In this guest post, our partner – Impact Data – takes us through what a successful customer engagement journey looks like and how brands can use their customer data to its full potential.
David Bird, Sales Director of Impact Data explains, “In my 13 years working in database marketing, one of the most common questions I still get asked is “what do I do with all this data?” This question is even more pertinent today, given there are now many more ways businesses collect information about their customers.
“The first step is to bring this data into your marketing platform, to combine it and form a single customer view. This is just tech speak for presenting all the information about each customer across a single profile, and often includes important information about their most recent visit to your venue.
That’s technically the easy bit, hospitality tech suppliers have become really collaborative over the past few years and most systems can now talk to each other and share data.
“However, what’s left is a huge database containing lots of information about each customer. This is where you need to leverage the power of automation. Marketing platforms can analyse and check millions of customer records and then make decisions about which customers need to receive marketing messages (or not), so it makes sense to let a machine do this as opposed to the marketing team. Setting up automation is really about identifying certain conditions upon which it makes sense to send the customer a message or incentive to drive a visit i.e. when they first sign up, when it’s their Birthday, when we can see they used to visit regularly and have now suddenly stopped, or to reward high frequency, high value customers.
“Understanding these conditions also helps qualify why it makes sense to send a customer an incentive in the first place. It also reduces the chances of cannibalising sales by sending offers to customers who would typically visit regardless. The beauty with these types of campaigns is that when reviewing redemptions, you are able to understand the reason behind why a redemption has occurred. In most cases it is because you’ve changed customer behaviour or created demand, which combined with the sales data gives a very clear view of how much value / revenue you are generating from your customer database.”
If you’d like to learn more about this topic, check out this link to Impact Data’s “Anatomy Of A Customer Journey” whitepaper.
