Make Your Marketing Campaigns More Successful This New Year

The key to a successful marketing campaign is to reach customers at the right place, at the right time, with the right message. Traditional market segmentation used in campaigns aggregates prospective buyers into groups with common needs. Marketers hope that customers in the same segment will respond similarly to a marketing promotion. But will they?

Not according to McKinsey & Company’s research that found that 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions. In addition to this, 76% answered that they get frustrated when this doesn’t happen. McKinsey & Company also reports that companies that excel at personalization generate 40% more revenue from those activities than average players.

Segmentation introduces more challenges than just insufficient personalization. Segmentation, even micro-segmentation, is an increasingly flawed campaign tactic since a customer with constantly changing shopping behavior quickly falls into a different segment than the ones initially identified for a promotion. This situation is made more complex because marketers can’t adjust campaigns quickly enough to keep up with customer and market changes throughout a campaign’s duration.

A more effective campaign optimization approach is to use data integration to build a 360-degree customer profile that enables the creation of individual-level messaging and relevant offers delivered in the best channel to reach the customer at exactly the right time. This data integration combined with real-time data analytics will help you sense and respond to campaign performance changes in real-time.

360-Degree Customer View

If you don’t understand who your customers are, your campaign promotions will not be able to target them effectively and you’ll lose opportunities to your competitors. The impact on your business can be tremendous; 66% of consumers say encountering content that isn’t personalized would stop them from making a purchase. Yet, many marketing departments lack access to the comprehensive data they need to create a 360-degree customer view, relying on limited historical data that has been extracted from their sales and CRM systems.

A 360-degree view requires access to real-time customer engagement data across all touchpoints, including your call center, your website, emails, social media, and more. In addition to this first-party data that you’re collecting directly from your customers, zero-party data collection is becoming more important. Forrester coined the term zero-party data and defines it as data that a customer intentionally and proactively shares with a brand. This includes data such as personal information, contact preferences, and purchase intentions.

Customer data should also come from external data sources (second-party data from partners and third-party data from aggregators). Examples include credit history, demographics and market data to create a broader picture of the customer that helps produce better-performing campaigns.

Real-Time Campaign Performance Analytics

Once you execute your campaign, you will benefit from measuring its performance in real-time. Operational analytics of sales data tied to marketing promotions can identify when you should adjust your campaign. You’ll have to build, test, and deploy campaigns in rapid succession to quickly adapt to constant changes in the market and customer behavior. Quick action will help you drive more revenue and optimize your marketing spend with greater accuracy.

How to Improve Your Campaign Performance

To fully optimize campaigns, you’ll need a cloud data platform with two important characteristics. The platform should include data integration to make it easier to create an accurate, complete, and timely 360-degree customer profile. Since data sources for creating a 360-degree customer view are so diverse, the integration should handle structured, semi-structured and unstructured formats. Also, the platform must provide real-time data analytics so that you can make fast campaign optimization decisions based on how your campaign is performing.

The Actian Data Platform provides all these capabilities, making it easy to connect, manage and analyze customer data and campaign performance. To learn more, download two complimentary eBooks and How to Maximize Business Value with Real-Time Data Analytics.

About Teresa Wingfield

Teresa Wingfield is Director of Product Marketing at Actian where she is responsible for communicating the unique value that the Actian Data Platform delivers, including proven data integration, data management and data analytics. She brings a 20-year track record of increasing revenue and awareness for analytics, security, and cloud solutions. Prior to Actian, Teresa managed product marketing at industry-leading companies such as Cisco, McAfee, and VMware.