How to Improve Your Marketing Analytics with a 360-View of Your Customer
What is a 360 View of your customers?
A 360-degree view of a customer is a holistic visualization of collected data from all your customer data in one place. It consists of all the touchpoints where a customer meets the brand, be it social media, website or customer service.
Having a 360-degree view of your customers, you can understand and study them better. This in-depth data can help in curating tailored and more personalized content for your audience. You can better understand your core customer’s priorities and preferences, which in turn means you can position your business better in the market.
This data can also be beneficial to cross-sell opportunities and upsell your services/products.
Having a comprehensive view of your customers can allow businesses to create a journey, showcasing past and present customer interactions as well as predicting the future state of the customer relationship. Diving deeper, we have identified key elements required to curate a holistic view of your customers.
7 Elements of 360 view of the customer
A 360-degree customer view is a mixture of various components, each element critical for understanding the customer better.
Demographic:
This includes basic information about the customer such as their age, gender, location, income etc. This data can be gathered from various sources such as form signups and web analytics. While this may seem extremely basic, this data is the foundation of any personalized marketing strategy.
Behavioural:
To tailor the services or the marketing campaigns according to the individual needs it is essential to identify psychographic patterns. By tracking customer behavior across various channels such as online interactions, purchase history, and engagement, you can understand their habits, preferences and predict future action.
Preferences:
Preferences can include data around a customer’s preferred communication platform or their specific choice of service/product. This can be collected via surveys and other interactive mechanisms or by studying their buying pattern. By studying preferences, you can deliver better targeted messaging.
Social media data:
Social media platforms provide a wealth of psychographic information such as their interest, opinion, trends they follow etc.This pool of data can be used to create marketing strategies that your target audience can relate with.
Feedback:
The best way to study about what needs to be altered in your service/ product is by asking the customers that have already interacted with your brand. This can be collected from feedback, review, surveys or social media interaction like comments and posts.
Transactional data:
Data about a customer’s purchase transaction including returns or any kind of financial transaction can help study your customer’s buying patterns in detail and predict future buying behaviors.
3rd party data:
Third party data is the data collected from sources not directly related to your business such as market research, credit bureaus or data brokers. This information can provide additional in depth information about customer’s psychology.
With a comprehensive view of your customer, you can take data informed business decisions, driving business growth.
Benefits of 360 view of your customers
There are many other benefits to having a 360 customer view. Here are just a few:
1) Improved customer profiling and segmentation:
Nuanced understanding about needs, preferences and behaviors of the customer, you can create more refined customer profiles and segments based on their psychographic information.
Analyzing customer behaviors across multiple touchpoints allows for the identification of patterns and trends. This data can be used to categorize customers based on their interactions with products, channels, and marketing efforts. By micro segmentation, it is easier to create marketing campaigns tailored according to the audience.
2) Personalized marketing:
According to a McKinsey & Company research, 71% consumers expect brands to deliver personalized interaction. With a 360 degree view you can not only understand about your customer but also about their wants, needs and what actually matters to this. This kind of precise data can enhance the likelihood of capturing customer attention and driving conversions,
3) Enhanced customer experiences:
A comprehensive view of customer data ensures that each team including the customer facing team such as customer service representative have better access to the entire history of the customer.
This holistic understanding leads to much more than just surface level interactions with clients. Also, Customers receive a seamless experience as businesses integrate data from different channels, providing a unified and coherent brand experience.
4) Better alignment of sales and marketing team:
Sales and marketing have historically struggled with working together. With a 360 View of customers, both the teams can have full access to customer data. You can measure sales performance and improve sales forecasting.
You can connect your marketing data to sales to anticipate customer needs and communicate better with prospects.You can create tailored campaigns and precise strategies. This will maximize the effectiveness of you marketing and sales campaign.
In addition, having a 360 customer view can also reduce risk, improve decision-making and help avoid costly mistakes.
Achieving 360 view with data integration
– Identifying data sources:
For achieving a 360 view of your customer, it is important to identify all the possible sources that can contain information such as website analytics, CRM systems, transaction databases, social media etc.
