Marketers know this: 88 percent of marketers believe that their customers expect a personalized experience. Nearly all believe that personalization advances relationships with customers.
It’s a no-brainer: Personalization is key to the customer experience.
But you can’t personalize unless you can identify your customers — no matter where they learn about or interact with your brand.
That’s why smart brands don’t just know who and where their customers are. They understand how each of those cross-channel interactions connect along the buyer’s journey, ultimately leading to a purchase.
Those smart brands — along with the data-driven marketers behind them — collect data, connect data and leverage Identity Matching to create a single view of their customer. Connected insights fuel predictions and create personalized campaigns that make a big impact.
Here are four ways Identity Matching helps brands connect the customer journey.
1.Create a consistent brand experience
Don’t interrupt the buyer’s journey. Irrelevant messages are frustrating roadblocks.
Understanding what your customers are buying, browsing and saying on social, mobile, in-stores and online allows you to meet your customers and their needs at every touchpoint.
Today’s customers are multichannel and empowered. They value brands that make their lives easier. In fact, more than half of consumers say brand experience factors into their purchasing decisions. Identity Matching is essential to smoothing the cross-channel customer experience.
Customer experience impacts the bottom line. Retailers who used customer experience to stand out from the competition showed a revenue increase of 11 percent year over year, compared to just a 3.5 percent revenue increase for retailers who focused instead on value and convenience.
2. Understand the impact of your marketing efforts
Attribution remains a huge challenge for marketers to understand the ROI of their efforts — especially when data points generated from separate campaigns or teams might be disjointed or disconnected.
But customers are touched by campaigns in across channels. The buyer’s journey is nonlinear and often messy.
Without a single view of the customer, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to understand how these campaigns factor into the ultimate purchasing decision. A connected dataset enables stronger multichannel, multi-touch attribution.
Companies are taking note. According to the DMA, marketers will up to $3.5 billion on datasets that support multichannel — more than ever before.
3. Reach customers on new channels
Connecting siloed channels allows you to unlock new marketing mediums or reinvigorate old ones with refreshed messaging. This includes appending postal or email data to your list, allowing you to send offers and message in new channels and better segment by location.
An online customer could be retargeted and re-engaged through a postal campaign with an in-store offer, bridging the gap between channels. This multichannel approach can be a game-changer for customers: about three-quarters of shoppers search more than one channel before making a purchase.
4. Create lookalike campaigns
Lookalike campaigns use a segment of your data to target prospects that “look” like your current customers on Facebook or other advertising networks. These prospects have similar have characteristics that are similar to your current customers, and are more likely to engage, purchase or respond to your content.
Once your customers are connected to an email or email hash — their key central identifier — they can be uploaded to ad networks and used to create lookalike campaigns to find new prospects just like them.
Brands that harness Identity Matching will meet customer expectations by providing useful and empathetic experiences across channels. By knowing their customers across channels, they will anticipate needs, streamline tasks and personalize offers.
Brands that tap into Identity Matching services and products will build a stronger relationship with their customers and ultimately win loyalty.
About TowerData
Since 2001, TowerData has made it easy for marketers to access the data they need to better engage the customer behind the email address. Our suite of email services allows you to enrich, clean and expand your email list via a real-time API or automated file processing. TowerData’s services include:
- Email Intelligence – Better understand, segment and target your subscribers by adding demographic, household, purchase, interest and activity data to your email addresses.
- Email Validation – Increase your inbox delivery rate and avoid spam filters by cleaning your email list of invalid and fraudulent email addresses.
- Email Append – Expand your marketing reach by matching email addresses to your postal file in order to take advantage of benefits of email marketing or custom audiences via Facebook, Twitter and other advertising networks.
