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Best Practice Guide
Are you REALLY leveraging individualised insights?
Teradata Connect 2015 finished less than a month ago
in the inspiring Wembley Stadium. The speeches have sparked so much interest it
has made this Connect one of our most successful in the last ten years. This
year, a key theme was evident throughout the majority of the presentations: the
need for companies to understand and optimise the customer journey through “individualised
insights” – a strategy of which many marketers still don’t get the real value.
Marketing has to become more of a connection with
clients, rather than a univocal communication made of bulk campaigns. Omni-channel marketing is the new black, only
through the integration of online and offline channels it will be possible to
start a real, relevant and valuable conversation with consumers.
Marketers are
overwhelmed by a vast number of requests and requirements coming both from
inside and outside their companies – LT and clients respectively want to know:
which data is essential to collect? And once obtained, which should be used for
a good marketing campaign? How do you recognise how many and which pieces of
data need to be labeled as “individualised insights”? As Lisa Arthur, Teradata
Marketing Applications CMO, reiterated in her articles on Teradata Applications
blog, “individualised insights are made possible by data-driven marketing, the
strategy of collecting, connecting and analysing large amounts of online and
offline data, so that cross-channel insights can be used to create interactions
tailored to each customer, at his or her point of need and in real-time”.
In a scenario
that sees
- 247 billion emails sent every day
around the world
- 5 billion smartphones in 2017
- 50 billion connected devices
- 4.5 billion of social users1
It is important
that brands are ready to accommodate the increasing number of leads, but most
of all, are able to engage and keep their audience loyal and engaged. Consumers
are more and more connected and aware that the power is in their hands. Through
Omni-Channel Marketing it’s possible to track users’ activity both online and
offline and act upon consequently, as well as offer a consistent and valuable
experience to all clients thanks to data. Even well established brands own a
vast amount of data but are not able to integrate and use it appropriately.
This can be due to a lack of appropriate technology or dedicated teams. Rusty
Warner, Principal Analyst serving Customer Insights at Forrester Research, has
listed some useful tips helping you to succeed in today’s Marketing
ever-changing environment:
- Define a real-time strategy based on
customer needs
- Align customer-centric resources and
business processes
- Collaborate on your firm’s business
technology agenda
- Establish a foundation for data,
analytics, and measurement
- Integrate enterprise marketing
technologies2
Once
knowledgable teams, technology and channels have been integrated into a
company, Lisa Arthur underlines how marketers should see the future of
marketing campaigns, defining a precise difference between mere
“personalisation” and “individualisation”:
- Individualised
insights are intimate: Marketing is leaving the era of broadcasting mass
messages to audiences, and now has the technology to enable brands and
consumers to develop partnerships and – in the best-case scenario – create the
ultimate, intimate customer experience.
- Individualised
insights integrate all relevant data: personalised marketing doesn’t
require much data. You don’t need much sophistication to add a name to the top
of an email or send out a “Happy Birthday” discount. However, to deliver more
relevant and timely interactions – e.g. knowing that a customer prefers free
shipping as opposed to a discount or reaching out via SMS when a customer nears
one of your brick and mortar locations, you’ll need to tear down silos,
integrate all the touchpoints, analyse all the data and then act on those
insights.
- Individualised
insights give customers want they want, not what they expect: Mass personalisation
is polite and there’s no doubt that customers now expect you to know them at
this very fundamental level. Individualised insights take your marketing
campaigns to a completely new level. With individualised insights you’re able
to give customers what they want, not just what they expect. Your customers
want you to understand their preferences and behaviours, and they want you to
use those insights to deliver meaningful, timely interactions.
It’s in this
context that Teradata Marketing Applications enables marketers to be consistent
across digital and off-line channels, provide relevant and engaging content,
deliver value at the appropriate time, and spark continuous cycles of
interaction. Everything is made possible thanks to individualised insights.
When the
customer, brand and marketer are aligned, the customer experience is optimised,
and you can move far beyond mere personalisation to true individualisation.
This
article is a summary of Teradata’s newsletter “Inside Digital Marketing”. If
this article was forwarded to you as a recommendation and you wish to receive
further marketing news yourself, you can subscribe
here.
1 John Timmerman’s "The four essential truths of real-time customer engagement"
2 Rusty Warner’s "Making Real-Time Contextual Marketing A Reality"
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