still improve.
Firstly, try implementing these strategies: create engaging subject lines, check your sign-up process, review the ‘from’ section, get to know your audience, send emails at the best time, and automate your emails.
Also, don’t forget to follow your email marketing metrics, analyze them, and act accordingly.
Guest author: Skirmantas Venckus is a writer by day and reader by night. He hates talking about himself in the third person. He is also the growth hacker at Sender.net – the email marketing provider that is focused on user-friendliness, affordability, and utility.
Whether it is buying a product, digging for more about your solution, jumping on your email list, downloading a free report, or simply following you on a social network – everything hinges on your sales copy.
Effective sales copy must be engaging, credible, clear, concise, and persuasive.
It’s one of the most powerful marketing skills out there.
And over the course of this piece, I will give you 3 hefty sales copywriting approaches.
Do them right, and you’ll be spinning gold in no time.
Stories help educate us. They shape our understanding of events.
They root us in an ongoing stream of history. Ultimately, helping us with our sense of belonging and establishing our identities.
Humans love sharing stories with one another. And stories are the best way to connect with a persona to build a relationship.
So storytelling must be a part of your marketing strategy too, right?
Given it’s such an effective way to relate with people 1-on-1, a good story is a crucial factor in terms of building relationships with your target audience.
Chances are, you’re not the only business offering your particular type of solution. You’ve got competition.
And even if you don’t work in an extremely competitive market, you still have to fight for the attention of your target audience.
Why the word ‘fight’?
Because every 60 seconds in 2017, people publish:
And all of that happens over and over again. Every minute. Every day.
As a marketer, your job is to cut through that huge noise and strike a human connection.
And again, one of the fastest ways to make a human connection is by sharing a compelling story.
In marketing, you’ll be doing a lot of storytelling with your content. So it’s essential to study the anatomy of a good story.
Marketing storytelling isn’t very different from literature storytelling.
You’ve got characters. You’ve got a perspective. You’ve got a conflict. And you’ve got a resolution.
Let’s go over these elements one by one, so you can understand them better.
Element #1: Characters
When crafting a story, first, you must consider the people involved.
Who is the story about? Who’s taking action? Who’s facing a problem that needs to be overcome.
In marketing stories, the main character of your story will often reflect your reader.
But for that to work, it’s important to know your reader. And how do you do that?
By creating detailed buyer personas. So what’s a buyer persona?
It’s basically a composite sketch of a certain segment of your audience. Based on a combination of raw data and education guesses about who your readers are.
It’s a way to visualize an individual person consuming your content and identify the best way to connect with them.
If you work in a big company that’s been doing marketing for a long time, you may already have some buyer personas to work with.
Here’s the creation process:
Each buyer persona will have a name. This is totally arbitrary but helps to picture them as real people.
The rest of the information will vary depending on what your business does. But here are some examples of data points you’d want to include:
Job title: What do they do? What’s their job description?
Salary: How much money do they make?
Age: How old are they?
Gender: Does your audience skew toward one gender or another?
Location: Are your prospects based in a single place or distributed?
Education: Are they college-educated? Do they have a common field of study?
Family: Are they single? Married? Do they have kids?
Hobbies: What do they like to do for fun?
Reading habits: Who do they turn to for information?
Goals: What are their ambitions? What do they want out of life?
Challenges: What problems are they facing? And how could you help solve them?
Values: What’s most important to them? And why?
Fears: What keeps them up at night? And what helps alleviate those fears?
While these are just examples, these are the kinds of things you’d want to know.
You must be wondering where all this information is coming from.
It’s a combination of raw data and educated guesses, and it can come from a variety of sources.
For example, you can look at your website analytics to see where your visitors are coming from, what keywords they use to find your site, how long they stayed, which links they clicked, and so on.
These can tell you a lot about the desires and motivations of your audience.
Element #2: Perspective
Next, you must consider your story’s perspective, which ties directly to your character.
