Personalizing customer relationships has only become possible now – and many were caught off guard.
The digital transformation of businesses, accelerated by the pandemic, has been changing the way companies define their strategies and develop actions to attract, win over and retain customers. A data-driven approach, which uses data collected at various points of contact with customers and analyzes this information to obtain relevant insights, is becoming increasingly important.
If being data-driven is still a differentiator today, it will soon be a fundamental condition for businesses to thrive. And this is an exponential process: the more data is collected and analyzed, the more capacity the company has to create hypotheses, learn from its mistakes and evolve quickly. This “test/measure/learn” cycle allows businesses to better understand their customers in order to offer better ideas, promotions and solutions. All based on data.
For marketing, adopting a data-driven approach creates new argentina whatsapp data possibilities. This is particularly important in these times, since the pandemic has caused one in five consumers to switch brands and 70% to try digital channels. In segments such as supermarkets and pharmacies, the shopping journey has gone from being analog to digital, becoming 10 years older in a matter of months.
However, those who are not prepared for this new reality will face problems. Although there is much more information available about customer behavior, pre-pandemic marketing was not capable of working with such granularity and speed. The idea of personalizing customer relationships has been around for decades, but it only became possible now – and many were caught off guard.
From the mass to the individual and the exponential
Data-driven marketing finally makes it possible to move away from a mass communication paradigm and seek one-to-one relationships with millions of consumers. Mass personalization was either too technologically difficult or financially unfeasible. Smartphones, cloud computing, and digital acceleration have changed all that.
One interesting aspect of this migration to the individual, however, is that it brings with it a great acceleration of communication strategies. In a way, the possibility of testing campaigns and actions with millions of people accelerates innovation, as it allows us to evaluate how a series of factors relate to generate sales. Each contact with the customer begins to add something not only to the understanding of that consumer, but of the entire group of customers of the brand. Data-driven marketing is exponential marketing.
However, the growth of customer knowledge and the ability to obtain actionable insights is only the tip of the iceberg. What is not always clear is that it is necessary to develop an infrastructure that allows us to harness the power of data.
This structure goes through some important points:
1. How to collect data
If we are talking about data-driven marketing, the company needs to transform data collection into an activity that is as essential as administrative or purchasing. Starting at the most senior levels of the business, it is necessary to have the mindset that a company that operates without data is like a driver who drives with his eyes closed.
Data collection relies on obtaining reliable information from a range of sources, such as browsing your e-commerce site, customer behavior on social media, browsing physical stores, and interacting with online and offline advertising. And, increasingly, it’s important to understand how the digital world influences the physical world – and vice versa.