Member Article

How Data Is Vital To Ensuring Effective Engagement

Learn how data-driven marketing is not only essential for effective marketing, but also essential for enhanced prospect management and customer engagement.

Data-driven marketing is not new, but it has become an increasingly essential customer engagement and prospect management tool for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

When SMEs use data insights intelligently by tracking customer behaviour, they gain the ability to become more competitive, more profitable and more efficient in the way they manage their prospects and their existing customers. They can even use data to create new opportunities for their own businesses using effective data analysis to develop new products and services. In turn this can increase sales, customer engagement and loyalty.

Forbes Insights finds that 70% of the organisations involved in its recent survey, and who consider themselves leaders in data-driven marketing, have said they have seen increases in their ability to gain a competitive edge, customer engagement and customer loyalty. “Increased revenues are another bonus…contrast this with organisations that are lagging behind the data-drive trend,…only 24% saw increases in engagement and loyalty”, writes freelance writer Rick Delgado in online customer management magazine CustomerThink.

Data is Queen

Data is therefore the queen to content, which reigns supreme as the king. Yet arguably data leads because the insight and analysis gained by deploying an effective Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM, can help to create the sales and marketing content needed to promote a product and service appropriately to each customer segment within the CRM database.

Data-driven marketing and CRM make it easier to attract new customers within a particular market and market segment. They create an opportunity to cross-sell and up-sell to existing customers. Yet you can’t just add data and expect results. Improved prospect management and customer engagement begins by following the old adage of people, process and then technology. CRM, for example, fails when this is forgotten.

Data is getting bigger

Data comes from a widening array of sources: smartphones and mobile applications, emails, web and e-commerce sites, social media sites, customer interactions on sales calls and in contact centres. So think about the kinds of data your prospects and customers are using; and about the value that you want to extract from it.

Another key question to answer is about what the data doesn’t tell you. For example, data can tell you why 30% of customers clicked on an email or website link. What it doesn’t inform you about is about why the other 70% didn’t click. Therefore the key to data-driven marketing success is to know when and when not to use your intuition. To support data analysis there still need to be some qualitative analysis in order to more precisely understand the buying behaviour of your prospects and existing customers.

Data boosts retail

Supermarket Tesco was one of initial key proponents of data-driven marketing when it test marketed the Tesco Clubcard in 1994. In 2010 the loyalty card scheme boasted of having 15 million members, and as each member collects points the company was able to gather data on their online or in-store shopping habits. This enabled Tesco to redesign the layout of its stores, to more profitably manage its stock, and it was also able to use the data insight gained from the card to entice customers to buy in larger quantities.

More recently, in 2014, online retail sales rose by 15.8% to £45bn. Advances in data-driven marketing mean that this figure is set to grow with the help of mobile and in-store technology. These retail achievements are attainable in other markets because data-driven marketing demonstrates that it offers a distinct business advantage and a significant return on investment (ROI) no matter where it is put into effect. So even your business can improve its customer engagement, prospect management, sales revenues and profitability too.

Find out more about how you can gain a competitive edge over 70% of the data-driven marketing leaders today by copying and pasting http://bit.ly/1FUSqzd into your browser and reading ’The Ultimate Guide to: Using CRM for data driven marketing success.’

This post first appeared on the Redspire CRM blog.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Billy Lyle .