It could be the first person, second person, or third person.
First-person: Here, your main character is the author. You use words like “me” and “I,” and your story generally comes from firsthand experiences.
This is ideal if you’re an expert on a topic, and you want to share tips, advice, and experiences – based on your unique background.
Second-person: This approach is more focused on your audience. You use words like “You” and “Your” – and your reader plays the lead role in your story.
It’s all about their circumstances, their challenges, and how they can solve their problems. The second person is rare in common literature. But in marketing, it’s very common. Because, again, your audience would often be the primary focus of your story.
And of course, we also have…
Third-person: This is where the main character of your story is a third party. Here, you mainly use pronouns like “He,” “She,” or “They.”
This is something you’re probably familiar with. Because most books are written in the third person.
However, it’s not quite as common in marketing. The reason? Because it’s generally not as personal.
However, one common use of the third person in marketing is a case study. Here, you tell the story of how a customer/client used your company to eradicate a problem, and highlight the results.
In this case, that particular customer is the main character.
Element #3: Conflict
Conflict is what makes a story – a story.
Any compelling story needs an element of conflict.
This can be a specific conflict between two or more characters, or even just a problem in the main character’s life that needs to be solved.
So when you’re creating a piece of content to help your reader do something, you want to frame it as a conflict – a problem that you can help them solve.
If there’s no conflict, there’s no story.
And finally…
Element #4: Resolution
All stories need a resolution.
If you just present a conflict and end it there, your story will seem anti-climactic, and your reader won’t benefit from your content.
The resolution is the main conclusion, based on how the main character solved the problem.
So, if you’re writing in the first person, you’d be writing how you solved the problem.
In the second person, it’d be how the reader solved the problem.
And in the third person, it’d be how some third party solved a problem. Think case studies.
So now you know why stories are important, and you’re familiar with the core elements of a story.
Keep these in mind when approaching your content creation process.
You can stir their emotions with words and persuade them to believe in your product/service. Belief increases sales.
Decisions and purchasing behaviors are mostly driven by emotion. According to Harvard professor Gerald Zaltman, 95% of people make purchasing decisions subconsciously:
So, if you’re considering cramming your copy with facts, figures, and stats, discard the thought. You need to input sentences that click with your customers.
Something they can relate to instantly.
You need to write to the people and problems instead of writing for SEO. Of course, technical writing and keywords are important, but that shouldn’t outweigh the significance of the user experience.
Fuel customers’ emotions and sprinkle empathy. Figure out what problems they’re facing and what are their solution preferences.
When you write to their problems, show empathy. Let them feel you understand what they’re going through. Highlight their problems and show them how it could affect them after a while.
Once they’re on the hook, sell your product as a solution. Tell them how your product could solve their problem effectively.
One of the most powerful among this is fear. Using fear to sell products might be an easier option. Copy that increases fear gets customers anxious to see your product/service as the solution to overcome the fear.
Whichever product you’re selling, understand how the customers are feeling with the problem and without any appropriate solution.
What emotion could they possibly have about the problem? Is it fear, desire, or frustration?
Let’s see some examples:
Fear
Let’s say you’re selling a pet microchip. “Are you afraid that your furball might get lost in a new area? We got you. Use our microchip to ensure maximum safety.”
Desire
“Do you want to steer clear from the wrinkle phase and stay ever-glowing? We know you do. Hold your youth with our rejuvenating skincare line.”
Frustration
“Are you frustrated about failed job interviews? We have just the deal for you. Try out our monthly course to establish your business. The first week is free for you.”
In every case, we picked up their insecurity and assured them of helping with our product or service.
To promote/sell your product, you must find out the underlying cause of the solution they’re looking for.
Explain your offer with honesty and clarity. No over-promising stuff. Your offer will let the readers decide if the rest of the article is worth reading.
Once they decide to continue reading, it’s time for more persuasion.
