Customer identity management is the bedrock of modern data-driven marketing. Here are six reasons to invest in optimising your customer profiles.
New Epsilon research reveals that only 35% of companies are prioritising customer profile development, before they prepare their marketing campaigns. Instead, the majority of marketing teams are making the mistake of jumping ahead and focusing on optimising campaigns and increasing targeted engagement.
Why is customer identity so important?
To successfully optimise marketing campaigns and engagement, marketeers and CX practitioners should first focus on laying a firm foundation by optimising customer identity management. This will help them to understand customer behaviour better and enable them to capitalise on future opportunities.
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Here we outline six stand-out benefits of investing in fully formed, data-driven customer identity profiles:
1. Deliver seamless, personalised customer experiences
More than 60% of respondents in a recent Epsilon survey say they suffer from gaps in their first-party customer data. These gaps, caused by incomplete customer profiles, heighten the risk of:
• Incorrect messaging frequency, with intervals between messages either too long or too short.
• Interactions that fail to reflect the customer’s personal preferences.
• Disjointed and inappropriate marketing messages.
With the help of a robust customer identity management strategy, brands can double-down on data capture and overcome the issue of fragmented customer profiles. Programmes dedicated to the accurate identification of customers will help brands to effectively personalise and increase the relevance of engagement campaigns.
2. Increase the effectiveness of marketing campaign management
Just 8% of marketing experts believe their customer identity programs increase customer lifetime value. Also, a mere 17% of marketeers believe they are skilled at reducing marketing waste within their own business. This wasted marketing spend can be directly linked to the perception of marketing as a cost centre. In fact, internal tech and operational data silos often block marketeers and CX practitioners from accurately calculating how their efforts contribute to revenue attribution. The solution is for organisations to make joined-up marketing and tech decisions. This cross-department collaboration can yield dramatic results – proving marketing efficiency and freeing the marketing function from short-term campaign performance judgements.
3. Improve analytics capabilities
Companies that want to build strong engagement strategies must first find and analyse relevant buying patterns in past customer journeys. This approach enables marketeers to:
• Predict and reveal future customer buying behaviour.
• Develop and implement marketing messaging aimed at satisfying customer demand.
CX practitioners and marketeers can use data-driven insights on channels such as webpages, social media, and self-service portals to determine what content buyers prefer engaging with and adapt their strategy accordingly.
4. Better adherence to privacy controls and opt-outs
With 81% of customers saying they would stop engaging with a brand if it was involved in a data breach, it’s clear that the ability to adhere to privacy controls and opt-outs has a major impact on customer lifetime value. Companies that leverage customer identity management to protect private data and fulfil their legal obligations enjoy a distinct competitive advantage.
5. Identify lucrative up-selling and cross-selling opportunities
It’s a simple fact that when companies are aware of their customers’ buying habits, they find it easier to up-sell and cross-sell to them. Data-driven customer insights can reveal:
• Which customer segments are most likely to convert on a particular up-sell/cross-sell proposition.
• Which product-bundling suggestions are best for a cross-sell with existing customers.
• The best point during the customer journey to attempt an up-sell/cross-sell.
The ability to identify and optimise up-selling/cross-selling opportunities can be incredibly valuable, especially when you consider it is between five to 25 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to retain and resell to an existing one.
6. Navigating the post-cookie future
Google Chrome’s self-imposed deadline to phase out third-party cookies by 2023 is fast approaching. It is therefore critical that brands optimise customer identity management to ensure their first-party data is well organized, unified across company divisions and can be relied upon to help deliver market-leading personalisation in a post-cookie world.
Companies’ long-term reliance on third-party data is no longer sustainable. Without a strategy to guide customer identity data capture brands will lose the ability to:
• Track and understand customer behaviour and preferences.
• Gather insights from webpages, social media, and self-service portals.
• Analyse past customer journeys so that future journeys can be anticipated and optimised.
Find out more
For more expert insight and advice on optimising customer profile development read Epsilon’s latest report, Key Drivers for Identity Management.