Smart Ways to Acquire Customers
The success of any business depends on how smart you are with your marketing strategies to lead to enthusiastic customer acquisition for a lifetime. Delivering contextually relevant experiences to customers is of paramount importance today to acquire and retain customers. A simple and smart way to start is to take advantage of the business and customer analytics that drive customer life-cycle management.
Pick Elements to Get Closer to Buyers
There are 4 billion active internet users as of April 2018. Interestingly, there are 2.5 quintillion bytes of data generated every day. It is challenging in this multi-channel touchpoint era to discern relevant insights. Only by evolving your strategies and by employing smarter tactics, you can get a complete understanding of the data and a holistic view of the customer journey to better connect and retain customers.
It is more important to understand your customer journey, where and how they are adding those valuable experiences. From customer demographic information, their social media interaction, shopping behavior, internet usage and attitudes, values, the pattern of data consumption and up till the behavior of your campaigns etc., you need to correlate and analyze various elements to gain a new understanding and to employ personalization in real-time.
Capturing your customers’ valuable data is not a onetime process. You need to work on this consistently to drive efficiency and to deliver better experiences.
How to Prepare Data for Optimal Results?
Customer demands are changing and you need to be agile to meet the demand. So, re-think your approach. Insight-driven business can only enable you to identify future opportunities and have a competitive advantage. Responding to and building a more valuable and connected customer journey, and inspiring them to become a lifetime user, is critical to success. So, keep customers as your center point for any of your strategies and business operations. This requires you to analyze customer data.
A Journey to Analytics
Advanced analytical approaches and improved predictive algorithms have emerged in recent times that model available customer data, contributing to validation and optimizing of your customers’ journey. Optimal monetization of your data requires a deep dive into your data to understand the patterns.
This practice of gaining actionable insight is reshaping the enterprise business with new opportunities, better customer experiences, and enhanced products and services.
One example is Jaguar Land Rover, UK’s top car maker. The company is well known for its customer-centric approach. It reaches out to customers with relevant, contextual and timely information. This is possible only by collecting data and customer intelligence during the entire product lifecycle phase.
So, let us take this further and understand what type of analysis is required in this day and time.
There Are 6 Stages Involved In the Journey
Collect and understand the data; model the data, validate the model, build the model, deploy actions, test and optimize.
Model, Measure & Validate Data
There are several tools available today that allow you to perform both analytical and anecdotal research and construct models. Pick the one that perfectly aligns with your business goals. The process begins by capturing consumer data.
#1 Descriptive analytics tools help to analyze the journey of your customers with your products. It is purely about the past. Such analytics help you to learn what happened to a particular customer in the past, their reaction to your campaigns, and so on. This helps in contextual marketing.
#2 Predictive analytics tools help in altering your customer communication pattern in the days to come. Based on the current data, these tools predict their future actions, risks, and opportunities. For example, based on the current purchasing behavioral pattern, you can predict future purchases from a particular customer.
#3 Prescriptive analytics tools work using machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies. Interestingly, IBM calls this the final phase of analytics. Social media live chats, polling, bots etc., come of great help here. You can improve decisions with only a few recommendations. You can also improve the effectiveness of certain actions. It works best when combined with anecdotal analysis. This is the best practice to optimize future business efficiencies.
The generated models help with interactions and relevance marketing. It becomes easy to bring appropriate focus to guide customers throughout their journey.
Tip: Harness the data in a safe way
If you are not news deprived, then you are aware of Cambridge Analytica and how the company harvested information from more than 50 million Facebook users. Many experts call this Psychographic Modeling, as it helped a political campaign. In the world of big data, analytics and internet of things, the ethical and legal way of utilizing data can result in a better relationship with your customers; improving the operational efficiency and in monitoring your product and service enhancements.
Seek permission from your customers before using and sharing their information.
The idea to use both business analytics and data analytics is to enable you to mitigate risks and enhance operational efficiency.
The Final Say
Generating models from available data helps with predicting trends. Predicting actions with the available data will eventually allow you to plan future moves. So, try to respond and allocate clear accountability for data strategy and results. You can then execute transformational changes in a more systematic way. This will channelize you to bring customer acquisition, customer retention, customer value and relevance marketing center stage.
