Category Archives: Customer Experience

How Customer Data Platform is reinventing customer relations

Posted on by

Using a Customer Data Platform is helping companies to focus obsessively on their customers and benefit from their engagement.

You need to know your customers—this isn’t any news. It doesn’t matter if you want to make them more engaged, optimize your budget for campaigns, or improve your ROI.

Customer accurate information is at the heart of every company and should be treated correctly to generate powerful outcomes from your marketing efforts.

If you don’t have a consistent understanding of your consumers, then all your strategies will likely go down the drain.

But how exactly do you get to act like you know your customers? The answer is simple: by managing their data.

To treat data thoroughly and reach your customer relationship goals, you might come across the need to use the right technologies. This is when the Customer Data Platform (CDP) walks in.

A customer data platform monitors and tracks multiple data sources to bring relevant information to a single hub that is easy to access and understand.

#Subscribe and stay on top of the news on our blog

Once implemented, CDPs collect, integrate, manage, and analyze customer data continuously. These automated processes help many teams to focus on solving complex problems that require a human brain. At the same time, a Customer Data Platform brings current, real-time data to be leveraged and turned into marketing master plans.

Why do companies use Customer Data Platforms?

Is there a reason why companies implement a Customer Data Platform in their business models? Yes, many.

According to Gartner, plenty of marketers look to customer data-driven strategies to deliver growth. For example, marketers invested two-thirds of their budget in supporting relationships with their customers in 2017 and 2018. 

Still, they have found the technology they were using to be frustrating—until CDP’s unique upshots came out as a solution to their problems.

A Customer Data Platform reaches out for several channels and concentrates real-time data in a single place your team can access whenever it is convenient.

This stimulates a collaborative work environment and speeds the pace of operational routines. Customer Data Platforms are also known for making marketers’ lives less complicated since automating workflows would take too many working hours to be accomplished.

The other reason companies use Customer Data Platforms is that they are much more than a simple database. According to the CDP Institute, the ideal Customer Data Platform should contain five essential capabilities:

  • Absorb data from any source
  • Give full details of ingested data
  • Store data without end and frequently
  • Create unified profiles (such as personas)
  • Share data with any system that needs it

All of the five skills above drive brands into having a vigorous understanding of their customer base by collecting and analyzing reliable data across their marketing channels.

What types of data does a Customer Data Platform assess?

The types of customer data assessed by a CDP can be quantitative and qualitative. 

In other words, by using a CDP, you will be able to figure out:

  • How to identify your customers, using personal data
  • How to interact with your customers, using interactional data
  • How customers expect to be impacted by experiences, using behavioral data
  • How your customers perceive your brand, using attitudinal data

The datasets above are being generated at all times in any digital environment and should be combined to create an unbeatable and absolute customer understanding.

But how do CDPs gather such different information?

They reach out to analytics reports, engagement measures, support occurrences, eCommerce metrics, and customer feedback (to quote a few), to maximize your knowledge and equip you with fast, accurate moves.

This is the main reason why CDPs are revolutionizing the way brands communicate with customers and vice-versa. They are an unlimited and underlying base for companies to create remarkable customer experiences and increase customer engagement in a way we have never seen before.

The effects of CDP in customer experience

A Customer Data Platform grants companies an invincible competitive advantage: passionate customers who keep being fed with reasons to remain brand loyal.

Historically, we can see customers have adopted technologies faster than the brands they interact with. This made companies try to embrace digital transformation technologies focused on customer experience to reach out to consumers where they are and how they want.

Expanding your brand’s online presence to talk to customers in multiple channels isn’t enough, in any case. Any company can create an Instagram account and interact with its audience then and there, right?

However, the ones that truly stand out are focused on delivering personalized, relevant, well-designed interactions that take place as soon as customers want.

Tailored customer interactions should happen anywhere, at any time. This is the main reason why organizations around the world are digitizing their business models. According to the Boston Consulting Group Research, personalization will drive an $800 billion revenue shift to the top 15% of companies that work best on it, in only three industries.

# Subscribe and stay on top of the news on our blog

I know what you’re thinking: that’s much profit for a small number of companies—and yes, it is. Even so, it sounds like a warning: companies that aren’t ready to turn personalization ordinary in their marketing campaigns, will be left stranded.

As you know, doing a great job on personalization is all about knowing everything there is to know about your customers and quickly activating your knowledge when needed.

Can you notice any coincidences between this goal and the usage of a CDP?

How CDPs are reinventing customer relations

Suppose you’re leading digital initiatives to deepen the relationship between your customers and your brand. In that case, you should pay attention to the changes CDPs are leading in customer management and how it differs from other popular marketing tools.

A Customer Data Platform is way more complete than a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software.

CRM will tell you how to personalize and improve existing customer relationships. Meanwhile, a CDP will do that and indicate how you can promote products and services and what you should do to attract new customers.

With the new untapped potential CDPs unleash, companies are increasingly confident in meeting market changes and customers’ preferences. Hesitating in our competitive world is no longer an option, and data-driven marketing plays a vital role in feeding companies with unequivocal customer interactions.

Ahead, we have numbered a few ways Customer Data Platforms reinvent customer relations to inspire you and your team.

1. CDP enables segmentation opportunities

While it simultaneously optimizes strategies, a CDP provides companies with a 360-degree view of customers to act on an essential customer experience requirement: segmentation.

Segmenting customers by specific traits, behaviors, attitudes, and others is a fantastic opportunity to create tailored marketing touchpoints throughout their journey and attract them with meaningful content.

When based on data, segmentation is an unmatched growth engine that encourages customer loyalty and enhances profitability.

2. A CDP gives your interactions a personal touch

Similarly, you can not spell personalization without customer data.

Owning a Customer Data Platform will help you quickly access reliable information to customize customer interactions, making your consumers feel special, and long-term relationships feasible.

Many companies are using CDP for Customer Data Management. See below how their tactics connect with top-level personalization:

3. A CDP enriches customer relationships

There isn’t enough emphasis on how knowing your customers is essential for customer relations.

People expect to be treated accordingly to their visions as much as they wish to connect emotionally with brands. A single miscommunication can harm brand-customer relationships irreparably.

As soon as you have a panoramic view of your customers’ habits, preferences, needs, and issues, you should feel more confident in building specific touchpoints that elevate the customer journey and make customers want to hang around you for longer.

Owning a Customer Data Platform will also measure your customer loyalty programs’ effectiveness and help you find what groups of customers deserve attention according to their life cycle.

4. A CDP is agile

Agile methodologies are the perfect response to a world that is changing every day, every hour. CDPs consider our ever-changing environment and let your team access specific data whenever it needs, contributing to an agility mindset.

Agility layers can be used to shape CDP frameworks that adjust to your company’s infrastructure, turning data sharing into a reality. CDPs also absorb data from other internal systems, like CRMs and Data Management Platforms (DMPs), you might already have.

Apart from that, CDPs update in real-time. This allows you to assess micro-moments data and instantly operationalize it.

5. A CDP ingests data from any source

Your customers are everywhere these days, right? You can find them on social media, navigate your website, read your emails, download your app, and take a look at your physical store. The interaction possibilities between your customer and your brand are countless.

If truth be told, it truly doesn’t matter where your customers are and what they’re doing. Whether they’re reading your blog or using your chatbot, data is being generated at all times, collected from simple interactions to complex operations.

A Customer Data Platform reaches out to any source of information, from Live Chats to SEO, from blogging to Twitter, from customer loyalty to affiliate marketing programs to provide your company with everything you know about your potential and current consumers.

6. A CDP elevates digital transformation

Simply, a digital transformation process should rely on—and a lot!—on a Customer Data Platform.

By watching digital-native organizations, it becomes clear that many technologies can be embedded to digitize businesses.

However, it is worthless to implement technologies that don’t accurately connect with customers’ needs. Digital transformation starts and ends with the customer, transcending traditional marketing, sales, and customer service roles.

That being said, without a reliable Customer Data Platform, companies who are digitizing their operations will mostly fail to unleash the real potential of a digital transformation.

Digital-native companies have already built their business model based on data collection and responding to customers’ needs with high-level experiences.

These companies combine traditional marketing strategies, such as loyalty programs, with groundbreaking digital initiatives that connect with customers in real-time and engross their engagement.

Remember: It is crucial to direct your digital transformation efforts into interactions that engage your audience, and a Customer Data Platform is intimately related to that.

It taps into your databases to unify relevant information and operationalize customer knowledge, delivering targeted experiences that will delight and retain your customers.

It should also be stated that CDPs assist companies in taking a step back and revisiting their processes to leverage technology cleverly.

For example, Netflix was quick to turn its service into a scalable streaming platform that replies to customers’ demands. The now-sector-leading company could only reinvent itself because it took a very attentive look at customer data and responded accordingly.

Align your digital initiatives with the power of a Customer Data Platform

While IT staff has been skeptical for a while, digital leaders worldwide have been engrossing CDP in their workflows and getting amazing results from data management automation.

Not only has perfect treating data been helping these leaders come up with customer-centric solutions, but it has optimized their budget and turned manual work more effective.

Forbes Insights highlighted that 44% of surveyed organizations stated a Customer Data Platform is helping drive customer loyalty and increase ROI.

Arena serves customers from 120 different countries and sees firsthand how the fast-paced digital environment influences global market changes day after day.