Since there are a lot of over-promising, not-so-true claims, your readers will often have their guard on while reading your copy. You need to slowly take the guard off by asking the right questions.
Questions that get answered yes – all of them. That will make them feel understood, and they’ll put their guard down and be ready to read more.
Ask as many questions as possible to reveal more details and features of your product. Don’t leave them unanswered. That’ll only resist them from taking your offer.
Instead of telling them about the features of your product, tell them the benefit they’ll get from the features.
Like, instead of saying:
“Do you want to buy our super-fast race shoes?”
Say:
“Want running shoes to win the race? We’ve got you covered.”
See the difference?
Here, you’re fishing the right emotion, feeling it, and selling the benefits.
To unlock effective copywriting, research is the key.
Thorough research will lead you to the way of a successful sale. It’s the main element to produce engaging and motivating copy for consumers.
You can’t execute effective sales copy without deep research. You need to research your prospect, product, and a competitor to write a well versed, compelling, and detailed piece of copy. Proper research will give you knowledge about these three things.
To offer more than enough information for your customers, you need to know their expectations. When you do detailed research on your customer’s demands, you understand their needs completely.
You know what to offer them or what benefit will draw them in to make the call. This will even help you identify your potential customers.
Using the research, you’ll be able to carve out your offer according to your customer’s needs that resonate with them.
Instead of just sticking to the sale-sy mindset, put yourself in your customer’s shoes, and write persuasively.
Think about the benefits you’d want from the product and how you’d want it to be put in sales copy. That’ll give you an insight into what you need to put in your sales copy that will convey the right message and fetch you the sale that you’ve been dreaming of.
After gathering information about your customers, it’s time to study the product. You must find out every detail possible, no matter how trivial.
Every feature of the product will become a bridge to connect to the customer’s needs.
More and better research will give you more details to work with. You need to translate each feature into a benefit and each benefit into a story to draw your prospect’s attention from different angles.
Tell your customer in detail what the product does and how it could solve their problem.
Product research gathers specific information and characteristics of a particular product. This information allows companies to understand the customer’s demands better and improve or upgrade the product accordingly. Doing surveys will be a great initiative to play with new product ideas.
Now, you can’t just pick the description of the product and present it wrapped to your customer. You need to point out each potential benefit the product has to offer. Also, let them know how many extra ways they’ll benefit using your product besides just solving their problem.
Finally – research your competitors. You and your competitors are supposed to have a common objective – satisfying the customer’s needs.
Keep tabs on your competitor’s products. To help you with your research, answer questions like:
What new products have they launched?
What problems are they solving?
What are their shortcomings?
What’s their price range?
What are their benefits?
What are the features?
And so on.
Doing this will give you a few points to highlight in your copy in a competitive way.
It could be anything like longer shelf life, more savings, free servicing, or better customer care service. When you know their weaknesses, you’ll be able to lay your strengths against them.
That’ll help your customer see why your product is a better option. Ensure you point out the weakness and benefits clearly, and it should be able to shake your customer’s perception and encourage them to buy yours.
You just can’t make information up out of thin air. You need to put some solid material in it to work effectively.
So use Google and Google scholar as much as you can. Go join industry Facebook groups to understand the audience. Study the proven copy of the industry. Make a vault of quality sales copy, and you’re well on your way.
If you want to learn more about research, I will leave you with rockstar copywriter Joel Klettke.
Closing words
There you are.
Armed with the top three most powerful sales copywriting approaches.
If done properly, these methods can impact your marketing and sales big time. Even small tweaks can lead to huge rewards.
So make good use of them.
Guest author: Mehedi Hasan Shoab is a freelance content marketer helping businesses skyrocket. Want him to handle your work? See his website here.
eCommerce won’t be the same after this year’s events.
While the whole planet was frozen by the coronavirus pandemic, offline stores found they couldn’t compete with even the smallest online stores when people’s lifestyles were limited by their homes or neighborhoods.
