At 9 AM, the average person has already updated their social media feed, checked their RSS feeds for interesting news, shot out a few texts, had their morning cup of coffee, and is ready to get started with work.
Today we live in a hyper-connected world where everyone can see everything around them. Learning to harness the connectivity of your customers is essential to your growth in the future economy. Right now we are in the middle of a huge data explosion and it is time to either reach out and embrace that data or be swept away.
The key to success is data-driven marketing.
In 2011, IBM and Aberdeen group had their analytics do a study on the growth of data available and what its potential impact would be. They found that there were 4.8 trillion online ad impressions during the year 2011. Their studies also showed that data production would increase by more than 44 times over the next 10 years and that the majority of CMOs were not ready for it.
It’s all about the data.
With the explosion of information online, traditional ad campaigns are becoming obsolete. We can now know exactly what type of customers we have and how to reach them. All we have to do is look at the data.
So how do you use this data?
Many companies have already learned to use the data available around them to better engage with their customers.
Here are 5 different strategies that have been proven successful.
Build Apps Designed to Collect Information
When you build an app for your customers to use, make sure you design it in a way that will allow it to collect information. There are a few different tricks that can be used to do this so just try them out and see what works for you.
Tip 1: Ask customers to provide their email address in order to get sent coupons.
Tip 2: Offer rewards for filling out a short questionnaire.
Tip 3: Incentivize account creation through special offers for customers.
When done correctly, you can easily collect a lot of information from your customers with little hassle. Then use this information to create a clear data-driven marketing plan.
Make a Clear Plan of Action (Based on Centralized Data)
Even though we just mentioned the importance of using your data to build a data-driven marketing plan, this idea is worth expanding on. Many companies do a poor job of using their data to change the way that they are selling. Data alone is not enough to help you; you must use it to build a plan that works.
Marketing experts can be quickly overwhelmed by the mass amount of information that is available today so learning how to harness this information and have it work for you becomes essential.
Here are the 5 steps in the process:
- Centralize your data: Gather all of your available intel into one place so you can access everything together.
- Analyze customer data: Review your data to determine who your best customers are.
- Segment your target audience: Group your top customers into easy to understand segments.
- Execute your campaign: Plan a strategy to market to more people that match your target profiles.
- Track effectiveness and make changes: Ask yourself if the marketing campaign worked and make any changes as needed.
Following this simple strategy to utilize data-driven marketing will put you well on your way to success.
Use Data-Driven Marketing at the Right Moment
Be sure to sell to your customers when they are ready to buy your product. For example, if you can see that your customer has been looking at a certain product many times over the course of a few weeks they may be on the verge of buying it.
Why not send them a coupon for 10% off that product? It may be just the push they needed to help them make the decision.
Another thing to consider is customer retention and cart abandonment plans. Simply emailing people who abandon a shopping cart can often get you your customers back. Some companies have reported over a 10% success rate with emails sent after shopping carts are abandoned.
Give Customers the Experience They Desire
One of your most powerful tools is actually the customers themselves. Try reaching out to your customers via social media and get them engaged with your product creation process. Some of your most loyal customers might even spend more time marketing your products than you do.
Every time that a happy customer makes a post about how great one of your products is, that’s money that you will be making. So don’t forget about the impact that even just one engaged customer can have.
By letting the customer tell you exactly what they want you can be certain that your product will be a hit. Getting your community engaged in the process will also turn them into a more loyal customer base in the long run. It’s a win-win situation and the future of the medium.
Use Every Marketing Campaign to Gather More Data
Each time you create a new data-driven marketing campaign you should consider it a chance to learn and improve your efforts. If you treat each of your campaigns as an experiment and carefully track the impact that it had on your customers, you will gain a valuable metric.
Over time as you build more marketing campaigns, you can draw on past experiences to see how effective any given campaign was. By using an independent control group who you do not send the marketing campaign to, you can gauge the impact that it actually had on your bottom line.
What kind of metrics should you be monitoring and gathering? Here are a few:
- Demographic: There is a wealth of information in the area and basic details of who you are targeting. Your products timing (notifications, etc.) in different seasons or even specific days of the week.
- In-app behavior: What are the most visited and utilized functions of your app? Use those insights to improve and create new experiences.
- Other apps/tools: Quizzing your users to figure out what other tools they use most often when using yours could lead to partnerships, integrations, and other products.
In the future, this will help you to fine tune your data-driven marketing campaigns to maximize customer engagement. Not every company does this and they are missing out on some of the most important data that is available to them. Properly using this information is huge. You can do things like:
- Segmenting the audience,
- Personalizing your messaging and advertising,
- Sending custom email campaigns to leads that are on the fence,
- Predicting customer behavior.
The most important thing to remember is that all this data does you no good if you do not implement your findings into your products with a quality developer. Using all of the data that is available today is tough, but with proper preparation, you can learn to ride the wave instead of being swept away by it.
It’s up to you now. Will you learn to master the data or will it master you? The choices that you make now are going to change the future of your company. Thankfully, you know what decision to make…
After all, the data is there.
Koombea can help you take advantage of all of those insights and provide a truly unique customers experience. Get in touch with us today.
