Many businesses fail to fully utilize customer data for creating personalized omnichannel experiences. With the many challenges of e-commerce, it’s important to have a strategy for streamlining operations, and customer data is a valuable tool in achieving that goal. In this blog post, we’ll explore the benefits of a customer data-centric management approach and how it can simplify your business operations and improve customer experiences.
Less Cold Marketing, Warmer Customer Experiences
Your “cold” e-commerce marketing efforts might be able to take a rest. Outbound emails that are not targeted, repeat offers, promotions and campaigns that are more focused on acquisition…those campaigns can be modulated and replaced with personalized experiences that offer your customers timely and relevant offers based on the segment they are a part of.
By integrating personalized customer experiences you will be able to rely on cold marketing less and less. Furthermore the cold marketing that you do utilize will have a higher ROI because you won’t be making existing customers aware of your offers and your business. You’ll be providing them with relevant, personalized experiences instead.
Increased Conversion and Lifetime value
Adopters of CDPs (customer data platforms) and CXP (customer experience platforms) architecture are reporting an increase in conversion rate and lifetime value simply by leveraging automated personalized experiences. Once the customer data is available it’s easy to set up experience flows that will have higher levels of performance.
One very easy example: An e-commerce merchant that has a CDP can relatively easily set up an “Anniversary Club” of customers who have previously purchased, and automatically send them a special offer on the one year anniversary of their first purchase. The same thing could be set up for a Birthday club, or both.
These programs automatically boost conversion and add to the frequency of purchases on the part of a merchant’s average customer without much effort. Those two simple program examples are just the tip of the iceberg.
Reduced Customer Service Costs
Early adopters of CDPs are leveraging the personalization aspects to ensure that customers are not just getting offers and promotions that are relevant but that they are also receiving timely messages about product availability, inventory, or even supply chain problems that might impact them. With customers getting the right messages at the right time there should be less of a burden on customer service. These types of communications can also be triggered by automated CDP flows, generating high customer satisfaction and engagement for a relatively low effort.
Reduced Website Maintenance and Improved Product Focus
With relevant targeted and personalized content experiences now available to a site administrator, content managers and product merchandisers can focus on quality vs quantity. There is less testing of obtuse content ideas and product bundles and so forth because customers are getting the content that meets their specific needs.
Increased Data Usage for Better Marketing Efficiency
Accuracy in marketing is becoming more and more important, especially as digital marketing / customer acquisition costs have risen so dramatically over the last few years during the pandemic. Once your team gets the hang of using these products, your marketing efficiency will increase dramatically and you will find your e-commerce operation working in a more automated way with less waste and fewer campaigns that don’t hit the mark; AKA “bad ideas.”
The Bottom Line
It’s hard to get the organization moving in the direction of harnessing data but the time is now. There are many, many options of experienced partners that can help solve the problem – three of ours have organizations covered from larger global enterprises to startups with aggressive growth plans. Bloomreach Engage. Adobe Experience Cloud. Klaviyo One.
You can do your own due diligence or contact us for more information about which one might be the best fit for your organization. If you’d like guidance, feel free to drop us a line at [email protected].
