At this point everyone can agree we’re in a customer-focused, relationship-driven era of marketing. The only way to make waves in this new landscape? By connecting consumers to relevant, personalized experiences and touchpoints. And delivering those unique journeys starts with something that’s as simple as it is complex: knowing who, exactly, these customers are every time you see them, even if they don’t look quite the same as you remember.
Now the million dollar question: how do we do it? Despite having the data and the delivery capabilities, what still trips up countless marketers is that they’re drawing on info from disparate sources without creating a unified view of the customer. This data point is coming from your marketing automation system, another foundational piece from an existing customer relationship management (CRM) system paired with X and Y from Google, all competing with some metrics you’ve culled from social media … sound familiar? More importantly, what can you do with that?
The short answer: on its own, not much. But if you’ve got the data it’s a solid first step. Your goal, then, should be to figure out how to put it together and take it out for test drive. Here’s how.
Step 1: Remember, Data Needs to Work
Gut-check time: see what data you’ve got, where it’s coming from, and how it’s contributing to your overall customer view. This is the time to focus on data strategy and less on data data. It’s a hard pill to swallow sometimes, but at the same time it’s a critical foundation to creating a unified customer view.
Some things to look for, specifically? Often I see customer data siloed between different departments or, even, competing systems and solutions. That means stakeholders can’t see the entire journey that led this customer here and, likewise, can’t engage in a meaningful way. You’re basically starting from square one, even if you think you’re effectively tapping into the data. You’re offering them the yellow experience when they’ve already told you they want blue. You’re welcoming them to your site when, just a few hours ago, they came in on their mobile device. Or you’re overlooking key pieces of information they’ve left sprinkled throughout your platforms so far—clues that would have steered you toward a relevant experience and, with it, a conversion.
Not very welcoming, is it?
See what’s out there and what others are using and survey everything. That doesn’t mean you’re going to use it—I always remind clients that, at this stage, there’s no need to tap into everything you’ve got in your data arsenal. In fact, I’d argue that it could be detrimental to bite off too much at this point. Start with the basics, like the customer profile, computed data, explicit info, and implicit touch points. Think about what moves the key performance indicator (KPI) needle. You can always go back to the data and keep building and, if done right, a handful of key metrics can deliver stellar results when it comes to delivering relevance at scale.
Step 2: Putting it all Together
“The key to successful cross-channel customer engagement,” explains Mathieu Hannouz, an evangelist for Adobe Campaign, “is leveraging a single marketing view of the customer.” This view should combine, “personally identifiable information and online and offline transactions and behaviors.” So that’s our next step: unifying disparate data and sources into one clear-cut customer view. No matter the entry point, platform, OS, device, geolocation, or path, this approach will enable you to recognize your customer and audience segments. From those views you’ll be able to continuously tap into existing and real-time data sources to optimize and, ultimately, deliver meaningful relevance as your customer moves through your branded experiences.
So back to the big question from earlier: how? Don’t panic—a customer-friendly, experience-centric solution like Adobe Marketing Cloud can help tackle the heavy lifting. Our Marketing Cloud’s profiles and audiences core service brings existing Adobe data together with first- and third-party profile attributes for a comprehensive view of each individual customer, both known and anonymous. To ensure a unified and actionable customer view, profiles and audiences assign a common ID to the visitor that’s consistent across all Adobe solutions.
From here there’s limitless power. Having a holistic view of your customers enables you to meet them halfway—no matter how fast they’re moving—while identifying new business opportunities you may not have even realized before. Audi is a great example. After realizing consumers were less likely to buy or recommend an Audi the longer they had one, the brand took a deep dive into satisfaction and advocacy. “We needed a totally different way to value customers,” explained Mike Hill, CEO of Audi’s digital and creative agency, Holler, “not just as a point of purchase, but over their entire customer lifecycle.”
Hill and his team saw a single customer view as core to assessing and delivering customer value: “They say 5 percent of the fishermen catch 95 percent of the fish,” said Hill. “That’s because fisherman get really detailed about the species they’re looking for, where they live, their tactics, the tackle, and the bait. That’s what we’re doing here with Audi; we’re trying to understand our audience by developing a single customer view.” The results? More personalization, consistent cross-channel messaging, and a better ability to optimize marketing and sales spend, all key components in both delving into and maximizing value to both the brand and the customer.
Step 3: Define Goals and Benchmarks
As is the case with data, having a unified customer view is great … if you know how to use it. Determine early on what the goals of this initiative are for your organization and, from there, decide how you’ll benchmark success. Audi knew it wanted to win back customer loyalty and advocacy, and that it didn’t have a strong, consistent enough view of its buyer to dive in effectively. What is your goal out of the gate? Increased average order values? Higher lifetime values? More time spent on the site? Something else?
It’s also important to decide on the metrics you’ll need to gauge success. Remember, you don’t need every data point in your arsenal to drive high value and strong relevance at scale. Figure out what you need and be sure you’re capturing and harnessing that—and don’t let yourself get bogged down in the rest or you could quickly muddy the clear, comprehensive customer view you’ve created.
Step 4: Built for Growth and Real-Time Evolution
Creating and leveraging a unified customer profile system is a lot like buying a new iPhone—the minute you’ve got it, it seems, there’s a new one about to drop. Keep in mind that the digital landscape is expanding by the minute and your data collection, integration, and activation needs to keep pace. In the next five years, experts predict there will be more than 50 billion connected devices globally—that’s 50 billion devices capturing and delivering data around the clock.
Adobe Marketing Cloud and solutions will ensure that you’re always on and always running in real time, even with billions of data points flying back at you. Through the profiles and audience core service, behavioral insights will be updated with every move the customer makes. You’ll be able to deliver rich, contextual moments across all of your platforms and experiences, all based on a known customer profile. You’ll even be able to tap into Adobe Analytics’ anomaly detection, contribution analysis, and predictive modeling. You’ll be able to suss out growth opportunities, plus a host of other services and solutions, then ship those insights, in the form of an audience, to a tool like Adobe Campaign for remarketing, as an example. And the more you, your organization, and the industry as a whole continue to scale, the more this matters in a big way.
Step 5: Reassess Based on Your Resources and Access
All of this is meant to get you on the right track toward cultivating a comprehensive, data-driven customer view. But some more good news: even if you can’t get to a complete convergence, you can still identify some foundational items that are key to your existing digital marketing strategy and build from there. Usually this is the visitor profile—start there with the aim of bringing key sources together to get a single view of your customer. Less is often more when it comes to integrating data and cultivating this type of comprehensive single view. Some relevance delivery is better than none—and, of course, better than something that entirely misses the mark. Build off your wins, cultivate key learnings, and revisit in the coming weeks and months—there’s no rush.
No matter how much you can contribute to this initiative resources-wise, now is the time to dive in and align your disparate data sources for a better, bigger picture. To be a truly customer-centric organization you need a deep, meaningful, and, most importantly, actionable understanding of who your audience segments and, even, individual consumers are. You’ve got to dig into what makes them tick, why they chose you, and what could take them from casual browser to profitable partner. The good news? The data’s there. The less good news? You’ve got to know how to use it. But that we can tackle. Start here with an eye on revisiting and, even, upping your game down the road. As your approach and integration get more and more seamless, you’ll unearth countless opportunities to leverage this cohesive, consistent view.
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