Apple ’s Steve Jobs has a well-known saying, "Many times, people do n’t know what they want until you show them the product." This sentence is more appropriate to meet the expectations of hyper-connected customers Too. Nowadays, hyper-connected customers increasingly hope that every enterprise interaction can get an intimate personalized experience, regardless of the channel. This demand spawned the concept of personalized or personalized marketing, that is, companies use data analysis and digital technology to provide personalized messages and product marketing strategies for existing or potential customers.
The concept of "personalization" has existed for some time, but its relevance to the marketing department or its importance to the marketing department has never reached the current level, mainly because B2B and B2C companies are now eager to pursue personalized customers Due to experience. Our Chief Marketing Officer Prashant Bhatia wrote in his recently published "Customer Think" article: "Today, it is outdated to send personalized wishes only on the customer's birthday. Customers want more in-depth, more personalized interactions Experience, no matter what kind of interaction they choose-physical store, online store, email, Facebook, Twitter, mobile phone, etc. "
Personalization can increase loyalty and upsell and cross-sell levels.
How powerful is personalization?
A recent survey found that personalized promotions on the homepage can attract 85% of visitors to purchase related products, while targeted recommendations on product pages can attract 44% of visitors to purchase related products. From pre-sales to after-sales services, this is undoubtedly good news for companies that can truly provide such personalized experience throughout. Another survey found that 44% of consumers said that if they had a personalized experience when they made their first purchase, they would likely buy products from the company again. In addition, 49% of the respondents purchased products that they did not intend to purchase initially because of personalized recommendations, and 40% of the respondents said that they purchased more expensive products than the original plan because of personalized services.
So, how can companies join personalized teams?
One approach is to use a customer-centric approach to master data. Although this method sounds simple, the inaccurate and disconnected master data throughout the enterprise has caused great trouble for the enterprise. In the article "Total Retail", Darren Cooper, Director of Industry Solutions at Stibo Systems, laid the tone for the technical challenges of delivering a personalized experience and the role of master data. He wrote: "To provide a superior experience, retailers It is necessary to maintain accurate standardized product data across all channels and gain deep insight into customers, which brings operational challenges. "
Marketers also face extremely severe challenges. 46% of the companies surveyed said that legacy technology is the main obstacle in their personalized journey. In addition, 32% of the companies surveyed said the lack of relevant technology is a major challenge. Coupled with the marketing department's inability to extract useful insights from consumer data, the marketing personalization journey is further hindered. Because without such insights, it is impossible for the marketing department to segment consumers and provide personalized content for them.
Help deliver personalized experiences through master data management.
To meet the needs of today's connected consumers and provide them with personalized content and services, companies need to break down internal data silos and manage customer, product, and location data so that complete and accurate information is directly delivered to business users responsible for providing customer experience In the hands of marketers. This is exactly the promise of master data management (MDM).
Unlike other data management systems, master data management allows marketers to easily link customer records to other data fields, such as product and location information, in order to create a complete view of customers and their interaction with the enterprise. Customer master data management solutions can help companies accurately understand the identity of customers, and immediately identify the identity of customers at any point of contact. With this complete real-time customer view, companies will be able to create a single, trusted version of customer data, that is, a unified "golden record" of all customer data across the enterprise. Next, they can map such customer data to other types of data domains to build the views needed to provide real-time personalized services.
By linking two previously independent data domains together to manage data, companies can build a more comprehensive and complete view of customer interaction and behavior. This in turn will allow them to:
1. Get deeper and richer insights
With accurate customer data in hand, companies know their needs at the beginning of working with customer companies. Although a deeper and more comprehensive insight into customers is a prerequisite for providing a satisfactory overall experience, you cannot provide a superior customer experience if the data is not clean enough.
2. Speed up decision making
The increase in customer demand also requires companies to speed up decision-making. Quick data extraction is a necessary condition to simplify the decision-making process. A survey conducted by Aberdeen Group shows that, relatively speaking, companies that manage customer-centric master data can make faster decisions, obtain more complete customer records, and more easily increase customer retention.
This is particularly important because it is known that if customers cannot find what they need quickly from you, they will look elsewhere, which will bring you a series of negative chain effects. As the customer ’s alternative channels continue to proliferate, it becomes extremely important to cater to customer preferences. Therefore, every touch point must have accurate customer data to truly be customer-centric.
3. Improve operational efficiency
Customer-centric management of master data can obviously bring more practical benefits to the enterprise. If all data is clean, accurate, and stored centrally, it is easier to find and analyze. Enterprises operating in this way will be able to reduce data search time and free up more time to gain insights.
If an enterprise can provide a personalized experience across all channels and touch points without exception, it will greatly improve the chance of consumers completing the purchase journey. The most important thing is that enterprises and customers can achieve a win-win situation. As marketers begin to provide customers with more personalized services-such as appropriate articles, product recommendations, discounts or email content-businesses will be rewarded for this, including more meaningful interactions, faster customer conversions, More customer consumption and long-term loyal customers, etc. MDM technology allows marketers to understand the requirements and needs of customers, which is one of the prerequisites to promote their decision to cooperate with your company.
