Customer Profiles: 5 campaign ideas to get started

Across the companies I speak to there is a strong desire to move towards a centralised Profile for each and every customer. At a high level it ‘just makes sense.’ However decisions can’t always be made on gut feeling. A business case is needed and for that a few components need to be in place.

In this blog series I will cover the three areas we start with when building a business case with a customer:

• Campaign ideas
• Customer lifecycle focus
• Revenue vs cost-saving

Lets begin with campaign ideas…

To connect ‘gut feeling’ to business benefit you need to work out the actual ways the Profile can be leveraged to improve company performance. Often a couple of these ideas will have driven a company to speak to us in the first place but its good to have some more up your sleeve to develop a longer term roadmap. Here are a few below…

CRM

This data silo hosts a wealth of information and can be applied across many of the channels being mentioned here. Is CRM data being fully used by the rest of the business, in particular the online business? Information in CRM is useful to online for improving campaign targeting, improving analysis (see below) and powering personalisation on websites and apps. It’s not just a one-way street, however. We work with a few customers that just want to upload behavioural information to their CRM system to empower sales and customer service teams.

Email

Is email being maximised regardless of the email service provider you are using? Are email lists created based on behaviour? Are all abandon basket or reactive type campaigns set up? If not – these are a quick win. Often the email platform can manage these tasks but it needs the data to do it. A real time Profile can provide this.

Web Analytics & Business Intelligence (BI)

Web analytics and BI or data visualisation have been around for a long time and I am grouping two big areas together here. Implementing web analytics platforms has become easier with tag management, but often enriching web analytics reports with (anonymised) customer information can really improve insight. Gender, time since last purchase, last customer service interactions – all of this information can be made available in a Profile which can improve the insight from web analytics. With regards to data visualisation – collecting behavioural information to visualise can be difficult. A Profile that is connected across channels represents a good source of data for BI platforms.

Online personalisation

There are many platforms for personalising online content. Typically these are Content Management Systems or testing platforms. Often they will have great functionality to adapt content and chose what content is shown to different visitors. However they are only as good as the data made available to them. Better data, better personalisation. Make sure your CMS has the data to make its personalisation functionality really sing.

Sales/Customer Service

Most companies still have online and offline as very different silos. My mobile operator called me yesterday with an upgrade price but said “you may get a lower price if you go into a store.” Useful, thanks for that! As companies move towards a truly single experience, ensuring that those offline systems and teams (sales and customer service, for example) have the most up to date information is crucial. FAQ’s browsed before a customer service call is useful information to the call operator.

There will be many other areas you want to look – other channels such as display marketing and SMS. Personalisation can be extended to apps, and with beacon technology the in-store experience can be included. But the above ideas are

For more information on creating actionable customer profiles, download our eBook: Creating Actionable Customer Profiles