Is Your Digital Marketing as Customer-Centric as You Think?

Take a look at leading digital-native businesses such as Gymshark, Deliveroo and AO.COM, and you’ll notice they all have one thing in common – deep-rooted customer-centricity.

They put their customers’ needs at the very centre of everything they do and that filters through every aspects of their business, from the technology they use to the way they market their goods and services.

Epsilon has created a series of video and blog ‘explainers’ to guide you through key aspects of customer-centricity. Topics range from calculating customer lifetime value and boosting loyalty to customer acquisition and incremental growth.

What is customer-centricity in digital marketing?

Digital-native understand that to have customer centric digital marketing one of the most important aspects is business need to have as basic requisite the ability to recognise a customer or prospect, accurately and across multiple devices

Why it matters?

Customer centricity forms a virtuous circle. When you can identify your customers and understand their behaviour. Armed with this information you can proactively share messages that will resonate with them and ultimately sell them what they need and want, when they want Can we not use track as often?

Why is this such a big challenge?

The problem is structural. Most organisations are primarily channel-centric rather than customer-centric. Business functions, and the teams that service them, operate in isolation and there are gaps and barriers where they meet. Every team is working on their own piece of the jigsaw, so it’s almost impossible to have a single, fluid and friction-free customer journey.

Businesses often invest in a single customer view, but if their internal silos aren't broken down, each team will continue to look at a solution that applies to their own goals rather than the ultimate customer goal.

Deeper dive: three steps to becoming a customer-centric company

Here are three challenges organisations must overcome if they are to be truly customer-centric:

Identify customers and prospects: 65% of shoppers will visit a website using multiple devices over a period of a year and many may change their cookie multiple times. If you can't connect offline data with an online ID, you will never know what percentage of your web visitors are current customers and your messaging will be disconnected.

Achieve true customer-centric personalisation: Customer-centric personalisation looks and feels like an on-brand, real-world relationship – a sensitive and evolving dialogue extending across all your channels. This is only possible with successful cross-channel identification. The alternative is channel-centric personalisation – spam emails and being chased around the internet by a product that you’ve viewed once.

Effectively measure incremental revenue growth. Incremental growth is the key measure of customer-centricity because it shows how well a brand nurtures customer lifetime value. Epsilon measures incrementality using a tested control to understand changes in the sales baseline. This data-driven approach to incrementality enables organisations to create marketing campaigns that are super-targeted and provide a compelling ROI.

Questions to ask yourself…

• Do you understand your customers’ lifetime value?
• How does this data affect the way you acquire customers?
• If you are in charge of acquisition, can you influence the SSCV, CDP or ID solution your CRM team use?
• If you are in charge of customer experience, how often do you speak to the performance teams when performance ads get a bit too performance-driven?

Introducing Epsilon’s solution

Epsilon’s solution is different because it is end-to-end – harnessing data to provide customer-centricity for the lifetime of the customer.

• Onboarding customers and making sense of their data,
• creating algorithms to decide if and when to serve a customer
• Deciding what to talk about as well as being responsible for getting the end result

The bottom line

This end-to-end approach means that Epsilon’s solution connects disparate functions right across the organisation and attributes engagement levels according to customer value.

You can find out more about customer-centricity by watching our on-demand video series