That is why we work to build awareness for digital leaders and marketers to embrace Customer Data Platforms in their full potential and boost customer engagement.

In case you need to further your research towards the CDP role for the upcoming years, download our Customer Data Platform 2020: the future of marketing and sales ebook and take a deeper dive.

The secret to real data collection: why is a CDP key to your business

Posted on by

Using a CDP is extremely important these days, but just as important is the need to understand why you need it. It’s more than collecting real data, it’s about how you chose to use, such as to improve your business.

Knowing who a brand’s audience is the most significant purpose of a company. It’s the only way to recognize the best way to communicate, find your public, offer them your product or service, and so on. Because of that, from the early years of the internet ascension, customer data collection has been discussed.

Many software and platforms were developed to gather data to help companies better target their audience. However, data collection can be a delicate subject regarding privacy matters.

Indeed, a General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) aims to give the public more control of what happens to their online data.

While it was extremely common for companies to gather data and sell to third parties, this is now a bit more complicated — especially when it comes to data originated from cookies. Although collecting customer data is still common and required in the market, brands need to be more careful about how they do it and what kind of data they have in their hands.

# Subscribe and stay on top of the news on our blog

A business needs to have accurate data to provide a better customer experience. This means that working with purchased cookies won’t be the perfect solution since they’re mainly anonymous data. For that reason, solutions like the CDP are becoming more notorious. They’re a way to work with real data, hence accurate information, and find the most suitable marketing and sales strategies.

To better understand the search for real data and how a CDP will help achieve that, here, you will learn more about:

  • what happened to cookies
  • what is the importance of CDP
  • why use real-time data collection
  • how does CDP influence a company’s strategies
  • how does this affect relationships between customers and brands

What happened to cookies?

It has recently come to our knowledge that browsers like Firefox and Google are suspending their support to the usage of cookies. These are the text files that store a user’s activity online. They can be used to save some navigation information and make the process easier. For example, automatically filling a website when you’re reaccessing it, or collecting login information for a page.

However, the primary use is to save data about a user’s browsing history, such as pages visited and browsing time. As we all know, having this type of information is essential for excellent performance in digital marketing strategies.

Because of that, browsers used to support cookies and allow companies to access a user’s information for as long as the cookie was saved on the computer. This means that personal and browsing information would be shared with each company’s website for the same amount of time.

When talking about this subject, we can think of both first-party cookies and third-party cookies. First-party is the information that a company gathers directly from the audience, while third-party is data united from various sources. Other companies mostly buy third-party data.

Though when a company purchases data from another one, information is anonymous. You can’t really know who that person is, and data might not be so reliable. Other brands can also end up with the same information you have since the data provider can sell the same data “package” to anyone.

Because of privacy matters and the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), cookies’ popularity has been going down. People started using ad blockers so they wouldn’t be bothered with ads after clicking a product.

Even more, when Google decided to suspend third-party data sharing through its browser, the cookies’ future became quite unappealing. Now, brands that want to work with customer data need to find new ways to gather data — and work primarily with first-party data.

Hence, the CDP comes to the rescue. A Customer Data Platform is a software developed for marketing teams to create more useful content and campaigns. 

What is the importance of CDP?

Since it is essentially a marketing tool, the main reason to use a CDP is to know the consumer better. Analyzing and understanding customer data and behavior is crucial to create accurate content. In general, the Customer Data Platform gathers information from a wide variety of sources putting the pieces together to create the ideal consumer profile.

The entire process of data collection and organization is automatized. So the software does all work to give professional marketing information ready to use. However, several teams can have access to this data. All sectors in a company might need some context from the consumers before dealing with their tasks, especially sales and customer support. Still, the products and engineer teams can easily use the CDP information too.

Having data centralized into a single platform is a peculiarity of the CDP. That’s because there were other tools before it that worked with data collection, like the CRM, but none of them were as complete as the CDP.

Further to this, in the era of data-driven marketing, the process of decision making inside a company must be made based on real, accurate information. Since purchased cookies were anonymous, data could be compromised. On the other hand, with a Customer Data Platform, real data is at easy reach.

Accordingly, the service generates better results through the personalization of communication. Businesses that are continually looking for ways to improve ROI can find their needs fulfilled with the CDP. Being a data-driven company and working with real data makes you one step ahead of competitors.

 

# Subscribe and stay on top of the news on our blog

Why use real-time data collection?

It’s not only about data collection, but mostly about real-time data collection. What’s the difference, you ask? Well, working with anything in real-time is an advantage. In this case, it means that the data collection software, such as a CDP solution, will start gathering information from a person’s first visit to your page.

For the company, it is a strategy for improving the promptness of a response and communication system. Therefore, improving every customer-related service in the company. It’s no secret brands use CDP to have better customer relationships, audience engagement, and audience targeting.

Moreover, it is possible to classify visitors into customers and qualified leads as soon as they access your website. Equally, having a database with real-time data makes it easier to take actions that are on the spot, allowing you to see where the current strategy is failing and what needs to be improved.

Overall, working with a CDP makes the company look active and worry about treating customers the way they deserve.

How does CDP data influence a company’s strategies?

Whatever product or service you provide, there’s no doubt you have competition. Because of that, brands need to offer the best solution and customer service at every moment. Nowadays, it’s hard to catch someone’s attention, but extremely easy to lose it.

So, even though a company should work to create a good reputation in the market, no matter what, aiming to be ahead of the competitor is necessary. After all, having a customer turn into a brand advocate is not easy, but highly relevant to a company’s strategy.

Consequently, it’s required to offer the best customer experience out there. For that, you must know who your consumer is, ergo, the use of CDP.

A Customer Data Platform can gather data from multiple sources, from social media and in-apps to sales engagement and product use. This is what makes the software such a unique solution, since the more information you have, the more accurate the ideal customer profile will be. From then, not only marketing strategies will be perfected, but also sales and customer support.

As professional marketing, you know it’s no proper working with guesses in any business. Thus, making decisions founded on real data will lead to several benefits — including the increase in audience engagement.

How does this affect relationships between customers and brands?

When we talk about acquiring a CDP solution, the main reason is to connect with the customer. Thus, it’s logical that it’ll have an impact on the relationship between customer and brand. Since it’s possible to understand and know the consumer thoroughly, it thereby becomes possible to make them more satisfied by providing truly personalized service.

When customers are more satisfied, they are more likely to recommend your mark to other people. With the right after purchase strategy and content, they may even become brand advocates. And why is this so important? For a company, it means a better return on investment and lowers costs with customer acquisition.

After all, it’s less expensive to retain clients than to acquire new ones. That’s why many companies started working with a customer-centric strategy as well. If there are no customers, a business can’t survive in the market. 

Arena is a CDP platform that will revolutionize your company. With our real-time data collection system, all marketing and sales strategies will be refined and boosted.

To better understand how that’ll happen, download our ebook Customer Data Platform 2020: the future of marketing and sales. It has everything you need to know about acquiring and using a CDP to make your brand a reference.

Connecting Marketing Campaigns with Customer Data Platform

Posted on by

Customer Data Platform has become the game-changer tool to reach business success. Find out how a CDP can integrate your marketing campaigns to increase revenue now!

Throughout the years, marketing and sales can gather large volumes of data from their actions. But the million-dollar question is how to manage that amount of information effectively and coherently apply them, connecting your marketing and sales campaigns.

But since we are experts on this issue, we made this content for walking you through and show how the Customer Data Platform can sew up your strategies to generate more profits, reduce customer acquisition costs, and increase the investment.

Keep up and find out!

What is a Customer Data Platform (CDP)

Customer Data Platform (CDP) is a software capable of gathering and organizing customer information from multiple sources. 

It puts together data from social media, CRM, e-mails, purchase records, ads, browsers, devices, and more. It also allows real-time updates, reading customer behavior to provide fresh and relevant material.

This compiled information obtained by CDP allows communication with hyper-segmented audiences. More positive engagement is given since marketing and sales know precisely whom they are supposed to talk to and what they really want.

Customer Data Platform uses every single action taken from the audience and turns it into a data profile. So, even though a first-time visitor didn’t share their e-mail with your website, you can still use browsing behavior, pages, and items checked to build up a remarketing campaign on Google or Facebook Ads.

Build more assertive marketing with CDP

One of the essential aspects of CDP is the possibility of creating integration, not just about data but also about teams. Customer services, marketing, sales, customer experience, and support: from Customer Data Platform on, they will speak the same strategy language.

When there is communication harmony indoors, all pieces combined can show this bigger and coherent picture. As a result:

  • Customer services can give the appropriate approach, knowing exactly who they are talking to and what the audience truly wants. No more wasting time here.
  • Marketing can design unique plans of action, understanding by analyzing customer behavior, the best elements to improve conversion in that segment.
  • Sales can offer precisely what the audience needs to purchase, whether it be a discount, a trial, testimonials, or a personal approach to explaining some details.
  • Customer success can promote simple usability based on the interests listed on CDP, enhancing user experience, and improving the chances of making an upsell.
  • Support can grant a more humanized and empathic service, offering high-quality solutions to increase customer satisfaction, generating good referrals.

Those steps combined to ensure a buyer’s journey without bumps or unfortunate surprises along the way. Hence, the entire process gets smoother, causing the best impressions your brand could ever have.

