For many marketers, organizing data into individual customer profiles’ is common practice. Organizing information in this way makes it easier to look up information about customers, and target them with personalized communication. But how much information does your customer profile truly have about your customers?
Let’s say you have a customer, Joe. Based on Joe’s customer profile, you know that he most recently purchased sandals on June 1. You know that Joe has made 4 purchases in his lifetime, and that he has spent $400 total with your brand. You can also know Joe’s average order value per purchase. But what else do you know about him?
A customer profile is a great start to providing personalized communications and getting to the Holy Grail of 1:1 marketing. While with basic customer profiles you have visibility into RFM data and maybe even some demographic overlays; traditional customer profiles are limited in their data collection. The CP Customer Profile collects information from all customer touchpoints, and organizes it into individual customer profiles to provide businesses an enhanced view of their customer.
Let’s revisit the example about Joe:
Do you know Joe’s preferred product category? Did you know that he made his first purchase online, and the next one in-store? Joe is a “gifter”, and primarily purchases for his wife. He typically buys in the spring, for Mother’s Day and his wife’s birthday. Based on the number of purchases, Joe is also a good candidate for a loyalty program. These are the enhanced pieces of customer information that the CP Customer Profile can tell you. Additionally, the CP Customer Profile can use behavioral and customer data to run predictive models for a customer’s likely next purchase, which in turn informs how a brand can market to its customers.
What else can the CP Customer Profile tell you? Below are three more reasons why it’s important to go beyond the standard data collection and enhance your customer profile with Customer Portfolios:
- Scale with your customer data – In an omnichannel world, customers interact with brands through an increasing number of touchpoints. The CP Customer Profile is flexible enough to integrate data from all your customer touchpoints, and its knowledge about a customer expands with the more data it collects. As more data is collected from individual customers, the CP Customer Profile is nimble enough to update the data and analytics to provide real-time insight about your customers.
- Make your data actionable – As data grows and the insights about your customers are updated, the CP Customer Profile helps make that data actionable by giving you the detailed customer insight necessary to adjust communications based on up-to-date customer behavior and product and channel preferences, where your customers are in the lifecycle, future value, and other behavioral data to help you send communications that are targeted and relevant to growing each individual customer.
- Distribute to all marketing touchpoints – Having your customer data organized in one place can help you easily share the data with other partners, like ESPs, programmatic solutions, or even in-store clienteling apps. For example, we recently shared the CP Customer Profile with a programmatic advertising firm to connect a customer’s profile ID with their digital ID. With the growing specialization of MarTech solutions, it’s becoming harder and harder to consolidate your data. The CP Customer Profile provides a central repository to collect data from all sources and distribute a single view of your customer.
In summary, gathering all this information, and organizing it into actionable, scalable, customer profiles, is not easy. It takes flexible, scalable data collectors, and skilled analysts to organize your data and answer any questions you have about your customer. Thankfully, Customer Portfolios has both the people and the products that you need to collect and organize your customer data to create 1:1 personalized communications that will help you put your customer at the center of your marketing strategy.