– Data Collection:
Once you have identified data sources, it is vital to collect all the data in one place like a database. Platforms like Google Cloud (Bigquery), Microsoft Azure, Amazon S3 or Redshift, Snowflake etc are industry choices for implementing such a project.
To ensure that the data collected from different sources is of high quality. Standardize data formats, resolve inconsistencies, and validate data accuracy. This step is crucial for creating a reliable and accurate customer profile.
– Data integration:
You can utilize data integration tools and technologies to seamlessly bring together data from disparate sources. These tools can automate the process of extracting, transforming, and loading (ETL) data into a unified format.
For example with Funnel, a data integration tool, data analysts can effortlessly connect, store, and organize data without the need for coding. Furthermore, Funnel facilitates easy sharing of this organized data with any visualization tool or data warehouse.
In essence, it streamlines the entire data management process for analysts, enabling them to focus on insights rather than grappling with code.
To know more, read our blog: Unlocking the Power of Data Integration: Choosing the Right Tool for Your Business’s Success
– Combining GA4 with company data :
GA4 is a powerful marketing analytics tool. By integrating the data from GA4 with your company data, you can build a better audience and get a better idea about the entire customer journey.
With real time analytics capabilities of GA4, you can respond promptly to changing customer behaviors, contributing to more agile and effective decision-making.
To know more about GA4, read our blog: Exploring all major changes in GA4 and how it affects Data analysts and Marketers
– Visualizing your data:
You can implement robust data visualization techniques to transform raw data into meaningful and actionable insights. With help of visualization tools you can present complex customer data in an accessible and understandable format, facilitating better decision-making across the organization.
There are numerous tools available for data visualization, catering to different preferences, skill levels, and specific business needs such as Power BI, Tableau, Qlik, Quicksight, Sisense etc.
To know more, read our blog: How to Choose the Right Chart for Data Visualisation
– Advanced analytics:
Leverage advanced analytics techniques, including predictive modeling and machine learning, to anticipate customer behaviors and preferences. This allows businesses to proactively address customer needs and tailor offerings based on predictive insights, enhancing the overall customer experience.
– Data Audit:
Conduct regular data audits to ensure the accuracy and integrity of the integrated customer data. Identify and rectify any inconsistencies or errors in the data, maintaining the reliability of the 360-degree customer view for strategic decision-making.
– Social listening:
Integrate social listening tools to capture and analyze customer sentiment on social media platforms. Social listening provides valuable information about customer opinions, trends, and reactions, contributing to a more nuanced understanding of customer perceptions and preferences.
Tools for 360 View of your customer
For a 360 view of your customer, you need all the information of your customer available in realtime. While this may seem very difficult considering the multitude of data. For creating a 360 view of your customer, it is essential to gather and analyze data from different sources. As a data integration company , we recommend following tools to best track your customers:
- A CRM
- Interaction analytics
- An attribution tool
Let’s go through why each is vital.
- CRM : A CRM should be an integral part of marketing analytics. It allows you to keep track of your inbound leads and gives your sales team the resources they need to nurture leads into customers.Integrated with the right tools, a CRM can provide you with a wealth of information and better organize customer information.
- CDP (Customer Data Platform): CDP is a comprehensive system that aggregates and organizes customer data from various touchpoints, creating a unified customer profile. It goes beyond CRM by incorporating data from multiple sources, online and offline.
CDPs bridge data silos, providing a holistic view of customer interactions across channels and touchpoints, enabling more personalized and effective engagement.
- Interaction analytics solution: Interaction analytics solutions use advanced technologies like natural language processing and machine learning to analyze customer interactions across different communication channels, such as calls, emails, and chats.
It can analyze customer conversations for sentiment, keywords, and patterns, and provide valuable insights that can contribute to deeper understanding of customer behavior.
- Marketing attribution tool: Marketing attribution tools help businesses understand the impact of their marketing efforts by attributing conversions and sales to specific marketing channels or touchpoints.
This tool can provide actionable insights into the customer journey, helping businesses allocate resources effectively and optimize their marketing strategies based on actual performance data.