Customer marketing focuses on retaining and enriching the customer relationships you already have, and the more competitive your industry is, the more you are going to need real-time data.

At BDEX we talk about how we are building the data infrastructure that powers human connectivity by delivering the right insight into the right people at the right time – to close the sale. But the value of our real-time data goes far beyond that. It can be just as valuable for building customer loyalty as for audience segmentation and targeting.

In fact, learning how to integrate real-time data into customer marketing could be a great way to pull away from competitors, particularly in more mature industries where customer loyalty is critical to sustaining growth. Research from Forrester and DataStax has shown that 95 percent of companies can’t yet make sense of customer data, and thus they struggle to pull any meaningful, real-time insight out of it.

Targeted marketing vs. customer marketing

The term “customer marketing” may seem redundant since all marketing is aimed at customers. But in this context, we are using the term to refer to marketing to existing customers rather than targeting new ones.

Targeted marketing markets products or services to potential customers, not current customers based on known preferences and behavior.

Customer marketing aims to not just retain customers but keep them buying repeatedly and success hinges on integrating data that is often scattered throughout an enterprise. For instance, product marketing and management and account management, as well as the customer marketing team, need to work together to build a single customer database.

Each team on its own wouldn’t have all the information about what customers value most and what brings them the most satisfaction, all of which are factors that lead to brand loyalty. In a study from the CMO Council, almost half of marketers still fail to deliver “contextual, personalized engagements” across points of contact.

Often, marketers can get that context more quickly by partnering with high-end data exchange platform like BDEX, which aggregates and classifies billions of real-time data signals from dozens of vetted partners using a uniform taxonomy to help marketers quickly build custom audiences.

Enhancing the customer experience

The first consideration for customer marketing should be enhancing the customer experience across all touchpoints to create a seamless and immersive brand experience. This will lead to greater customer loyalty, which will lead to repeat purchases and lifelong customer relationships.

A report released from Motista showed that emotionally connected customers are much more valuable to brands overall. These loyal customers spend up to two times more than other customers, have a 306 percent higher lifetime value, and stay with a brand for 5.1 years on average.

So, how do you enhance the customer experience and foster customer loyalty in 2019?

One way is to find new ways to use real-time data to push further toward true 1:1 customer personalization.

For instance, you could layer real-time data signals available from third parties on top of your existing customer data to enhance the product recommendation engine on your online store.  Personalizing recommendations can make the difference between a returning customer making add-on purchases and abandoning their shopping cart.

Or you could make a commitment to omnichannel personalization. This involves using cross-device matching and real-time data to tailor content not just to the customer’s preferences and behavior, but to the channel being used to present a consistent and integrated customer experience. This means adjusting content to exploit the strengths of each channel, whether that be email, text messages, an online store or SERP, a mobile app, an addressable cable TV box, digital signage, smart appliances or direct mail. This capability will become more critical the more humans become enmeshed in the Internet of Things and it’s only possible when you have access to the technology listed below.

Identity resolution

Your organization likely already has a data gathering system in place. But are you using that data as much as you could be? Each data transaction should be linked to a unique customer identifier, which allows you to create a more granular picture of your customers for not just real-time personalization, higher resolution targeting, and audience management, but more omnichannel personalization.

The more data you have in your ID Graph the more you can segment your audience and personalize your content. This allows you to send different messages to potential customers and existing customers so that both groups aren’t seeing the same ads and thus becoming alienated if a message doesn’t apply to them.

Deterministic matching

Deterministic cross-device matching uses customer information like anonymized log-in data or email addresses to match connected devices to Customer IDs and it ’s essential to omnichannel personalization and integral to building a robust ID Graph.

Geofencing

Geofencing allows marketers to draw a virtual fence that will alert them any time someone enters or exits a specific area. This can be used by brands and retailers to email coupons and other content to customers once they get within a certain distance of a store or even a section of a store. The technology provides a tremendous way to connect with existing customers at or near the point of purchase.

Clickstream and POS data

Combining geofencing data with other real-time signals such as a customer’s browsing activity or brick-and-mortar purchases can provide even greater insight into customer intent. This can help you decide not only whether and how to connect with the customer, but what content to send.

The above provides just a glimpse of how real-time data can be used to enhance customer loyalty, boost customers’ lifetime value and improve your marketing ROI.

Why loyalty matters?

Research shows investors are much more likely to reward brands with repeat customers and customer loyalty with premium valuations. That’s primarily because repeat purchasers spend more, refer more people, and bring in more business, according to Bain and Company research. As any marketer knows, it’s also significantly less expensive to retain a customer than acquire a new one.

This is why more auto dealerships are now focusing their marketing efforts toward retention, rather than just target marketing. Real-time data, it turns out, can turbocharge customer loyalty just as much as customer acquisition and sales.

BDEX is committed to building the infrastructure marketers need to power human connectivity. Call (917) 410 6616 or email us at info@bdex.com today to learn how brand-building solutions from BDEX can help you put the right messages in front of the right consumers at the right time.