But those who have just started online sales this year will quickly find out what to do to sell efficiently on the internet. This is why the overall competition will rise.
There are numerous applications, services, and programs created on these technologies, but not all of them are equally applicable to online retailers. And they’re quite expensive to implement.
So before you go adopting some fancy new technology, let’s have a look at ways AI can improve eCommerce growth, increase conversion rates, and improve the customer experience.
What is AI?
AI technologies help computers complete tasks humans would otherwise accomplish by successfully training computers in various abilities and by helping them learn from experience.
The whole idea of AI began in 1956, so it’s already an old and reliable technology with a strong mathematical and software base. There are a lot of different AI technologies being developed:
It’s been a long time since modern business settled on the internet, so AI has a lot of work to do with all the bytes of behavioral, financial, and marketing data that businesses have stored. And even if two out of five AI startups aren’t AI-based at all, you can still find AI-based solutions to intensify your sales growth.
The biggest negative of AI technologies is that they’re totally dependent on the data you feed them. If there’s not enough data or it’s of poor quality, you won’t get much use out of it. And it takes time to integrate this technology into your data ecosystem.
Where and why should you use AI in an eCommerce business?
As I mentioned, AI can’t work without volumes of data. That’s why before implementing AI, your data quality matters. AI motivates businesses to bring together departments – sales, marketing, advertising, customer service, even logistics – into a single data structure where data quality is the number one priority.
When all business data is stored and collected correctly – no data loss, no looping, no format disorders, all connections logically bounded and AI technology used for processing this data – you’ll get high-quality analytics with enough power to solve hard business problems, improve processes, and strengthen the customer experience.
Here’s a brief list of benefits you can obtain by implementing AI in your business:
Smartly assist customers with their search thanks to conversational commerce. Using AI, you can improve the search logic on your website and create a chatbot assistant that helps your customers place orders anywhere and anytime.
Make only personalized offers. By tracking all touchpoints and saving all products your customers have seen and all prices they’ve reacted to, you can determine the specific blend of goods and offers each customer wants.
Stop guessing your customer’s path and predict it instead. Make your customer journey as smooth as possible with AI-powered recommendations. When you can predict your customers’ behavior, you get a competitive advantage due to flexible margins and the possibility to estimate your future marketing plan performance.
Reduce human errors in supply chain planning and adjustment. Make your inventory and goods available at any time in the volume your customers need by means of AI. This optimization is possible both online and in-store and can give you real-time 100% transparent warehouse stock levels.
Detect problems before they hit you. Get notifications of anomalies or suspicious transactions, vendor activities, fraud, and shrinkage while you still have time to get involved in the situation and find out what’s happening.
Pump up your offline points of sale. If your AI collects information from sensors like video cameras, you get the magical ability to track your customers inside your physical stores. You can find out where people go, where they stop, and if they’re new or returning customers. You can also attract customers by making the best online offers available in stores.
To solidify your knowledge, let’s review a few examples of AI implemented in eCommerce.
Examples of how AI helps in eCommerce
Improve personalized targeting with predictive AI-based analytics
AI-powered sales targeting is one of the most popular applications of predictive analytics. It’s used for automatically determining customers who want to buy now and sending them personalized offers.
From a technical point of view, it’s looking for customers among your target audience who have the same set of features as a typical “ready to buy” group of existing customers.
This task is impossible for a human but doable for an AI algorithm.
You can create many to-do lists of automated reactions for defined types of customers:
Churning customers
Seasonal purchasers
Customers who have given feedback
Wholesale customers
AI experiments can result in a growth in sales, minimize deal closure times, and automate the whole sales process.
AI bots to deal with customer overflow
You need a bot to follow up with a massive number of leads after a successful advertising campaign. AI bots are most useful when they can react properly and in a timely manner to any message from your potential customers.