Improve marketing metrics with Customer Data Platform

Through the Customer Data Platform, you can have a 360-degree view of your audience. Having that density of information turns easier to get tighter metrics, eligible to translate ad campaign performances, and provide relevant insights for the teams.

Data is gold, only when you use the right ones. The lack of planning and proper understanding over it may cause inaccurate results and misperceptions about the strategy. The same rule applies to metrics.

CDP does not over give you information. It hands you organized and coherent material to measure all the steps on the way. Therefore, marketing and sales can count on extra support to plan, execute, and manage their best actions.

Increase success of ad campaigns using real-time data

This is undoubtedly one of the most powerful tools currently available in the business. Real-time user data refers to new information from data sources being injected into your Customer Data Platform profiles. 

An applicable example of this feature is when a sales team gets to see an online buyers’ shopping cart to induce a cross-sell. This type of data can also be used to re-target campaigns after the visitor triggers an event.

The ability to walk around the customer to scan them from multiple POVs given by real-time data grants you access to analyze aspects of your strategy. Take a look at some more possibilities you can have with real-time data on CDP:

  • Recognize bottlenecks on your website
  • Improve marketing, and sales campaigns live
  • Create an exclusive and personalized customer experience
  • Offer individualized and relevant post-sale service

All those pieces of interactions –and those many more not mentioned –create a singular environment experience for your brand, leading to customer satisfaction, positive referrals, and more revenue.

Reduce customer acquisition costs and upgrade ROI

To talk about the return over the investment (ROI) made with the Customer Data Platform. First, it is fundamental to understand where CDP is going to fit in your strategy. To get that, there are some key questions that you can answer: 

  1. Does your company work with multiple communication channels? 
  2. Do your teams need to improve their strategies to be more assertive? 
  3. Does having updated data about your customer continuously bring you more insights?
  4. Would it help have more in-depth information about your audience to increase sales?

If you got at least three definite answers, you definitely should consider talking to a consultant to see in a more practical way how CDP can benefit your company.

With doing that, there are some aspects to measure how CDP will optimize ROI. Time, risk, and cost are the trio to show you how efficient marketing, sales, support, UX, and other teams can get with the Customer Data Platform. 

To each department, you should know how much more you can get using the same budget as before. Also, it is important to list some possible cost savings due to group efficiency.

What is the value-added to the process that will lead to risk reduction? You should be aware of the strategy value as well, understanding how much cleaner the entry points will get. 

Last but not least, knowing the total cost of the CDP initiative. Analyzing your new numbers, you may see the bigger picture with all stages connected and the newfound paths it leads to.

Once your teams have this level of customer knowledge, they can aim the efforts directly into actions more likely of conversions. Personalization and localization are two key features to leverage niche data and provide exclusive and relevant customer experience through CDP.

That behavior can lower customer acquisition costs (CAC), improve productivity, increase profits, and customer retention. Analyzing smart data through CDP facilitates a plan of action based on individual customer preferences instead of a massive standardized campaign.

Ease decision-making

Companies need to learn how to make profitable operational decisions fast. It is going to be an ever-increasing data-driven scenario, and we already know that more data is only relevant when it is useful data.

The only way to capitalize on significant amounts of information is by organizing them into relevant segments. By that, your team will be able to tailored offers and strategies to fill their real needs.

Enhance CRM with Customer Data Platform

Every business currently in the game is using customer relationship management (CRM) –– or, at least, they should be. CRM is a software to store customer data and help marketers and sales to develop better practices.

Their functions might sound similar, but they are not. The digital buying journey demands uniqueness to succeed. To understand what customers are doing is not enough anymore. Seeing beyond time and space to predict what customers may do is now crucial.

Also, the need is not only about capturing new customers but also keeping old ones satisfied, making more purchases, and putting great referrals out there. Each customer is now a cycle, not a straight line with a beginning and an ending point.

So, CDP has the power to add unique features to CRM information. It gives you access to a more robust and enriched database made by an organized combination of other data sources. Thus, the customer journey and experiences will become more polished and exclusive.

Customer Data Platform: the future of marketing and sales

We want to take you further and show you: 

  • How to enhance a CDP with first-party data
  • What it does to CRM data –– and other data sources 
  • A panorama about the quality of the information generated 
  • What are the other benefits it can add to your strategies 
  • Why getting a CDP solution can make you stand out amongst competitors

Check out Arena Personas, a great way to boost your CDP with first-party data generated by your own brand.

Boost Your eCommerce Conversion with Live Chat

Posted on by

Companies are now more interested in Live Chat solutions. Research shows it is helping increase conversion rates and customer satisfaction. Find out more!

Live Chat is not precisely a new solution in the market, but it has evolved into a must-have feature. It’s more than a way to have real-time customer support. It’s also a marketing and a sales strategy jackpot.

There’s no denying it: customers hate waiting to be attended, and they want quick answers. Everyone is so busy nowadays that they want and need means of dealing with their issues while multitasking. That’s why Live Chat is preferred over phone calls and emails.

In emails, a person might wait for hours or even days to get an answer. On the telephone, the customer usually has to go through automatic voice messages that will filter and redirect them to sales, support, or another sector — and it does involve some waiting around with jazz music playing in their ears.

Boost Your eCommerce Conversion Rates with Live Chat

Customers who can connect directly to the brand and have a personalized interaction gives value to the company. Something chatbots can’t do. That’s why they like it when a brand offers Live Chat on the website. Moreover, it’s all about the advantages of the company as well.

More than customer satisfaction, Live Chat provides a channel for marketing and sales strategies. Thus, increasing conversions and revenue. Let’s talk a bit more about what Live Chat is and how it impacts the way eCommerce works.

What is Live Chat?

Live Chat is a solution for companies that want to have a better connection with their audience. It allows real-time conversations between customers and companies. Usually, Live Chat is used for customer support, but it can do a lot more. For example, it can be a tool for customers to talk to each other when you’re live streaming.

There’s no doubt keeping reasonable customer satisfaction rates is of high priority, and this solution can assist for that purpose. However, Live Chat has also become a strategy for the marketing and sales departments to increase their results.

Have you heard about conversational marketing? Since customer behavior is constantly evolving, marketing needs to tag along and find better means to communicate with customers. Because of that, this new branch of marketing is about having a tailor-made experience for each customer.

In general, there are three steps for conversation marketing: engage, understand, and recommend. It’s mainly about moving customers through the sales pipeline in real-time, either increasing conversions or sales.

Most companies use chatbots together with Live Chat so they can create this connection between customers and brands. This way, the bot can filter the person’s problem and redirect them to the right sector for better service — while sending messages like “someone will be with you in about 2 minutes”.

How does Live Chat influence eCommerce?

In recent years, companies have found that Live Chat can affect visitors and customers. They discovered that by having access to Live Chat, people are more likely to complete a purchase. That’s because a customer can easily have their questions answered within a few minutes.

Sometimes, if a visitor can’t have a quick answer to what the store’s return policy is, for example, they will probably give up purchasing. On the other hand, if they do have a response and it’s one that pleases them, the sale is made! 63% of customers who used a Live Chat said they would return to that site for future business.

Additionally, depending on the Live Chat platform you acquire, attendants will be able to respond to up to 6 customers at once. This means a shorter waiting time for websites with high traffic and chat initiative. And you know what quick responses do? They make a customer happy — that’s pretty much halfway to make a client close the deal.

There’s still one more thing a Live Chat will influence on eCommerce: the upselling and cross-selling strategies. 

Yes, they can be performed via Live Chat as well. Surely you remember the experience of buying something online when suggestions start showing up after you click a product. Usually, there’s a session on the bottom of the page saying, “here are some similar products you might be interested in…”

Seeing that real-time data collection is possible through a Live Chat solution too, and the marketing and sales teams can use that to their benefit. When they see someone adding an item to the cart, they can appear in the corner of the screen with a message showing something similar or complementary to the product in the cart.

The same can be done if the customer completes the purchase and comes back on another day. They can send a ‘welcome back’ message, followed by suggestions and product recommendations.

Even if the consumer doesn’t use the Live Chat right away – or at all – when they see it is available, they are already more inclined to buy from that brand. That’s one more reason it can have an impact on eCommerce. If you work with Live Chat, it means they have easy access to ask questions, make complaints, and just keep in touch for whatever reason they need after acquiring a product.

Does Live Chat increase conversions?

The most straightforward answer is: yes, it does.

This research has found that one simple message can make a visitor 50% more inclined to become a customer, while a 6 message-chat makes them 250% more likely to become a customer. 

For conversions to happen, it’s required to pay attention to the opportunities that come up. If a customer contacts you through Live Chat asking about payment plans, it means they are interested in your product or service. You can take this opening to ask for their email, for example. More than that, keep an eye for people who ask about:

  • personalized solutions;
  • detailed information about products;
  • return and exchange policies.

Not only that, but Live Chat also impacts on a company’s revenue and retention rate. Since it makes customer satisfaction rates higher, that means they are happy with your brand. Therefore, they don’t have many reasons not to buy from you in the future.

Of course, for the conversion to happen, you need to follow some good practices. Otherwise, things might fall apart for you.

How to boost eCommerce sales with a Live Chat solution

So, we’ve been talking about how Live Chat can increase conversions and sales. But how does it happen?

To use this tool in marketing and sales, it should be set in a way that, when people enter your website, instantly reads an ad message. For instance, “Hi there, need a deal?” or “Hello, nice to see you again. How about getting a discount on that product you’ve been looking at?”.

