Do you think you know every individual of your prospect and customer universe?
Unfortunately, despite the advanced marketing technology available today, many brands fail to effectively collect and properly use all the customer data they gather.
According to a Harvard Business Review survey, only 13% of executives had a unified view of their customer with a single source of customer intelligence to integrate the entire customer journey.
As brands seek to better understand their customers’ behaviors and preferences to build contextually relevant experiences, unified profiles are becoming critical in today’s competitive customer experience battleground.
What is a unified customer profile?
Valuable customer information such as demographics (date of birth, family status, address etc.), behavioral data and transactional data regarding the physical store or/and the online store purchasing gathered in a single place.
Here are the top 5 reasons industry leaders use unified customer profiles to better connect with their customers and drive business success.
#1 Access comprehensive insights
By unifying information, you expand your customer vision and get a holistic customer view. There are various platforms that enable you to safely gather and manage customer data from structured and unstructured sources from a single point. Building unified behavior profiles helps you get deep activity and insights on each customer and monitor their impact through custom, real-time analytics.
Gift tip: Make sure you collect and analyze customer data and use them throughout the customer lifecycle.
#2 Provide better personalization
With unified customer profiles, you can drive personalized customer experiences. No more irrelevant emails and SMS messages. Marketing today is all about identifying customers’ unique needs and tailoring your message to suit them personally. Personalization can come in different forms; SMS messages with tailored offers available for a limited time within the specific store, emails with discounts, and other communication channels (VIBER).
Extra tip: Real-time personalization matters. Today’s customers seek for experiences that provide convenience and consistency during every step of their journey.
Did you know? 65% of consumers are disappointed by the lack of in-store personalized discounts and promotions,
Emarketer
Related: How to delight the multi-channel shopper
#3 Improve in-store customer experience
As smartphones are becoming increasingly important to the consumer’s in-store shopping journey, brands can leverage this opportunity to reach customers directly to the most personal device they own. A unified view of the customer along with marketing automation tools, can help you automate key processes and enhance the in-store experience by sending relevant messages on mobile at exactly the right time to convert.
#4 Increase customer loyalty & retention
Seamless experiences are the ones that people love and repeat. Remember that human beings are emotional and to win their trust, you need to talk to their heart first. To properly do this you need to identify your customers and truly understand their behavior. Unified profiles enable you to do exactly that. Give your customers incentives that go beyond the transactions and add value to their shopping journey. In this way, you can build meaningful and successful relationships with them and create customers for life.
Extra tip: Invest in a loyalty program to incentivize your customer to give their data in exchange of valuable rewards and outstanding experiences and enhance the unified profiles with loyalty insights.
Related: [Free eBook] How to master customer insights in 4 steps
#5 Empower sales
Unified customer profiles empower your sales team too. How? You equip your sales force with an unprecedented overview of leads. With a unified view, they can instantly report on all customer touchpoints, interactions, and views. Therefore, your team can now focus on the best customers, leveraging all data to better connect with them and make meaningful and smarter decisions.
Wrap-up
Investments in technology and marketing automation tools are crucial if you aim to dominate the customer journey. These tools along with the know-how to successfully manage the customer information, enable you to get closer to your customers, understand the entire customer journey and translate data into smart insights. With a