The most pleasant (and maybe unpleasant) thing is that you’re in total control of the way your bots talk with leads. For customers, chatting with a bot is like chatting with a company representative, which means it’s quite risky for the company’s credibility.
Your bot has to:
Make initial contact with customers
Answer FAQs based on simple scripts
Schedule a meeting or a day to get back in contact if a lead can’t reply immediately
Even the simplest AI bots work better than no answer at all, increasing conversions. Bots can reply by email with answers based on trigger words or respond via a chat window on your website or by Facebook Messenger.
AI visual search and image recognition and their creative applications in eCommerce
Visual search can provide exclusive customer experience and enable numerous experiments. If you’ve ever used the Pinterest Lens for visual search, you know what I’m talking about. The technology hidden inside is AI.
Retailers like Asos and Target also use AI technology for virtual fitting rooms. Choose a photo and category of goods you’re looking for and the algorithm will give you a best-fit match.
You can build thousands of ad campaigns with visual search or image recognition or augmented reality. And doing so will make your brand outstanding and memorable.
What’s next?
Advertising will never get you more than 400% ROAS, goods won’t sell themselves without detailed descriptions, photos, and video content, and customer service will never only give refunds without needing to handle complaints. Avoiding new technologies that can help your business optimize expenses and multiply revenue leads nowhere.
Let AI technologies help you adapt your business to the new era of immersive digital consumption.
Guest author: Margaret Kashuba is the Chief Marketing Officer of OWOX BI, a marketing analytics service that consolidates data from disparate systems, evaluates the performance of advertising campaigns, and quickly builds the reports you need. OWOX developed an easy to use a product that allows marketers to get any reports without SQL syntax with the help of a report builder.
If you’re in the marketing world, chances are you’ve seen or heard of the term, ‘360 customer view,’ making a buzz. Suddenly, enterprise-level organizations are talking of customer personalization, aggregating data to build 360-degree views, and omnichannel interactions.
While all this sounds great, there is little information on how companies can actually achieve a 360 customer view. Also, how many marketers really understand what the term encompasses and what kind of work they would need to do to attain this goal.
With this piece, I hope to help marketers understand the term better, why it matters, and how you can make a 360 customer view a possibility.
Let’s dive in.
Understanding the challenges with customer data
A simple definition of a 360 customer view is, ‘aggregated data that can give you a complete picture of your customers.’
As simple as this sounds in theory, it’s mostly an unattainable objective because of the very nature of data itself.
In a nutshell, customer data is inherently messy. No matter what controls you put in place, your data will always be flawed. The three big troublesome Ds of data that plagues every business is:
Duplicate Data. This is the biggest problem companies have to face. There are literally 101 ways duplicates can be created. A customer entering conflicting information. A data entry operator entering the same information multiple times. A system error that results in data duplication. A CRM migration gone wrong. There is very little you can do to prevent duplicate data from happening.
Disparate Data Sources. It’s not uncommon for businesses to use multiple tools and platforms to store and process customer data. Your marketing team may be using HubSpot, while your sales or customer support team may be using Salesforce. Come the time of reporting, you realize the data is messy, differs in structure and format, and is unable to provide the right information.
Dirty Data. Rising data complexities lead to data quality issues. Dirty data refers to data that has format issues, typos, misspelled names, incomplete or duplicate data. Basically, dirty data is data you cannot use for its intended purpose – and that is never a good thing.
Annually, millions of dollars are wasted in return mails, lawsuits, expensive mistakes, inaccurate insights, and analytics – all because companies do not check the quality of their data and don’t bother about it until they have to fulfill a critical goal – like customer personalization.
Here’s a preview of bad data:
What’s the link between data and customer personalization?
To personalize an experience, you have to find out the hidden relationships between people, products, their environment, their behaviors, their experiences, and their expectations. All this can only be found via data reconciliation.
