Should I Use Customer Data for My Marketing Plan? Yes!

Last year we shared Personalized Marketing Programs for Customer Acquisition and Retention and discussed how utilizing any data available (location, recent products viewed, etc) can help you narrow your focus when marketing to prospects and customers to increase conversion rates. Now, let’s take it a step further. 

When creating your marketing plan for the next year, start by looking at the data you have on your customers. It’s critical that you go through all of your systems; POS, marketing, sales, etc., as we live in such a data-driven world, that we often forget how much data we collect in silos and then never end up using it in the most effective way possible. Go through each system one by one.

• List all of the data points you have available: 
• Start with the basics, names, addresses, emails, etc., 
• Keep going levels deeper to look through past purchases for:
  • Dates they typically shop or even a general season
  • Types of products purchased 
  • What brands they buy
• Identify what types of email they usually open or click through
• See if you have a salesperson that typically helps them or a preferred shopping method (online, in-store, via phone, etc.)

Once you have the data identified, you can determine what you want to do with that data. Look at your sales goals for the year and match data to them. Typically, it’s easier to get repeat business from customers than it is to get new business, so let’s say you have goals to increase customer retention and increase sales, you can hit both of those goals by using a data-driven marketing plan. You can:

• Create personalized marketing experiences 
• Remind customers about products purchased that they may want to repeat based on a time interval
• Showcase new products that they are likely to be interested in based on past purchase history
• Push them to their local store with an offer
• If you offer personalized items, you can actually show them an example of what it would look like if they ordered
• …and so much more! The possibilities are endless (and sometimes you need help to connect the dots, which is where your marketing partner comes in).

From there, you need to export the data, and this is where it can get tricky. With so many points to capture data, it can be hard to know how to match it up. If your marketing partner offers strong data services, as long as there is some common denominator or unique identifier, they can do the work for you. All you have to do is get them the data.

At the end of the day, you can do one of three things when you have a lot of data; use it, abuse it, or avoid it. There’s only one good strategy out of those, so let’s talk about how Kirkwood can help you create a data-driven marketing plan that appropriately uses the data you have to meet your sales goals.