Transforming data into insights for better customer knowledge
How can modern technological tools create a personalised customer experience and omnichannel engagement?
This is the question Maurizio Alberti, VP Sales at Mapp Digital, answers by first explaining why B2C companies should adopt omnichannel marketing solutions.
These technologies give us a 360° view of each customer, enabling us to improve and individualise their experience, which in many cases is still standardised and does not take account of habits, preferences or different moments in time.
To obtain a complete view of each customer, and achieve a high level of personalisation at every point of contact, it is important to make data the conductor of your digital strategy. This data then needs to be exploited and transformed into insights, for appropriate marketing activation. The Customer Data Platform is the data-driven solution that facilitates this orchestration.
The benefits of a data-driven marketing solution
The first advantage is economic. Numerous studies conducted by the American consultancy Nucleus Research estimate the ROI of marketing analysis at around 900%. Correctly exploited, insights generate a significant impact on the ROI of your marketing expenditure and on your company's revenue. The proportion of expenditure devoted to marketing analysis will increase over the next 3 years.
Another medium- to long-term aspect is the ability to influence customer experience and loyalty. By obtaining a unified view of your customers, you can better understand their needs and expectations. With the data you've been able to collect and exploit, you'll be able to influence their journey, from acquisition to loyalty, with 100% personalised messages and activations.
The third advantage is that it provides a single methodology to facilitate collaboration between departments working on different touchpoints (acquisition, conversion, loyalty). By focusing on customer analysis, Mapp aims to predict customers' buying behaviour and personalise the offer made to them, to achieve a truly individualised relationship. This often generates a huge amount of data that is difficult to manage. Technology is therefore essential.
Personalisation will make the difference, but it must be powered by technology
To offer a personalised customer experience and boost engagement at every stage of the customer journey, you need to understand, but above all anticipate, the actions your customers are going to take. Thanks to AI engines and an intelligent marketing solution, you can predict your customers' behaviour, for example to recover abandoned shopping baskets in the online purchasing process, to predict their conversions, the value of their next order or even to prevent churn.
Artificial intelligence helps marketers to simplify and automate complex operations, and to transform data into information, so that they can make more informed decisions. The work of analysts generally comes at the end of the marketers' work, whereas at Mapp we consider that customer analysis is the strategic starting point that will guide all execution activity.
A major challenge in data analysis is to have the necessary skills in-house. Most companies still make decisions based on intuition, gut feeling or past experience, but these elements, while important, do not take into account the ongoing transformation of the customer. Companies that want to differentiate themselves need to adopt data-driven strategies, be able to understand that data and turn it into insights and then decisions. The solution, if the company doesn't have these skills in-house, is to rely on technology. There are tools that can be easily used by marketers and customised, such as the dashboards specifically created by Mapp for different sectors, from e-commerce to finance and the media. Companies with in-house resources can use these solutions as a starting point for developing more advanced tools.
The Mapp solution is designed to efficiently collect, analyse and activate data for personalised campaigns across channels such as email, mobile, push, web and social media.
Case study
myToys is a German retailer specialising in the sale of children's products, clothing and toys. It is also the 12th largest e-commerce platform in Germany, storing over 130,000 SKUs of products.
myToys analyses and optimises every part of its multi-brand customer journey using Mapp Intelligence. The company has implemented this solution for three of its brands: myToys, mirapodo and yomonda. By combining several brands under the umbrella brand, it quickly realised the value of basing most of its marketing decisions on data.
Over a hundred reports and dashboards are used by the product, marketing and merchandising teams to help them forecast demand and better understand emerging trends.
For marketing in particular, the main use case was the optimisation of customer journey flows once customers are already on the site (from entry to conversion). Most of the insights used by the marketing team relate to the funnel and the various stages throughout the navigation, with granular information on the source advertising medium, technology, interest in the product and the LTV (Life Time Value) status of customers.
The biggest challenge myToys faced in terms of customer insights was its multi-brand shopping experience. The company has several shops combined into a single checkout process (KombiShopping). For example, a "myToys order" may contain products from several e-commerce platforms belonging to the same group. As a result, many analysis and insight dashboards have been adapted to the KombiShopping experience.
No other independent provider of multi-channel marketing automation and customer insights could offer this level of customisation to suit these unique requirements.
Mapp Digital in a nutshell
Marketers and data specialists should be able to focus on what makes a difference to their business, rather than spending all their time taming technology. With Mapp's customer engagement platform, marketers can focus on what really matters and the exciting ideas that could fuel their strategy.
Using customer intelligence and marketing analytics, companies can easily and efficiently gain insights from data across different channels to trigger highly personalised marketing campaigns.
Customers benefit from predictive models powered by our AI engine, enabling targeted, automated and optimised cross-channel campaigns. Automated messages are sent via the most appropriate marketing channel, at the right time, at the right frequency and to the right person. Thanks to advanced individualised personalisation, long-term customer engagement and loyalty objectives are achieved.
Sponsored article. The expert contributors are authors who are independent of the appvizer editorial team. Their comments and positions are their own.
Article translated from French