Leveraging Customer Data Management To Boost Your Business

What Is Customer Data

In the current scenario, every customer is hooked to the web, thus customer data plays a crucial role. Customer data is any information collected and leveraged by business brands about the customers. It is an essential asset for understanding customers & their goals. The business brands target potential customers and sell their data to third parties for revenue generation.

This digital age is of constant customer connectivity, so customer data analytics tell us how the customer reacts to various tactics so the organization can improve its product and services. Business Brands acquire customer data via recording historical purchase transactions, customer support communication data, web analytics, website cookies, and social media activities.

Types Of Customer Data

Descriptive Data: It includes the basic identity data of customers including name, phone number, email address, gender, LinkedIn profile, income, etc. It also includes customer demographics which can be used later for customer segmentation or grouping customers based on shared attributes.

Interactive Data: It includes how customers or potential customers interact with the brand across various areas, e.g. how customers are engaging with the e-commerce websites and how often they like/share your posts on social media. It is usually applied at a macro level and highlights click-through rates or how many shares the brands are getting on social media. Interactive Data is particularly useful for informing decisions about the customer’s journey. Interactive Data in web analytics is often studied in detail by marketing consultants to understand the campaign effectiveness.

Behavioural Data: Behavioural Data offers insight into the customer’s experience with the actual product or service. It is often confused with interactive data, but there is a key difference between the two, behavioural data focuses more on the way a customer interacts with the service or product the business offers directly. It includes actions like purchase history, abandoned shopping carts, and renewing subscriptions. Tech companies are often cited as prime users of behavioural data, such as free trial sign-ups, user account logins, feature utilization, user license additions, deactivations, etc. Behavioural Data helps to understand customer preferences & identify future trends.

Attitudinal Data: Attitudinal Data helps to understand what customers actually think about the business brand and the solutions provided by them. While the previous types of data are more objective, attitudinal data is subjective, where the data provided by customers is a first-hand opinion about what customers think about your brand, product, or service. It can be collected through Online reviews, surveys, forums, and feedback interactions with customer service. But the Attitudinal Data is harder to access because every customer does not share their opinion in the same way & at the same volume. That is why consistent & proactive collection of Attitudinal Data from a statistically significant group of customers is the key.

How To Build The Customer Database

Customer Database can be built via aptly executing Customer Data Management. Customer Data Management is how the business brands keep track of the information they collect about customers. It includes collecting, analysing, organising & sharing customer insights throughout the organisation. Customer Data Management helps to generate leads, builds better customer relationships & close deals. While building the customer Database, the following points should be kept in mind:

Segmenting customers as per their preferences sends them the right messages & involves them in proper campaigns.
Using programmatic advertising, and website visitor tracking to retarget the customers.
Targeting the customers by Google Ads.
Creating dynamic content via content marketing strategies, so that the content on web pages & emails can be changed automatically according to the buyer persona, past digital activities & other data points.
Investing in reengagement reminders & push notifications to retarget the customers based on their inactivity, thus enticing them to reengage with the tool.
Creating value content to target customers using heat maps.
Using CRM (customer relationship management), CDP (customer data platform), and DMP (Data management platform) to organize data.
Using web forms for gated content is vital. It is important to install & optimize them on the business brand’s website.
Using Tools and strategies such as Business Intelligence tools, CRM software, Market Research, Attribution Modelling, website analytics, and Competitor Analysis.
Gathering Customer Data at the point of sale as a lot of valuable information can be gathered at this time.
Using email marketing strategies like giveaways, discounts, and competitions to engage customers &collect their data.

How To Leverage Customer Data To Boost Business

In today’s scenario, businesses that do not personalize customer experiences face a hard time competing in their respective industries. The digital world is flooded with data; therefore, it is important to segregate & organize the useful data. To achieve this, the strategies & techniques helpful in leveraging the customer data are listed below:

Increase conversion, target customers, and invest in the most effective channels to improve customer acquisition.
Analyse data from marketing and business management tools & monitor the performance of different products.
Incorporate site-wide tagging to track conversions.
Observe customer behaviour and purchasing habits, and follow fluctuation in numbers.
Build dashboards to track and visualize data conveniently.
Collaborate on solutions to Customers’ problems.
Evaluate propensity to buy & market trends through logistics.
Guide content production via heat maps, and web visitor tracking to determine which content leads & customers visit.
Leverage customers for feedback by starting a referral program to get a positive social media reputation.
Track financial sales & map customers’ journeys.
Build customer-centric value, shift from sales mindset to benefit consumers.
Build amazing campaigns.
Use the right tools & a good CRM system.
Capitalize customer data, and personalize it.
Customer Data can be leveraged using tools like Salesforce, Oracle, Hubspot, and CRM.

What Are The Benefits Of Data-Driven Decision-Making

Data-driven decision-making is the process of using data to inform your decision-making process & validate a course of action before committing to it. From the above content, we have realized the awesome power of data. Digital Marketing relies heavily on data for optimization and reducing customer acquisition costs. To quote Winston Churchill,” Think of data collection as your geese that lay the golden eggs.”

Leveraging the customer data acquired in the right way can transform business growth to a great extent. The benefits are listed below:

Using data to generate revenue, increases profit & reduces customer acquisition costs.
Using key data for all the major decision-making processes helps a business achieve consistent results.
Minimizes bias as every decision is made logically after analysing the customer data.
Data-driven decision-making brings agility & adaptability to the business as per the changing market trends.
Regionalizes brand products as per customer requirements
Improvises problem-solving and customer relationships.
Improves lead generation, customer acquisition & customer retention.
Helps create custom dashboards to study the patterns of customer choices.
Huge volumes of data collected by the data-driven organisations, help to spot patterns in customer choices, thus aiding the business to modify its products & services accordingly.
Improves transparency & awareness throughout the business as the same information is available throughout the organisation which prevents any miscommunication.

What Are The Risks In Managing Customer Data

As customer data is becoming more valuable, the customers are becoming more concerned about how their info is used. Data protection Regulations along with industry-specific data security requirements are becoming commonplace in our data-centric economy to avoid the risks in managing customer data. Hence, understanding security risks & implementing safeguards to protect customer information are key steps for any business brand that wishes to make the best use of the customer data.

In addition to this, maintaining clean data is very important. However, without the right systems & processes, faulty data will become a familiar reality. To keep data clean, implement proactive data deduplication measures, keep the staff well trained, & look for opportunities to eliminate manual data entry.

Conclusion

Leveraging customer data management for business growth is one of the key digital marketing strategies to boost business apart from SEO, site audit, etc. But there are many challenges to overcome e.g. analysis time is spent just on discovering and preparing data that needs an effective use of CRM software. It is the need of the hour to leverage customer data for internal usage as well as for interested third parties. If you are looking for an all-in-one solution to customer data management for your business brand, then UENGAGE PRISM – Customer Marketing Automation platform is the right choice for you. It provides a CRM platform for restaurants, cloud kitchens, breweries & cafés, cashless campuses, D2C brands & for salons to manage & book appointments. With Uengage Prism, you can connect & engage with customers via automated marketing campaigns. It helps in leveraging the customer data in a way that boosts sales by providing the following features:

End–to–end customer data covering minute details.
Real-time data availability ensures quick access to customer data.
Manage campaigns via SMS or push notifications.
The audience is divided into micro-segments which can be targeted over time, making them order again.
Fetch data directly from your POS system.
Simplified guest accommodation process with a digital entry system.