It doesn’t need to be a pop-up window that will take up the entire page and cause a distraction, a simple picture on the right corner of the page will do the trick.

Besides, messages should always be personalized according to whether it’s the first visit or a returning customer. And here’s a note to remind how important data collection is, only from there will it be possible to create these messages.

As people interact with the chat, more data will be collected, and all interactions must be analyzed. They see what works and what doesn’t is essential for strategy improvement. Also, analyzing from which pages chats were initiated, what conversations converted more, and what topics are always coming up should be on the marketing team’s to-do list.

Besides, keeping Live Chats available 24/7 can be a good idea. As long as you either have human assistants also available during that time or if you have a chatbot that can answer general questions and forward the person to a human agent as needed — saying how long it will take for them to be attended.

What do customers think about Live Chat?

The bottom line is that customers adore Live Chat. Whether it is the immediate response factor or the fact that customers can multitask while being attended, people are generally happier with this tool. Indeed, more than half of all customers prefer Live Chat over other communication solutions — the satisfaction level for Live Chat is 73%.

A real-time online conversation is way more efficient in problem-solving than, let’s say, a tech support call. While a call is a real-time conversation, it does involve quite a lot of waiting time being transferred from one attendant to another. In the meantime, a Live Chat shouldn’t take longer than 2 minutes to connect with an assistant.

Social media and emails are also online communication tools, but the average wait time to get answers from these platforms can be as high as 10 to 17 hours. Hence, the high satisfaction rate with Live Chat solutions.

Even though chatbots can be quite useful in real-time answering questions, having a human attendant for eCommerce is the best solution. Even more so, when the store’s catalog has a high number of products, a human is more informed and can give better, personalized answers to increasing conversions and sales.

How to offer better customer service through live chat?

Despite having so many benefits, live chat can still cause a decrease in conversions if not used properly. These are some tips and practices you should follow to have the best results when acquiring your live chat solution.

Train support team

Since live chat is mostly used for customer support, it’s consequential to have a trained support team. Some of the things they need to know are:

  • not to rush into answers;
  • adding personality to the answers;
  • checking grammatical errors;
  • matching the customer’s tone.

Yes, the idea is to answer as quickly as possible; however, never rush into answers. Don’t reply to something because make sure all solutions have a foundation and give the correct information. If there’s the need to look up some information, ask the client to hold on a minute to provide them with the right info.

Also, it’s essential that you don’t sound like a robot. The support team should have a protocol and a script to follow, but they shouldn’t copy and paste their answers. Each attendant can personalize and adjust the text as needed. They should even be encouraged to add their personalities to the responses.

Moreover, matching the customer’s tone is the skill they need to have. Each customer will either be more formal or more casual. It’s crucial that you speak accordingly to keep them comfortable. Lastly, grammar is essential. Even in a casual conversation, it’s good to keep sentence structure and language rules intact.

Keep average response time to a minimum

This is something you can’t get away with using live chat. The answers need to be quick. An excellent average time can be around 46 seconds. That being said, responses can be as fast as 7 seconds.

However, there is the possibility of sending an automatic reply saying that “we usually reply within 2 minutes, stay with us”. If that is the case, customers will be happy to wait to talk to someone — as long as responses come quickly after that, they probably don’t want to wait 2 minutes for each question they send.

Keep chat visible, but not distracting

As much as we’re talking about live chat and its benefits, people sometimes enter your website to see something that is not remotely related to using the chat. Because of that, it must be strategically placed on your page. It needs to be easy to find and access, but not in a distracting way.

The most common way to use it is with a small chat window on the bottom right-hand corner of the page. Sometimes it’s just a chat icon that you can click to start a conversation. Other times it’s a proactive chat. That is a chat that talks to you before you speak to them. We’ve mentioned it before, the chat that already sends a message when you enter the page asking how they can help.

Additionally, all of your pages, the home page, landing page, and sales page should have an active chat head. That way, you can investigate to find the pages people are most likely to open a chat on.

Provide transcripts

One other way to increase customer satisfaction is by providing them with transcripts of the conversation after they’re done with the service. Also, a way to capture their email is to ask them to contact information to send over the document.

It’s an advantage for both sides. For the customer, because they’ll always have access to that conversation and won’t need to come back and ask the same thing again. While for the company, it’s because the next time that customer comes back, the assistant will know exactly what happened in the last conversation and have enough information to talk to them more efficiently.

Perform surveys

At the end of each conversation, you can set a survey to ask the customer how the service as if it was helpful, how helpful was it, what would they like to change, and how would they rate the service?

How to obtain a live chat solution?

Overall, all you need to do is find a platform that fits your needs as a business. Once you’ve found that, all it takes is to configure the tool and implement it to your website. While it may take a bit of work to deploy and configure a live chat solution, the results make it worthwhile. See it yourself how Shoply leverages Arena’s API to offer great Customer Experience to their customers.

One tip we can give you is to use a platform that integrates with an analytics tool or has it built-in in the system itself. Understanding the results and ROI of the live chat is how you’ll be able to adapt your strategies for the better.

This is an opportunity to bring innovation to your brand’s communication and gain a competitive advantage. If you can’t supply a customer’s needs and keep them satisfied, they will have no problems moving on to another company. In 2021, it’s expected that most companies will have a live chat available.

If you don’t want to be left behind, you should start using live chat right away. Here at Arena, we’ve already helped thousands of brands worldwide with our Live Group Chat solution, and guess what? You can try it yourself too – for free.

Understanding the Difference Between Customer Data Platform (CDP) and Customer Relationship Management

Posted on by

Customer Data Platforms are still new in the market and they can be mistaken by other solutions that came before them. Here’s the difference between CDP and CRM.

The difference between CDP and CRM needs to be explained. Even though they both gather customer data, they work in distinct ways. While the CDP is a much more complete software, the CRM can still perform very well in many strategies.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and the Customer Data Platform (CDP) are both customer data-collection-related software. However, there are many differences between these two systems — from the type of data gathered to why they are used. For example, CRM was developed to assist sales representatives while CDP is much more focused on marketing teams.

Because CRM can be integrated into the CDP, that’s even one more reason they can be mistaken for one another. Nonetheless, the difference between CDP and CRM is there and it needs to be understood. Mainly for the reason of knowing what is the best solution for your company.

So, if you already know what your pain points are, you only need to understand what is a CDP, what is a CRM, and the difference between CDP and CRM — which is everything we’ll explain ahead.

#Subscribe and stay on top of news on our blog

What is a Customer Data Platform (CDP)?

A Customer Data Platform, commonly known as CDP, it’s a software that gathers, processes, and stores data. It’s a system that was created with the goal of helping marketing teams to be more successful in their strategies. Through a database created by the CDP, marketing professionals can have access to all information about a company’s clients and prospects.

These data can include characteristics such as:

  • name and age;
  • contact;
  • demographic;
  • time online;
  • pages visited;
  • products of interest;
  • which social media they use;
  • how many interactions they made with the company;
  • purchase history.

This is just a general overview of what a CDP can do since there is still a lot more information it can collect. Even more, it’s a thorough platform as it unifies data from several sources, both online and offline. This way, if someone follows the company’s Instagram and then buys a product in a physical store, the software has the ability to recognize it’s the same person, organizing all data about him or her and avoiding data duplication.

Basically, the CDP consumes data from any available source to create its database. Some examples we can name consist of the company’s website, online store, social media, payment systems, and app.

Moreover, a CDP system will always be up-to-date since it works with real-time data collection. This means information begins to be processed and stored from the first contact with the brand. Even if the person doesn’t share personal information on the first visit, their online behavior is being analyzed.

That way, when they do decide to share personal and/or contact data, the system will be updated and unify all that information into a singular customer profile.

Something that’s worth mentioning too is that the data available on a CDP software has no lifetime limit like cookies do. A system like DMP, for instance, has up to 90 days of data storage because it only works with purchased cookies — you’ll understand more about this later on.

Also, a CDP will create unified customer profiles for clients with similar preferences and habits. These can be analyzed and used to create segmentation groups for highly personalized customer journeys. Of course, individual profiles can be used for the same reason.

Working with real and reliable data makes a huge difference in marketing strategy success. Still, other teams inside the company can also benefit from using a Customer Data Platform. For example, sales and product teams can have access to all the data without the need to have reunions and updates from the marketing sector.

Just like that, the whole company is able to work with efficiency to give the customer the best UX possible.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM): Definition and Advantages

Customer Relationship Management is a system developed to assist mainly sales teams. Yet, nowadays, it’s used by other sectors in a firm, like Human Resources and the supply chain.

Overall, what CRM does is gather customer data through online transactions. So, what makes it different from the CDP? Well, that is the fact it only analyzes personal data from known customers. That means it’s possible to check information like name, age, and contact, but not the number of visits made to the website or which pages were visited by each client.

The main role of Customer Relationship Management software includes:

Even more, it’s a platform that’s used in the B2B (business to business) field, where data allows us to analyze the sales pipeline and see where there are more chances to close a deal.

It’s a guaranteed way to understand more about the consumer and the context where they are before contacting them — which will help increase conversion rates. After all, when you know who you are talking to, customer service is more accurate and the client will have a more pleasant experience.

