sasProviding a consistently good and engaging customer experience is important, just like optimizing it on a variety of devices and deliver it when customers want it, emphasizes SAS in its whitepaper How a data-driven approach can engage customers and boost marketing returns.

“With multiple organizational silos, no online/offline data synthesis, rigid customer databases and other inflexible legacy systems, organizations only have a piecemeal view of the customer. It’s hard to take advantage of all the existing corporate customer data that’s available, much less the rich variety of external data. As a result, marketing efforts are fragmented, communications are inconsistent and ineffective, and revenue growth is hindered”, SAS explains.

By taking a technological approach, that synchronizes marketing processes with the customer journey across multiple channels, organizations can indeed achieve amazing results in terms of revenue, customer advocacy and loyalty.
Marketers need to get a panoramic view of each customer first to understand and anticipate customer behavior before orchestrating the next best action across any channel.  “After that an integrated, omnichannel experience and truly compelling content can be delivered at the right time and on the right device, through advanced customer and marketing analytics”, SAS emphasized.

Asian eMarketing likes the company’s step-by-step guide for CRM success, which is the following:

Step 1: Synchronize marketing processes based on a comprehensive understanding of the customer

When marketing departments, call centers, service operations and merchandisers operate independently based on their own distinct views of the customer, both customer engagement and marketing efforts suffer. Consider a scenario where a customer’s browsing history is in one database while offline point-of-sale data about the customer is in another database. If these databases are not connected, there’s a good chance you will have less relevant interactions with that customer than what the customer expects. Or you may see the “echo effect,” where you reach the customer through one channel but he responds through a different one, leaving you unsure how to attribute the response or plan your next offer. To use your existing corporate data to the fullest, SAS recommends built-in data management capabilities as this way you can speed up many marketing processes to run in real time or near-real time.

Step 2: Understand customer behavior and fuel content engagement

By using advanced techniques like text and predictive analytics, you can improve search engine optimization (SEO) for digital content, quickly categorizing content and text mining words, phrases and topics for customers. Beyond SEO, you can profile and segment customers based on their historical behavior, profitability and lifetime value. Through a range of predictive analytic models, including affinity analysis, response modeling and churn analysis, you could decide whether it’s a good move to combine digital and print subscriptions, or recognize which content merits a fee versus which content you can monetize without a paywall.  With predictive modeling, you can e.g. understand and predict the behavior of each customer and target group, besides taking resource, budget constraints, or contact policies into account.

Step 3: Automate and synchronize customer engagement across channels

Once you’ve determined which analytics approach is best, you’ll need to automate your engagement activities with customers, and SAS can of course be supportive. With its Marketing Automation you can quickly define target segments, prioritize selection rules, choose appropriate communication channels, schedule and execute campaigns, analyze results, and make adjustments to improve future campaign performance. So, you’ll be able to present customers with the best, most profitable offers to keep them engaged or to win them back from competitors. With a complete view of the customer, a deep understanding of behavior and automated engagement efforts, you’ll be able to make decisions that resonate for customers and invigorate your marketing efforts.

Step 4: Effectively measure campaign performance and attribution

Combining SAS Reporting capabilities with SAS Visual Analytics makes it easy to examine the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and tactics based on your budget and success metrics. Use response attribution modeling to understand the customer’s conversion path and to know where to assign marketing credit. Then you can create future marketing mix optimization models, test/control strategies, predictive models and marketing campaigns. With adaptive, agile marketing, you can test your offers and content quickly on a small scale and nurture continually richer customer interactions.

With a single view of each customer, and a detailed understanding of what you should say and promote to each customer, you hold the keys to marketing success.

By MediaBUZZ