by Sanjay Dholakia, CMO Marketo
Have you noticed how words like engagement and lifecycle have entered marketing parlance over the last few years? Not so long ago, it was all about blasts and shots – today, thankfully, we 
are talking more and more about relationships and conversations. This shift, while by no means complete, signals a growing acknowledgement by marketers of the environment in which they are trying to attain and satisfy customers. With customers having more access to information and higher expectations of products or services – marketers must strive to build sustainable 1:1 relationships with customers at scale.
Quite simply, we are living in the Age of the Customer. Customers are empowered through access to information and they rightly demand a new level of customer experience. But what does this mean for marketers? It means that marketers have to strive to know their customers as well as they know themselves. It means that marketers should be able to build personalised, sustainable relationships with customers. Sustainability is an important concept for marketers in the digital world. It is something, which marketers should consider in any interaction with their customers regardless of where they are in their lifecycle – be that during their initial research right through to their time as paying customers.
But how can marketers succeed in the Age of the Customer? How can they build experiences for customers, which build loyalty and ultimately deliver more revenue? Success in the Age of the Customer rests squarely on the shoulders of data and technology. Lets take a closer look at why:
Data
Building successful customer relationships is simply not possible without the right data and the on-going collection of that data. Building a database, which captures behavioral, transactional, and demographic data, provides marketers with a single, powerful view of their customers. This in turn allows them to build personalised, meaningful relationships.
Think of the possibilities when you can understand a customer’s behavior over their entire lifecycle – from the first time they interact with your brand online to any of the touch points along the way. So, you want to target all individuals over the age of 40 in Amsterdam, who subscribe to your newsletter and have visited your pricing page in the last week? No problem. You want to thank everyone who subscribed to your blog today and give them a gift-card because you reached 1000 subscribers? Easy. These are just some of the ways that the right data could deliver powerful customer experiences. But marketers should not be complacent, the days of looking in awe at companies who consistently deliver that level of personalisation is over – this is now what customers expect and anything less will result in customers voting with their feet.
Technology
With marketers collecting vast amounts of data about their customers, they have a serious responsibility to use the insights from that data to deliver helpful experiences to those customers. The only way to create these personalised relationships at scale is through technology; the good news for marketers is that this technology is available today. Marketing technology is maturing quickly but marketers have much to consider when selecting the right platform for their business. Here are some pointers to making the right decision around marketing technology:
Make sure the technology supports streamlined, repeatable processes so you can optimise your marketing resources by cloning previous work.
A good library of templates will help to get you up and running quickly. You shouldn’t need to reinvent the wheel every time – best practices templates should be available.
Answering your requirements today is important but a platform that has an eye on the future, which is constantly evolving (through new functionalities) to provide better customer experience, is critical.
A network of other users and exceptional support can radically improve the experience of your marketing technology platform.
A robust reporting and analytics engine should be at the heart of the technology – this goes without saying.
When you put the data and the technology together, you end up with a single platform that allows marketers to have a single 360-degree view of their customers. It is not a disconnected set of systems or databases rather a single place to orchestrate all communications to customers across all channels.
All this can sound daunting, right? It can be hard to know where to start – knowing whether you have the right data and technology is not straightforward. So take small steps and carry out an internal audit. What customer data do you have already? What does your customer lifecycle marketing look like today? Once you know where you are, you can improve. That will make your marketing more helpful to customers and as we all know, happy customers become marketers for you as they share their happiness. There is no time to lose – get started today because in the Age of the Customer, they won’t wait for you to get it right.