How Well Do You Actually Know Your Customers? By John Bard August 5, 2020 One of companies’ biggest mistakes is assuming they understand their customers’ needs, preferences and buying behaviors when they are actually just guessing. The better you understand who your customers are, the more successful you will be developing products and services to serve their needs, packaging them in a desirable way and communicating your offers with messages that lead to a sale. There is much available information, the challenge is gathering it in a meaningful way that leads you to actionable marketing insights. Why developing a 360-degree customer profile is difficult Marketers have known for many years that there is much more customer information available than they had the tools to manage and use effectively. A true 360-degree view of your customers can’t be sourced from a single system, it must be aggregated from many different sources. Traditional CRM and data warehouse systems just couldn’t handle all the data sources available, and developing a complex set of integrations was both costly and time consuming. With market dynamics and customer preferences changing continuously, the tools just weren’t available to provide the types of insights that were needed. Your marketing team needs detailed, near real-time customer-profile analytics that integrate data from multiple channels. Assembling a complete customer profile requires 3 key components: Access to data from different sources A means of collecting and aggregating data in one place Analysis tools to convert raw data into actionable insights Once you have these components in place, you will be able to generate the insights you need to improve performance of your marketing efforts. Actian provides a complete solution to enable marketing success! Employ advanced data modeling to de-duplicate, identify common characteristics and create customer clusters that depict the complete picture of your customers’ purchasing habits and preferences. Imagine what you could do with better data… Actian helps you develop a more complete and accurate profile of your customers by mining all available sources of information in any format, whether structured or unstructured, from any location or channel. Combine data from your sales transactions, Websites, mobile apps, service history and more with public information about customers, such as social media posts, product reviews and customers’ networks of friends and family. By gathering all this information, you will be able to identify the best methods to connect, assess your customers’ predilection to churn, develop offers and marketing messages that will resonate and learn how to personalize their entire customer experience. The result will be winning more business for your company and increasing customer loyalty by showing customers you understand them and want to solve their problems (instead of just pushing your products and hoping for a response). If your company wants to understand your customers better and target your marketing efforts according to their individual needs, then Actian can help. Actian Data Connect can help you manage and integrate data sources from inside and outside your company and Actian Vector provides the rich analytics solution to transform your data into marketing insights. To learn more about this and other data analysis use-cases, visit actian.com/solutions/customer360-analytics/ About John Bard John Bard is senior director of marketing for the Actian Analytics Platform portfolio of products. Joining Actian in early 2016, John has over 20 years of leadership experience at enterprise companies like Sun Microsystems, Cisco, and Fujitsu America. In addition to leading product marketing and product management for enterprise servers, he has held a variety of roles in marketing programs, business operations, sales support, and forecasting and revenue management. John enjoys the constant learning process to apply innovative technology to the most complex business problems.
