Analytics-enabled marketing is your right step in the right direction: The time is now!
Data analytics is at the heart of all the technology-driven marketing automation. Today, integrated Analytics has gone a step further and become a key driver of Business Intelligence (BI), which is a technology-driven process for analysing data and presenting actionable information to help your executives make informed business decisions. It is no longer restricted to marketing messages, it is now touching bottom lines and strategy alike.
The BI strategy you adopt today will influence your business performance over the coming years as internet-based technology goes mainstream from the point of view of customer engagement. More and more consumers are to be found across digital platforms searching for, comparing, and acquiring various products and services and talking to brands directly – this is called ‘consumer parallelism‘.
This same consumer is the catch for which all your rivals are baiting with messages, offers, and attempts at building loyalty. It is a big sea of opportunities where, to catch a consumer’s attention you have to catch them at the right time, on the right platform, and with the right offer. This has created the need for a Unified View of the Consumer, for which, you need insights from data analytics. As a marketer and a brand, this is your ability and opportunity to have a ‘Smart Conversation’ with your consumer.
How to do this? Enter marketing automation, with integrated analytics at its core.
Analytics has been around forever but data-driven analytics is changing the world of marketing automation. Your consumer today is ‘always on’ i.e. online and accessible.
For instance, you and I are online all the time, through one device or another, and always available to engage on things that interest us, individually. While I may ‘skip’ a brand’s advertisement about beauty products while scanning my video feed, you may not. Do I skip all such videos or only the one by your brand? Do I skip it only when it pops up during my working hours or do I skip it all the time? Are there any instances of me searching for any beauty products on other platforms? As a marketer, this is what you want to know.
Know Your Customer: As a marketer, you want to know your customer as closely as is possible. Analytics can help you achieve that. We see a data revolution across all business landscapes such that service providers are racing to develop tools that can ensure rewarding cross-channel experiences for customers by analysing data and acting on it in real time.
Good Business Intelligence will mean using real-time analytics to refine the targeting to up-sell, cross-sell, to reduce churn rates with engaging, personalised, or in other words ‘smart’ conversations. Use recommendation engines that can process and compute a customer’s behaviour in real time, and then provide the right recommendations based on what a customer looked at or bought recently. Recommendations can also be made based on community, i.e. what similar customers have bought or viewed.
Churn it Down: It’s a well-known fact that 80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers. Analytics can be a handy tool for creating a predictive churn model for a data-driven retention strategy. It will tell you how likely is your customer to ending their relationship with you – be it through an ‘unsubscribe’, or by blacklisting your messages. You can then immediately focus your efforts on engaging and retaining these customers.
Your Marketing Mix: As a marketer, your campaigns on offline and online channels must be in sync, requiring you to plan your budgets accordingly. You can use analytics-driven marketing mix modelling to measure the impact of marketing activities you have previously undertaken and to predict the future performance (in terms of sales) of various marketing mixes.
Analytics-enabled marketing makes it to our list of 8 transformational Martech trends for 2018, download now to read all