In spite of the difference between CDP and CRM, both systems perform their job in a way that is noticeable. Customer Relationship Management helps increase profitability and simplify sales processes. Likewise, since CRM is a source to feed the CDP as well, it makes marketing processes easier — this technology allows to make accurate decisions based on real data.

What is a Data Management Platform (DMP)?

It’s important to mention the Data Management Platform (DMP) because it is also a system commonly mistaken for CDP and CRM. In fact, there are similarities, but they are all different software and perform different functions.

In this case, DMP is a program that works with data collection and organization, but there is a big difference from the others: its database is formed by anonymous cookies.

These cookies are purchased data from external providers. That’s why they are anonymous — brands can’t collect and sell personal data. Because the customer decided to share their personal information with a brand, that doesn’t mean the brand can share it with any other company.

Even if they’re anonymous, these data are still a valuable resource to create target audiences and make promotions at large scale. Therefore, marketing teams are the ones who mainly use this platform. Besides, it provides professionals of the area enough support so they can create new segmentation groups to use in ads and overall campaigns. This way, boosts brand awareness and grows the company’s audience.

Also, one last detail to keep in mind about a DMP system: all data gathered can be processed and added to the Customer Data Platform.

What’s the Difference Between a Database and a CRM?

Based on everything that’s been said so far, it’s noticeable some differences between CDP and CRM. Then again, it’s important to show clearly what they are and clarify them a little better.

Application

First of all, Customer Relationship Management seeks to personalize and improve customer relationships. While CDP also has that at its core, it also focuses on how to ameliorate products and services. Thus, bringing a better overall customer experience.

Another factor to take into account is that CRM mainly analyzes sales pipelines looking to transform leads into customers. Though a Customer Data Platform does that as well, its priority is more about getting to know the consumer. Only then, the system do a public segmentation and help in creating personalized campaigns and publicity.

How Data is Collected

While CRM only gathers data of active consumers, CDP includes unknown prospect data too — so that when they decide to share their personal information with the company, the system will recognize who they are and put together all the information. Even more, a difference between CDP and CRM is the amount and type of data that can be collected by each platform.

At the rate Customer Relationship Management stores personal data, such as names, age, address, etc., the CDP knows a lot more — like the time each consumer spent on each page they accessed. Additionally, everything that is related to the brand is a source to increase the CDP’s database, from the company’s website to the payment systems used by the firm.

Customer Journey Tracking

If a client clicks an ad but decides to purchase in another moment, through another source, CRM doesn’t have the capability to connect that it was the same person who took those actions. However, that tracking becomes possible with the CDP.

As previously mentioned, Customer Relationship Management doesn’t gather offline data. So, if a customer interacts with the brand online, but buys on-site, the system can’t connect the dots. CDP, however, has the knowledge to understand and put together that information, following the entire journey someone makes to conclude a purchase.

Data Duplication

For the same reason CRM doesn’t track customer journeys, it ends up with data duplication. Since the system doesn’t have the intelligence to understand the person who clicked an ad and bought on-site as the same one, data ends up being repeated as if it were two separate persons. The same way, this happens if the customer interacts with an email and then on the website, among other cases.

Nonetheless, the CDP configuration enables data processing to avoid duplication. So, even if a customer identifies as Mary Jane Brown in one source and MJ Brown in another, that data will go into a singular customer profile.

IT Support

Even though CDP is a much more complex system than the CRM, it’s this second software that needs more IT support. From configuration to management, the Customer Relationship Management system needs the tech team through the entire process. Meanwhile, the CDP will probably need some support at the first configuration, but, after that, anyone with authorization can easily access the database.

#Subscribe and stay on top of news on our blog

CDP Benefits for Marketing Professionals

Many benefits can be implied along with the explanation about what is CDP. For instance, how easy it becomes to know your consumer and create the finest content possible. As a matter of fact, that is the main goal of acquiring a CDP solution.

As a part of the advantages, we can name:

  • understanding who is the customer;
  • knowing the pain points of the consumer;
  • getting a complete database;
  • increasing conversion rates;
  • improving ROI;
  • automation of data analysis;
  • lower operational costs.

Currently, the purpose of a company lies much more in understanding who is their consumer than on working on products. Getting the ideal customer is even more important since that will reduce the need to constantly work on the product. Still, developing and perfecting a product or service occupies a high position on the priority list.

When we talk about pains and gains in marketing, the idea is that all clients have different pains that the company will have a solution for. This way, a CDP gives all the necessary data for marketing professionals to find out what is impacting the audience and in what way their product can be used to put an end to the problem.

From the information about the consumer, the team will be able to create exclusive content and advertising that are extremely directed to increase the chances of landing a conversion. To clarify, data about what a person likes and dislikes, where he or she lives, who they live with, where they seek information, what kind of content they pay attention to, amongst many other possibilities. The more you are able to discover, the better the result will be.

Overall, marketing by itself is already a way to increase conversion rates and return on investment. Still, a Customer Data Platform will intensify that factor by giving the most accurate and real data as you can get.

In addition, it won’t be necessary to have a specific professional or group to analyze data into what’s useful or not. By using a CDP solution, that will already be covered — therefore, reducing operational costs and making the process automatized and faster.

How to Strategically Use CDP and CRM

Even when we consider the difference between CDP and CRM, a company can still take advantage of the benefits of both software. Everything that’s processed and stored in the CRM and in the CDP has an important role in two moments.

First, to help small businesses grow. Then, to help companies that already have an established audience and are looking for a large-scale solution to work on digital marketing strategies.

Through marketing strategies, it becomes possible to recognize an issue and present a solution. And with a CRM and CDP database, marketing professionals can identify exactly who the target audience is.

With all the data available, from purchase history to offline habits, the company controls target audience segmentation, creates an automation flow for emails and ads, and analyzes performance metrics. Thus, directing content with precision.

After analyzing the difference between CDP and CRM, have you decided on acquiring a solution like this to your company? Arena will give you the best product to work with data collection, customer experience, and audience engagement.

Plus, our team is always available to answer all of your questions. So, stop delaying the success of your business and talk to one of our consultants right away!

What is and how to do Customer Data Management CDM

Posted on by

This guide will teach you how to use data frameworks to offer differentiated customer experiences and optimize marketing ROI.

It has been a few years since the buzz around “Big Data” started. Working with marketing in the media space, you probably hear your peers bragging about their data-driven strategies a lot. Do you consider yourself a data-driven marketer too?

Beyond marketing, modern CMOs have had to assimilate abilities in information technology and customer data management.  In 2020, you should expect most marketing teams to effectively use customer data to drive growth and customer satisfaction.

Getting there can be quite a journey, though. Research from the Dentsu Aegis Network from 2018, made with 1,000 CMOs, shows that to two-thirds agree that while there is increasingly more consumer data available, it’s harder to extract insight from it. 

Another report from Harvard Business Review shows that less than half of an organization’s structured data is actively used in making decisions, while less than 1% of its unstructured data is analyzed or used at all. 

Historically, companies have relied on excel sheets and on manually storing and analyzing customer data through different software, with little to no integration. No offense to excel and isolated systems, but things have changed.

The amount of customer data flowing to companies’ databases continues to rise through new channels and platforms, and that’s where customer data management comes to play. More than ever, organizations need a complete set of practices and automation tools to help them manage customer information.

In this article, we will talk about the importance of having customer data management on top of the marketing agenda. We’ll also explore the types of data, best practices for data management, and the role of different data software in data management.

What is customer data management?

Customer Data Management, shortly known as CDM, is the framework in which companies collect, track, organize, analyze and share customer data throughout the organization. 

The term “Customer Data Management” was coined in the 1990s, initially as a way to describe software that replaced disc-based or paper-based data storage. Such software was often used independently by departments within companies.

The concept of CDM evolved along with the Software as a Service (SaaS) industry and nowadays embraces a wide array of cloud computing applications that centralize access to customer data. It also embraces a set of methodologies that help marketers to locate, cross-analyze, and act on customer data.

Why marketers should invest in customer data management?

In a scenario where customers interact with brands through dozens of channels, there is almost no room for guessing and gut-feeling in marketing. Having a good hunch about what will engage audiences is not enough, and so the role of customer data management is to provide companies with accurate and actionable insights.

It reduces your chances of making mistakes, since mismanaging your customer data can lead to actions that will ultimately reduce engagement and profitability. Additionally, using customers’ data in a biased, inaccurate way can lead to poor customer experience (CX) and harm your brand. 

Good customer data management is key to building a data-driven culture and bolstering customer-centricity in marketing. Isn’t it everything you wish for? 

Data Management strategies can bring marketers a holistic view of customers’ journeys, connecting the dots between different channels, and offering cues to enhance their experience.

Customer Data Management is important for: 

  • Customer acquisition
  • Increasing retention and engagement rates
  • Knowing customers in detail and in real-time, from individuals to clusters
  • Increasing data quality by breaking data silos
  • Simplifying customer relationship management (CRM) 
  • Drive higher revenue

How customer data management is connected to customer lifetime value (CLV)

Having well-structured customer data management practices is what allows marketing teams to follow up on important indicators, like the Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).

Amidst a seemingly chaotic user journey – with different channels, devices, and purposes – customer data management can help marketers understand customers and guide them through the conversion funnel. 

Collecting and organizing relevant customer data will allow you to better segment your audience, find out behavior and buying trends, and drive personalized campaigns. As a result, marketers can ultimately attract more qualified leads and reduce customer acquisition costs (CAC) – improving overall marketing ROI.

