This is a common scenario for retailers because they do not have a 360° view of their customers across all digital channels, and therefore, are lacking an understanding of their customers’ behaviors. If the retailer was able to identify who my friend was across all channels and recognize that he had already made the appliance purchase, wouldn’t it have made more sense to send him an offer for something else — or at the very least, not show him a discounted price on the item he’d just purchased? What if that retailer was able to connect his purchase (he gave them his name, terrestrial address and email address when he bought the appliance) to their customer database and make the distinction before the discounted email went out?  An email thanking him for his purchase would have made much more sense, and he might have appreciated an offer for an accessory that he hadn’t initially purchased.

Marketers today face unprecedented challenges when it comes to creating and maintaining a holistic view of their customers across their marketing ecosystem. It seems that customer interaction points, particularly in the digital world, continue to multiply on a daily basis. Add in the pressure of customers expecting highly relevant communications when and where they want them, and the business goals of increasing the lifetime value (LTV), and it equates to an increasingly difficult environment in which marketers must work. Finding, consolidating and analyzing data to achieve optimal customer interaction has never been further from us — and yet has never been so close.

With a plethora of tools available, marketers can reach their customers through emails, online profiles, loyalty programs, social network profiles and more. What hasn’t been readily available is the ability to link these digital profiles together, reducing duplication in marketing databases, giving marketers a clear understanding of active and inactive customers, plus who is buying from them, where they are shopping and how they want to be interacted with.

On the surface, this kind of customer information integration seems like a fairly simple task. Underneath however, there are several nuances within customer identity resolution that make this a profoundly difficult task. This isn’t about appending data; it’s about using the data a company already has, housed in multiple databases, and linking it all together through sophisticated matching algorithms that leverage a rich repository of referential data.

To make an integrated marketing strategy work, you need to be able to:

1. Validate contact data in real time, as it is entered online, in-store and over the phone

2. Create linkage of disparate identities and data sets, using merely a single piece of personally identifiable information for any customer

3. Enhance your data with a 360-degree view of your customers

4. Cleanse your data to remove duplicates or inaccurate information

5. Profile your best customers and understand how they want to be reached: mobile, email, catalog, social and more

6. Identify more customers like your best customers

Organizations can build this infrastructure in-house, however the process necessitates a large investment in technology and resources. In addition, the ability to resolve identities would be limited to the pieces of information collected by the organization. By working with an experienced partner who can resolve your customer and prospect identities across mediums, marketers create consistent and coordinated messaging strategies, understand the optimal path to purchase activities, maximize return on marketing investment and create memorable experiences for their customers.

A great brand will provide consumers with a customized experience across all channels. This requires a basis of integrated data that provides a complete view of the consumer and drives actionable marketing strategies and tactics.

As part of this endeavor, brands need to immediately set these priorities:

• Quickly cultivate relationships with new customers. Although welcome streams are slowly rolling among brands, there are methods that can be employed and data that can be integrated for a more customized brand interaction. Welcome streams enhanced with data-driven intelligence typically yield 16-24% improved response.
• Drive active customers to repeat purchase. Based on an just about any average order value, just 2% lift in repeat purchases could yield substantial additional revenue.
• Demonstrate appreciation to the most valuable customers. Along with identifying and treating high-dollar-value customers differently, brands find resounding success is extending the analysis to a consumers’ social graph. Delighting high-value, high-influence consumers can yield exponential returns when response attribution encompasses the social graph.

Brands need to partner with a marketing services provider who can not only deliver on data management, but also solve business problems and provide strategic guidance that challenge them to be better marketers.

Questions / Comments contact me
Email:  marcus.tewksbury@experian.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/tewksbum
Linkedin:  http://www.linkedin.com/in/tewksbum

1.  Are your customers getting a multi-channel or cross-channel experience?  If one hand doesn’t know what the other is doing, or in other words you are sending the same message, regardless of response, through different channels then you are multi- not cross.  To run an effective cross channel strategy you need to be able to correlate response across channels.
2. Does your marketing organization understand this difference?  And if so, are they structured to do something about it?  If your teams are still silo’d by channel (e.g., email, search, etc.) there is a large probability they can’t see over the walls and they lack the ability to craft communication strategies that are optimized to the customer need as opposed to the channel or campaign.
3. Connecting the dots across digital and social channels ups the ante for most technology organizations. Does yours (or your partners) have the knowhow to make the leap from traditional name and address linkages?  At both the technical level as well the applied business need?

CRM’s star is clearly on the rise again.  Before embracing it, however, you need to have a deep understanding of your organizations ability to effectively execute against it.

Questions / Comments contact me
Email:  marcus.tewksbury@experian.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/tewksbum
Linkedin:  http://www.linkedin.com/in/tewksbum