Consider a scenario where you buy some gifts for your family for the upcoming festival season through your usual online retailer. However, at the checkout you have to offer all your data again. Wont it be disappointing that you have to provide your data each time when you buy through the same retailer. Added to this is the fact that you get a discount for the product you have purchased, 2 days after your purchase. This would be pretty frustrating for consumers and it might result in Consumer detention. Quite often, businesses and brands leave vast amount of data unexplored.

They are- real time customer data or historical insights about their shopping behavior, which holds a huge opportunity to develop solid relationship with their customers. The most important job for any marketer would be to know their customers and build strong relationships with them. For knowing your customers, unifying all their real time customer data would be the first and foremost step.

The three steps to unify customer’s data are

1.Forego the silos and merge your customer data

To survive today’s challenging and competitive environment, marketers must forego their silos across departments, teams and channels to merge data establish a unified view of a customer. This way businesses can understand and respond to their consumer’s needs in a better way, which leads to the development of the business and brands.

However, bringing together all this information under one umbrella would be challenging. Hence start small through an iterative process. First connect your web and app analytics with the customer relationship management technology. Next comes your customer engagement tools, email campaigns, billing systems and loyalty programs and integrate them under one platform. Look out for external data sources like audience signal from search intent, videos viewed, polls, Instagram hits etc and gather all the above data under one platform like google cloud.Now you have in your disposal a treasure trove of rich and valuable information about your consumers.

2.Analyse and measure your customer’s full journey

Once you have this data which you have generated around your consumer, the next step would be measuring and analyzing the full journey taken by consumer. This is the main advantage of having a solid data strategy from which you can measure Marketing impact on your business accurately rather than depending upon your campaigns results alone. This way all the teams working under the same business gets the critical metrics to work toward.

For choosing the correct analytics solution for your business you need

• A tool that allows you to analyse various consumer journeys, channels, campaigns and content.
• An attribution model examine how media works together and which channel has the most impact. Your marketing can procure more success when you attribute it to specific marketing touch-points. This way you can analyse which among-st your audience are most valuable and for whom creativity works best.

3.Generate dynamic customer experience

Through the generated insights from the above two steps, you can easily deliver a dynamic experience for your customers. By using customer insights, you can create rich audience segments. Streamlining new technologies like machine learning and AI provides you an opportunity to generate personalised experience for these segments.

Conclusion

Unfortunately, with data still in siloed state, brands are unable to generate rich customer insights or measure their journey. Hence, they are unable to provide an engaging customer experience. This results in loss of customers, wastage of marketing budget and falling in short in your business goals.

However, this scenario can be changed through data unification. Having a unified customer view will allow your business to reach out to them individually through useful data generated from their previous experience making you a champion of a sustained business growth.

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