But customer data management is useful only for marketing. It can help sales, IT, and customer success manages customer touchpoints. The great news is that every department can have access to the same data and deliver a consistent, unfragmented user experience.

Four Types of Data to pay attention to

Before trying to set up a data management framework, your team should have a roadmap of data types and specific information that can enrich your strategy, according to your business goals. 

We will now explore four data types and a few examples for each.

1) Identity Data

Identity data is collected through micro-transactions and interactions in the company’s channels – when a customer signs up for a newsletter or enters their payment information on the checkout page.

By collecting customers’ identity data, marketers have the minimum amount of information to start a conversation (and hopefully a long relationship) with the customer. Such information is also helpful to help companies build brand personas. 

Examples of identity data: Name; Personal data (date of birth, region, gender, etc); Address; Contacts; Social media profiles; Account data.

2) Quantitative Data

Quantitative data is mostly related to the customer’s decision making process as they interact with your brand. Such data covers different channels throughout the customer lifecycle, from emails and customer support channels to purchase transactions and social media. 

The idea is to understand the specifics of how customers are interacting with your brand through important operational data. You could use quantitative data to find out details about channel interactions and steps that led customers to convert.

Examples of quantitative data: Transactional data, such as the number of purchases, time of purchase and subscription value; Order dates; Cart abandonment and Bounce info; Click-through-Rates; Website visits; Product views; Number of Interactions.

3) Descriptive Data 

Descriptive data comprehend additional lifestyle information that complements customer personas. Collecting this type of data typically requires doing deeper research and interviews with customers in order to dive into individual buying behavior. Such data is pretty helpful if you want to use predictive analytics in your marketing strategy.

Examples of descriptive data: Family Data such as marital status and number of children; Lifestyle data, like hobbies and interests; Education and career data.

4) Qualitative Data 

Qualitative data should describe the motivations behind the customer’s actions. Gathering such insights might be more time-consuming and expensive than simply collecting quantitative data, but it is worth it. After all, tackling into customers’ deepest motivations is how you’ll captivate them.

This type of data is better collected on a one-to-one basis, mainly through the marketing teams’ interpretations of customers’ opinions throughout their journey – through analyzing CRM notes or reviews in websites, social listening tools, feedback questions, and Net Promoter Score (NPS) systems. 

Best practices in customer data management

An effective customer data management framework requires marketers to make human and tech investments, have well-defined processes and priorities. We have picked a few key practices involved CDM:

Data collection 

A lot of the data within enterprises go unused, and so data collection is the first step in building an integrated customer data management strategy. There are millions of data streams coming into companies’ systems from many touchpoints, and so marketers need to make sure relevant data doesn’t go to waste. 

It’s important to understand what data needs to be ingested. Ask yourself: What goals do I want to achieve with my marketing strategy? Which data points are directly or indirectly related to my Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)? From there, you can start filtering your sources of data and the indicators you will track.

Data Integration

Centralizing all company’s data into a central system is also vital for customer data management. That enables the “ETL Process”, which stands for “Extracting, Transforming and Loading” data. This stage is where you will check your data integrity, filter it, and validate it. 

A good data system will ingest relevant data, convert it in necessary formats and load it into different tools such as a data warehouse, a customer data platform (CDP), a data management platform (DMP), a customer relationship management (CRM) or any other system. The result? You will have a single hub for all the data you need.

Data management

This is where you connect the dots between data points to build robust, unified profiles of individual customers or segments. This could mean using statistic models to create identity graphs, applying data governance to make sure you integrate consent to customer data, or anonymizing data to be used through a data management platform (DMP).

Data analysis and activation

Data management tools: the difference between CRM, DMP, and CDP

Although customer Data Management can be described as a framework, it requires companies to have the right technologies. 

Your data software stack could be more or less complex depending on the size of your business and the number of touchpoints with the customer, but, essentially, your CDM strategy will require a combination these platforms: a Customer Relationship Platform (CRM), Data management Platform (DMP) and Customer Data Platform (CDP). 

Each one of them plays a role in your strategy. But what is the difference between them? 

The basis of data management starts with customer relationship management systems (CRM), which are built to engage with customers by tracking their relationship with your company. They only store data if the customer has interacted with the brand in some way, and they are based on historical and general information such as contact, demographics, and notes made by CRM teams.

Data management platforms (DMPs), on the other hand, have been widely used by marketers to serve ads and lead digital campaigns. These platforms focus on third-party anonymized data collected through cookies (that typically expire after 90 days), device IDs, and IP addresses.

In a different model, a Customer Data Platform (CDP) is a software capable of unifying customer data from various sources, internal or external, gathering quantitative and qualitative information from multiple touchpoints between a company and its customer base. It allows you to build a holistic view of customers and their pain points in a granular way. 

Why CDPs are the ultimate trend in customer data management

Although CRM systems, DMPs and CDPs share similarities, they are different when it comes to managing data. Customer data platforms, specifically, have increasingly been used as an integration hub for data systems because they are built to ingest large volumes of data from multiple sources – unlike CRM systems and DMPs.

There were days when marketing segmentation based on DMP persona segments and CRM was enough, but today, brands are expected to personalize every step in the customer journey – which is only possible through CDPs.

A study by Forbes shows that 53% of marketing executives are using CDPs to engage with existing customer’s needs, increasing the likelihood that they will become recurring clients.

The focus of CMOs is also shifting from third-party data and anonymous data to first-party, single customer data, which also underlines CDPs’ importance. As data privacy and compliance regulations arise, organizations also seek to work with their own, integrated data.

CDPs are capable of providing marketers with a historical record of identified customers that can be used not only for advertising but for other purposes as well.  By centralizing information in a single platform, companies can optimize resources and avoid having to rework their data over and over through different systems. 

Bonus tips for successful data management

Make data widely available to different teams: The Harvard Business Review study we mentioned before reveals that 80% of a data analyst’s time is spent on just discovering and preparing data. Customer data can be an important asset across departments, so it’s important to centralize access to it instead of storing it in separate departments and warehouses. Let the data flow!

Always keep data governance in mind: Understand the privacy policies of your data tools and ensure consent is integrated into all of your data collection, while also respected in marketing campaigns. 

Don’t over-collect data: Understand exactly why you’re collecting the data your collecting, and which questions your company is trying to answer with them. Resist the impulse to gather too much data “just in case” you need it, without a proper purpose.

Create rules for data categorization: Set up file formats you’ll be using, standards for tags, file-naming, and timestamps. Such standards will make it easier for your team to navigate through the data.

Beware of new data sources: Pay attention to emerging data types, such as those from voice activation devices, geo-localization in smart devices, Internet of Things, Augmented and virtual reality platforms, etc. New data points will eventually require new processing and marketing frameworks.

Still want help defining your customer data management strategy?

Now that you have learned a bit more about customer data management, maybe your next step will be to study data management solutions.

If that is the case, we recommend you check out Arena’s customer data platform blog section to dive deeper into the subject. You can also get in touch with one of Arena’s consultants and learn the specifics about our CDP.

Customer Centric: what is it, benefits, and how to apply this strategy

Posted on by

A customer-centric approach is nothing new in businesses, but it is transforming the way companies work nowadays. It’s time to understand more about it.

Being customer-centric is not a new conception in the market. However, with the changes in customer behavior these days, it’s a strategy that is becoming more popular. It’s not only about focusing on the customers, but it’s also about making them the core of your business.

Some time ago, industries used to lead product-centered strategies, meaning that if a product wasn’t selling well, it needed to be renewed and improved. However, as time went by, marketing professionals started to notice the problem was not in the product, but in who was buying it. If you don’t have the right consumer, there’s no point in having the highest quality solution in the market.

Because of that, customer-centric is becoming more and more popular. As a matter of fact, this is far from being a brand-new concept. Companies have known it for ages, but it seems like the notion of it really started to gain attention in recent years.

Since customers now are more educated and informed, their expectations are getting higher by the day. If the company doesn’t find a way to live up to that, it will most likely not survive in the market. To genuinely build the right product and invest in the right marketing campaigns, following a customer-centric strategy is ideal.

What is customer-centric?

Also knowns as client-centric or customer-centricity, this is an approach that aims to put the customer in the center of everything. All strategies and actions the company makes are addressed to the customer. So, if an idea doesn’t fulfill the “will our customer want and like this?” aspect, it probably will be left aside.

Clients are the purpose of a company even starting to work and for that reason, they need to be satisfied with their acquisitions. That means paying attention to the consumer before, during, and after a sale happens — therefore, being directed related to customer experience. The goal is to provide the most positive experience possible.

For a business to have good results, being customer-centric shouldn’t be just a strategy. It should be the core of everything it’s done, creating a customer-centric culture inside the company. That way, every product, service, and publicity will happen around the consumer’s needs and pain points. Because of that, one of the most important things here is to know your consumer.

It’s more than creating a good product, it’s about developing something that’s so good and fit to the client that they don’t want to buy from anywhere else. This approach is to increase customer loyalty and retention rates.

#Subscribe and stay on top of news on our blog

What are the benefits of customer-centric?

Aside from knowing the consumer and creating all the picture-perfect products and ads for them, there is much more we can talk about a customer-centric approach. All the benefits it brings to a business are surely in your interest, so this is what we’ll address next. 

