Marketing: The Most Important Customer Data for Franchises

Accurate data is a must for your franchise’s marketing strategy. But what data should you be focusing on?

With all the big data available at our fingertips today, franchises are tasked with mining that data to find better ways to reach their ideal audiences. Access to customer data in addition to important business information helps drive business decision-making, and ultimately business growth and further expansion.

The challenge: having the right, most accurate data about customers.

So what’s the most important data to focus on for your franchise? And how do the solutions from BDEX help?

Customer-loyalty data is crucial

While it could be argued that certain demographic information is the most important customer data to have to drive your marketing strategy, accurate customer-loyalty data can make major impacts on franchises. Customer-loyalty data shows you which customers come back to the company to make another purchase, and it is especially crucial when you can see that they received other competitive offers and chose yours.

Loyal customers are extremely valuable to any type of business. This is why many franchises offer loyalty rewards programs, where customers benefit from discounts and offers on repeat purchases and the franchise benefits from getting that repeat business.

Data from BIA/Kelsey has shown that repeat customers spend 67% more than new customers. So, clearly your marketing efforts need to take this consideration seriously.

Segmenting your audience

By analyzing the data you gather about your repeat customers, you can start to notice patterns in the customers most likely to make repeat purchases or join your franchise’s loyalty program. What is their typical age? Where do they live? What kind of purchases do they make? Taking a closer look at this data allows you to then better target, new customers, with those same characteristics, building an audience that you’ve determined is more likely to become loyal to your brand.

You can then use this information to segment your audience grouping together those with similar characteristics and sending those segments specific messages at specific times. This way you can reach the right people at the right moments, building your base of repeat customers.

The local marketing challenge

A challenge specific to franchises is using local data to drive decisions at the corporate level. However, big data is presenting more opportunities than ever to align successful marketing at the top as well as in each individual unit.

Unfortunately, consumers are becoming warier about providing their personal details to big companies. They have to really trust a brand, a prospect that’s become even more challenging with everything going digital and the increasingly present fear that customers’ information will be used without their approval.

This is why showing customers that your franchise cares about this issue is crucial in getting the personal data you need. The chief information officer for Domino’s, Kevin Vasconi, told Entrepreneur that the company sees sharing information and gaining value from that information as a cycle that needs mutual respect to thrive. They don’t sell customer information to other companies; they treat it as if it were the brand’s own information. And the more that customers feel comfortable volunteering information, the more value the brand can give them in return through better marketing and promotions.

This is an example of how accurate data really can fuel better, more meaningful connections between brands and their customer base.

How BDEX data helps with local marketing

Franchises need data-driven tools that help them make meaningful connections. This can be challenging at the local level for some companies. BDEX helps franchises close gaps and reach the right people at the right time. Tools include email retargeting, in-market and real-time data, geofencing data, and direct-mail targeting.

The data provided by the BDEX Data Exchange Platform (DXP) gives your franchise a competitive edge. There are over a trillion data points in the platform, tied to more than 1.4 billion emails, 800 million mobile IDs and emails linked to each other, more than 300 million emails linked to postal records, and over 5,500 different categories of data on all U.S. customers.

Other solutions that will help your franchise are the BDEX Identity Graph and Omnisource IQ. Our Identity Graph provides data on consumers at the device level, providing key data like names and email addresses. This data is then tied together so the consumer can be reached across each and every marketing channel. Omnisource IQ is our Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) tool that gives you real-time data signals so you can reach those customers in your sales cycle right at the moment they’re ready to make a purchase.

To learn more about the data solutions we provide to franchises and other clients, contact the team at BDEX today.