You must incorporate a customer’s relationship with other entities such as the products they buy, the organizations they are associated with, the brands they follow, their household data, their favorite stores, locations etc. You must get the customer’s complete journey in their day-to-day life to be able to personalize a service for them. This is the crux of a 360-customer view.
Why do you need to do this?
To stay ahead of the curve. And honestly, this is the best time to get started.
Companies that invest in customer analytics do way better than their competitors. The reasoning is quite simple – if you know what your audience wants, and can deliver on their expectations, you win them for life. But to make this possible, you will need to get your data in order.
An example of 360 customer view
Let me explain 360 customer view with a real-world example.
A renowned insurance company has dozens of services that are offered in liaison with third-party vendors and partners. In an attempt to create a more personalized experience for their customers, the company decided to sort their data and understand the customer’s journey through various touchpoints and the services they acquired.
The company discovered that vendors and partners used their respective CRM tools and platforms. The format and structure of data differed significantly. To top it off, the company used its ERP system that had a different data collection format and structure than what the vendors used. For example, the company recorded dates as Month/Day/Year. Some vendors recorded the date as Day/Month/Year.
It took them six months just to collect the necessary data from its vendors and partners. But that was not the end of the ordeal. Next up, they had to clean that data, standardize it to meet the required format, and run matches to weed out duplicates. This process took another two months. Finally, after eight months of data cleaning, data matching, and data merging, the company was able to get a consolidated record of its customers and began initiating their customer personalization plans.
Keep in mind, the company opted to refine only one segment of their customer data – that of loyal customers who were associated with more than two services for the past five years. With this information, they intended to create personalized campaigns and services such as loyalty cards, exclusive memberships, and other services to make their customers feel cherished.
See how simple the idea of 360 customer view sounds but how difficult it is to get done? Yet companies are willing to go the extra mile because, in the age of digital, customers expect personalized services from their favorite brands.
So how do you get started?
Obviously, this is a big undertaking. Companies fail because they underestimate the problems of data quality. This is why, if you’re planning to experiment with a 360 customer view, I highly recommend the following:
Start Small. Create a goal, an outcome, and a process that you can manage. For example, testing out loyalty cards to the top 200 active purchasers is a good place to start. Once this is a success, you can then move on to a larger audience segment.
Don’t Aim for Perfection. You can never get a complete view of all your customers. This is why it makes sense to create small goals and aim for what is doable.
Invest in the Right Tools. Nope. You cannot do this using Excel or Google Spreadsheets. If you’re pulling in data from multiple sources (CRMs, transaction data, behavioral data), you’ll need to invest in a tool that allows you to consolidate, dedupe data and clean up dirty data. Lucky for you, there are best-in-class data quality management solutions out there that are great for business users. You don’t need to know data science to solve data issues.
Don’t Wait for ROI to Happen. Insights and clean data are only the start of the journey. You have to turn these insights into activities that drive ROI. Most organizations get insights, but they don’t have a plan for how to use those insights to achieve their goals.
Fix Your Data. I can’t help but reiterate this. Bad data will be a huge bottleneck in EVERY aspect. Regardless of whether you want a 360 customer view or not, you must make data quality a priority. A countless number of businesses have failed (with millions of dollars down the drain) because of bad data. So whether it’s for something as normal as a promotional campaign or for something as critical as annual reporting, you need data you can work with.
The most important question to ask before you begin is, ‘Do I have data I can trust to create a good experience for my audience?’
To conclude
I’ll keep it short. Want your customers to choose you over your competitors? Give them the experience they need. But before you attempt to woo them, fix your data, give meaning to vague terms like ‘data-driven’ or, ‘data-centric,’ and be ahead of the curve.
Guest author: Farah Kim is an ambitious content specialist, known for her human-centric content approach that bridges the gap between businesses and their audience. At Data Ladder, she works as the Product Marketing Specialist, creating high-quality, high-impact content for a niche target audience of technical experts and business executives.
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