Increase the customer lifetime value

In recent days, new customers are more expensive than retaining the ones you already have. For that reason, when you work with a customer-centric method, you will eventually increase the customer lifetime value.

In other words, a strategy such as putting the customer at the core of the business will, consequently, give the clients more reasons to be loyal to the brand. That’s what the company needs to focus on: strategies to make current customers buy more and frequently.

Moreover, this will lead to an increase in retention rates and also in overall profits. In fact, a mere 5% increase in customer retention leads to at least a 25% increase in profits — but it can be up to 95%.

Anticipate customers needs

Every area in the market has its competition and it’s important to be known as the innovator. When a customer is at the center of strategies, the problems they have will be explored so the company knows what to look at when building their solutions. With a thorough data collection in real-time, it’s possible to anticipate customer behavior and offer accurate, original products.

Gain a competitive edge

With loyal customers and a real-time data collection strategy, your company will become a strong competitor. Every business will be looking at you as an example of what to do and how to achieve success.

With so much alike solutions and prices, positive customer experience will be the differential of the brand. It’s actually common to see people pay more on services because they offer a unique experience — rather than because of quality.

How to become customer-centric

Well, surely, put the customer at the center of the strategy is the first thing that comes to mind. But it’s about much more than that. To truly enjoy all the advantages of this strategy, there is a need to work with empathy. This means, basically, what we’ve been saying so far: 

First look at the customer, then work on the product.

Since the rise of the internet, customer behavior has been in constant innovation. Every year companies need to renew their strategies so they can keep up with the changes. The good thing is technology has found its way to be one step ahead by creating data-collection platforms that help understand who is the consumer and how they act online.

Overall, some characteristics of a customer-centric business are:

  • use customer data to understand the customer base;
  • analyze who are the best customers and focus on products for them;
  • give special attention to customer success and experience;
  • practice audience engagement;
  • identity opportunities and make data-driven actions.

By using a Customer Data Platform, all information available about a brand’s consumers will be at easy access. From names, ages, and demographic to time spent online, and pages visited. The CDP can collect data from all channels and sources the company is connected with, such as website, online store, social media, payment systems, app, and so on. That’s why a customer-centric approach should be accompanied by a CDP solution.

The more you know about a customer, the better the chances are of having a successful customer-centric strategy. As a matter of fact, to implement this method in your company, it needs to go beyond marketing and sales teams. The entire firm should follow a customer-centric culture. This means customer support, product team, engineers, and whatever other sectors the company has will all be focused on learning and working around the customer.

In addition, it’s important to remember results don’t come overnight. This plan is a long-term project of building durable relationships and providing positive experiences over and over again. After all, customer acquisition costs are way higher than maintaining a devoted customer base. In order for that to happen, the brand needs to be in regular communication with the customer, whether over chats, email, or social media.

Customer-centric marketing

It’s was pretty much implicit that this approach could be used to marketing-related actions. For one, you can’t build a customer relationship without the help of the marketing sector. Indeed, performing an Inbound Marketing plan and delivering content is essential to establish bonds with an audience.

With the assistance of a Customer Data Platform, while being a customer-centric company, every moment of the customer experience can be thought of with minimum effort. Surely, it’s still something that requires the full attention of marketing professionals. However, they can focus more on planning strategies and content than on analyzing data and metrics.

The entire customer journey has to be worked in a marketing strategy. This means personalized content and ads will be sent at every stage of the journey. Even after a purchase is finished, marketing needs to be creating the right materials to send the customer. It’s the only way they’ll become loyal to the brand, maybe even turning into brand advocates and promoters. 

Moreover, based on purchase history and engagement with the brand, personalized recommendations will have a great effect in strengthening the relationship. The essential is focusing on what the customer wants — something you’ll be able to do through data analysis.

How a customer-centric approach impacts sales

In the old days, a sales process was demanding for the salesperson. They had to know every little detail about the product or service and have the ability to negotiate to close as many deals as possible. Nowadays, with the customer-centric strategy, things have taken a turn.

Since the customer is the focal point, a sales rep is no longer the person who showcases the product and tries to sell it at any cost. In fact, they understand the customer pain points, wishes, and demands so they can perform as a consultant — demonstrating how certain products will help solve their issues.

Because of this, it’s just as important for a sales team to have access to CDP data as a marketing team. Customer data is crucial to understand their journey and what is the best way to act in each particular moment. Even though a customer-centric strategy doesn’t attract many new consumers, it does keep the existing client base more loyal. For this reason, identifying the most valuable customers, the ones that generate profits, is a way to assist sales professionals chose their target better.

Customer-centric and customer experience

You must have noticed that customer experience has been mentioned a few times throughout your reading. That’s because there is a relationship between customer-centric and customer experience. But what is it?

In general, customer experience is the relationship a client has with the brand. From their perception at the first contact to their satisfaction after buying a product, every step of the way is a potential influence on their experience. Therefore, a customer-centric company needs to bring a positive customer experience at every moment of the customer journey

Brands that apply Customer-Centric 

For a better comprehension of how a customer-centric company performs (and their results), a few examples can be brought here. These three companies are stand-outs in working with their customers at the center of everything. However, there are many more to keep an eye on for inspiration, such as Nike — their empathy really shows in every marketing campaign they launch.

Amazon

If you have the habit of doing online shopping, you probably already got something from Amazon. Do you remember how was the experience? This is a brand that nobody can question the customer is at the center of their attention. Everything they do is to improve the customer experience.

Details like the 1-click purchase using data previously saved make a difference in obtaining customer loyalty. Besides, people are always talking about their delivery service — they are fast and accurate with their deadlines. Thus, customer satisfaction is never a problem in their hands.

Disney

Disney is a brand that embraces lots of different products and services, such as animated movies, TV channels, and amusement parks. Nonetheless, it’s noticeable how all of their actions are directed to their clients. They work hard to keep their customer-centric culture remarkable. This means customer-centric works beyond digital strategies.

The thing is, people can see the value in the brand. They happily pay more to go to Disney’s park then they would to go to any other park. 

Slack 

Even though this isn’t such a recognized brand as the other two, it’s still worth mentioning their method of work. Slack is a cloud-based communication company that is rapidly growing. Their approach is totally concentrated on the customer experience. 

Instead of having a group of professionals that knows every single detail of the product, they focus on certain areas of expertise. That way, when a customer contacts the team with a question, they are redirected to an expert in the area.

Plus, customer service and product development work in union to always update the service as they notice customers’ needs. Slack is a brand known to be open to feedback from their clients, so more than gathering data, they are regularly monitoring brand mentions so they can meet customers’ expectations.

How to measure the success of a Customer-Centric strategy 

So, you’ve established a customer-centric approach in your company and got everyone working towards it. How do you know if you’re having the desired results? There are three metrics that will give you the answer: churn rate, net promoter score, and customer lifetime value.

Churn rate

First of all, the churn rate. This metric is related to the number of customers who no longer interact and buy your products. To measure it, it’s necessary to divide the number of customers who left in a certain time period (1 month, 6 months, 12 months, and so on) by the average number of costumers in the same time period. If you lost 10 customers out of 100, for example, your churn rate will be 10%.

Since you want your customers to keep engaged and buying from you, in order to have a successful customer-centric approach, your churn rate needs to be the lowest possible.

Net promoter score (NPS)

The NPS, or net promoter score, is about measuring customer loyalty. There is one simple question that revolves around this metric: “how likely are you to recommend us to friends?”. And, in a 0 to 10 scale, people can be classified as detractors, passives, or promoters. 

  • Detractors: From 0 up to 6, they are the first kind, the detractors. It means they are not happy with the product or service and are likely to share negative experiences. 
  • Passives: Between 7 and 8, customers are happy, but not loyal. 
  • Promoters: Lastly, when the classification is 9 and 10, people are most likely brand promoters. This means they are not only satisfied with the brand, but also share positive experiences about it.

Once these data become available, the calculus should be the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors. The results need to be higher than 70%, but ideally, for a customer-centric company, they need to be around 80% to 100%.

Customer lifetime value (CLV)

The customer-centric strategy is based on creating a long-term healthy relationship with the customers. So, measuring the customer lifetime value, or CLV, is a way to see if your plans are having positive outcomes.

The calculus is multiplying total revenue by the time of the relationship with the customer (total revenue X average customer lifetime). 

CLV measures the revenue a customer generates to the company for as long as they are paying customers. This is the best metric to understand before and after results when applying the customer-centric approach to your business.

Here at Arena, we have the best CDP solution for your business. With our real-time data collection, you’ll be able to know exactly who is your consumer and how to work thinking about them. Learn more about our solutions by talking to a consultant.

An essential guide to Customer Data

Posted on by

Customer data is the key to understand customers beyond the confines of your own strategy, which makes you avoid dangerous assumptions to create relevant products and experiences.

Continuously data analysis will help you to come up with strategies that cover the market’s lacking points and elevate your marketing to a more meaningful approach. 

We are witnessing a new customer era. Every company’s engines work daily to think, develop, and incorporate business and marketing strategies that put customers at the center of everything they do. 

This new approach does not strike the market as a surprise. For the past years, with so much information in the palm of their hands, customers became more demanding and more willing to connect with brands that make proper use of their information to deliver more than just basic products and services.

