ACHIEVING A 360-DEGREE CUSTOMER VIEW THROUGH DATA COLLECTION.

Personalisation is the Holy Grail of marketing. So much so that 80% of consumers are more likely to do business with a company that offers a personalised experience. So how can you offer an experience like that? At Epsilon we know that success comes from small easy-to-implement changes, with that in mind we have created a three-stage plan that will help you to incorporate personalisation into your marketing program and ultimately build a stronger relationship with your customers.

• Stage One: Leverage data collection techniques to achieve a 360-degree view of your customers.
• Stage Two: Incorporate new technologies like artificial intelligence to engage with customised messages at scale.
• Stage Three: Reach your audience at the right time, in the right place.

In the first part of this three-part series, we will explore how, by building a 360-degree customer view through data collection, you can lay the foundations for creating a truly personalised experience for your audience.

Getting to know you, getting to know all about you

To kick-off, create a data collection strategy that’s realistic, and fits in with your overall marketing goals. Integrate your online and offline data and incorporate the necessary technologies and systems to fulfil on your strategy. Collect and capture cross-channel data with data pools. Then perform identity mapping to understand the who’s who of your audience (in a GDPR compliant manner, of course). Finally, understand how you can activate the data at scale to leverage for marketing purposes.

Audiences interact with multiple digital touchpoints each day and, each time they do, they generate a new piece of data. This activity has lead to a flux of first-party data globally, some of which is readily available to marketers. This data allows marketers to know their customers better than ever before.

To put this data to good use, it should be augmented with third-party data assets to enable a true, 360-degree customer view. For example, audience demographics and third-party data, such as audience interests, can then be segmented, profiled, and analysed against first-party data to enhance the customer view.

Putting it into practice

Let’s put it into context. At Epsilon, we work with multiple brands to help them solve their identity challenge. For many of our clients, their loyalty platform is viewed as a base or a starting point. All data sources from both the online and offline channels are integrated into the platform. It is then enhanced with third-party data providing an expanded view of the audience, bringing together data from several different sources. Whether it's by device or by different physical addresses, we give our clients a holistic view of the customer so that they can get a better understanding of who is generating the most lifetime value, and who is generating the least. With this information in hand, our clients can effectively plan their marketing efforts.

Over to you

So, when it comes to getting to know your customers, ensure you think of all the ways they interact with your brand. This way you’ll have accounted for all of the available data sources and can start to really form a 360-degree customer view and build a stronger relationship with your audience.

Stay tuned, as in our next article we’ll discuss how marketers are using artificial intelligence to engage at scale with customised messages.