If you have been paying attention, you already know customers value experiences more than anything else these days. This means true engagement will only be achieved by a remarkable customer experience that elevates your brand and creates a sense of connection with your audience. However, planning an exceptional customer experience takes a wide understanding and a sharp knowledge of how to solve consumers’ issues.  

That is why customer data is definitely here to stay.

What is customer data and why does it matter?

Customer data is all the information a company gets from consumers whenever they interact with it. Whether it is personal, psychological, or demographic, customer data help companies clarify facts and avoid assumptions when thinking and refining business strategies related to customer experience.

The importance of customer data is related to the incessant need to build a strong customer understanding. Many organizations have already noticed that, by using data as a pillar, their operations draw near customer satisfaction and proper marketing approaches that return investments and reduces waste. On the other hand, without concise information about their customer base, companies fail to engage their audience and make sense of the many market opportunities datasets provide. 

Customer experiences are tremendously affected by customer data, which means the right data extraction, validation and analysis are crucial to generate accurate outcomes that will enhance marketing and business plans. Customer data matters so many companies have embarked on customer data management (CDM) to correctly address data in their goals and daily work.

With trustworthy data at the palm of your hand, you will feel more confident in tactics to contact, acquire, and retain your customers, keeping their interest, and offering them exceptional engaging interactions. Customer data will also support your financial decisions, assisting you in where and when to allocate your budget.

How is customer data created?

As you read, a massive amount of data is being created. All around the world, people are navigating desktop and mobile devices. It doesn’t matter if they are shopping, replying to an online survey, or filling a lead form to get in touch with a software development company. Each of their digital interactions with brands creates data — which continuously provides the basis for algorithms to produce more data.

According to Deloitte in its Global Marketing Trends 2020 report, 90% of all global data were produced in the last two years, considering more than 26 billion smart devices circulating the globe.

Aware of data potential, the market has amended digital initiatives to maximize data collection, extraction, and validation methods. Big data analytics have been embedded to extract useful information from huge datasets, such as CRMs, that can’t be manually validated. Simultaneously, data scientists have been growing as popular as the need to adopt a data-driven culture. 

These market signs alone are an extremely important indication that data is everywhere, and companies that don’t welcome it proactively will be in a tight spot.

Types of Customer Data

Customer data is separated into four main categories. In their own way, these categories will help you enhance the customer experience in different and empowering perspectives. 

Personal data

Also known as identity and basic data, this type of information allows customers to be recognized by individual details and is divided into linked and linkable information.

Every information that can be used to identify a person without extra details is linked personal data — full names and emails, for example. Date of birth, physical address, and phone numbers are linked personal data too.

Now, linkable information doesn’t identify on its own. Still, when combined with other pieces of information, it is useful to draw a bigger picture. ZIP codes, age, gender, job titles, education level, marital status, and number of children are examples of linkable personal data.

Interaction data 

If you ever wondered how your customers behave on your website, or how they interact with your emails and your social media accounts, interaction data will answer all of your questions.

Sometimes known as engagement data, interaction data brings a meaningful and solid viewpoint of how customers interact with your brand’s touchpoints. 

Examples of interaction data are: Time spent on your website, page views, social media engagement, traffic sources, customer service feedback, and paid ad conversions.

Behavioral data

If you want to know how customers respond to experiences with your products and services, pay attention to behavioral data. 

This type of data assists you to have a deeper understanding of behavior patterns your customers have throughout the purchase journey. This means interaction data may or not be considered behavioral data — it depends on the big picture and the goals you wish to achieve.

Some examples of behavioral information you can track are: Previous purchases, website heat-maps, customer loyalty program usage, repeated actions related to your products, and CTAs clicked. 

Attitudinal data

The fourth and last type of customer data is related to how consumers perceive your brand. Unlike metrics you can easily measure, such as product purchases, click rates, website visits, and social network interactions, attitudinal data refers to emotions and individual opinions. It embraces feelings, which makes them highly subjective — that explains why this type of data is also referred to as qualitative data. 

Continuously mining through attitudinal data will get you closer to proactively responding to consumers’ issues and anticipating trends they might be interested in. This is the perfect chance to get to know your consumers’ individual preferences and their point of view towards topics that interest you.

Attitudinal data examples are: Customer lifestyle, motivations, pain points, sentiments, and desirability. Customer reviews are excellent to gauge this sort of information.

Collecting customer data

As we have already emphasized, digital transformation has made every channel a powerful source of customer data. If your customers are interacting with your marketing and shopping channels, you can easily extract customer data from them using Customer Data Platforms (CDP).

There are several ways to collect customer data from distinct data points, and they depend on your goals.

That being said, before jumping to conclusions on which channel is the best to collect data from, make sure you address your data goals first. Is it to accelerate revenue? Develop new products? Get a more precise understanding if you ought to invest in a new marketing campaign? Start with the why, and then move forward.

More than predicting upcoming trends, recall that customer data should be highly attached to things that happened in the past. Past customer sales, buying decision patterns, abandonment rates (and much more) can be extracted from customer data to develop better strategies that respond directly to what your consumers did and said months, weeks, and days ago.

We have compiled some collecting data options ahead.

1. Website Analytics

Web analytics reports are excellent to understand what is resonating with your audience and how they are talking back to you. 

When investigating this type of report, remember behavioral data insights can be extracted from heat-maps, bounce rate, page views, and even the devices your target market uses the most.

2. Social media engagement

Social media-based data can tell you a lot of things. Shares, likes, and comments on social media are basic engaging metrics you can measure to understand what customers think about your brand and what type of message they enjoy. You will likely get a good amount of data from social media analytics to make sense of customers’ sentiment towards you.

We highly recommend you to go even further and run social listening while analyzing social media insights. This will guarantee you interpret your customers’ interactions more accurately.

3. Customer interviews and feedback surveys

Feedback is crucial. Whether customers love what you’re doing or criticize it, you need to be available to take their considerations and opinions into account.

When done right, customer interviews, and feedback surveys will gather your audience’s interests, opinions, preferences, and how you can improve your products and services to serve them better.

Another data collection suggestion is to investigate customer churn. This explains the reason why some customers buy from you for a while and then leave. What affected their experience so they felt like not coming back? Is there anything you can do to improve this experience and avoid other customers from turning their backs on you?

If you’re looking for ways to extract behavioral and attitudinal data, consider searching for customer feedback and combine this information with other data to get a bigger picture.

4. Contact information 

Contact information is vital to customer data. If you wish to communicate with your consumers, you should know where to find them according to the stage of their journey.

From phones to physical addresses and social media, contact information is needed to build a good amount of personal data you can rely on.

5. Customer service

Customer service is related to feedback but contains high potential itself. It is critical to allow customers to reach out to customer service software enabled to bring useful data your way. 

As a consequence, customers can quickly seek help for big and small issues and solve their problems more easily all while providing you with more information.

Validating customer data

As vital as it is, customer data is useful when you are ready to properly extract and validate it. This means you need to find actual helpful information from your data sources, and pull them out to understand how valuable they are. This is what we call data extraction — and it will prevent you from swimming in a random sea of data.

Data extraction uses the right tools to streamline data from customer experience to marketing, and makes sure the information provided is useful for your teams to make better decisions.

To avoid wasting all the money, time, and effort you put into collecting data, there are some essential considerations about customer data validation you should pay attention to:

  1. Customer data must be a source of truth and facts about your audience: Above all things, remember customer data is supposed to assist you in using factual information to come up with fitting solutions. For this reason, the data you extract must be reliable and revolve around your clients. If the data you’re extracting isn’t customer-centric, you better reconsider why it is important.
  1. Customer data must be goal-oriented: Exploring multi-channels to extract data from without a clear goal in mind might lead you to conclusions that don’t make much sense. Make sure you know what your goals are from the beginning and set milestones to measure your progress. This will help you visualize how much data is affecting your operations and what else can be done.
  1. Customer data must be integrated: Thanks to technology, data can now be transferred from one channel to another in a matter of seconds — and that is essential to every company that needs fresh information to anticipate opportunities and maximize their potential. By using customer data integration (CDI) tools, you ensure information gets to the right people and set a pattern to collect, organize, unify, and visualize customer data wholesomely. Best of all, CDI automates these processes and cuts down routines that take time. This means your human resources will have more time to focus on what they’re good at: Finding perfect responses to all the data software and algorithms have extracted and assembled for you.
  1. Customer data must be contextualized: In-house data, also known as first-party data, should be combined with external data to give the information you’re putting your hands in a more precise context. There are two types of external data you can blend with your in-house insights to ensure a broader understanding: second party data and third party data. The second party data is the information provided by another company towards the audience that interests you — this type of data is usually shared between partners. In the meantime, third party data is collected by companies that don’t have a link to customers and sell information to other organizations. These data types can enrich your first-party data and elevate your insights.

Customer Data Analysis

Customer data analysis is crucial to any customer data strategy. Wrong data analysis might cause disconnected and poor responses from brands to erupt and bother customers with interactions they don’t need nor asked for.

As complex as it might sound to gather validated data to be analyzed, some special technologies can help the process be smoother and more efficient. Data mining is one of them. By mixing machine learning, statistics, and artificial intelligence (AI), data mining can analyze loads of data using sharp techniques —and the greatest thing about it is that its analysis is automatic.

Analyzing quantitative data

When it comes to quantitative data, you might come across the need to categorize it according to some classifications and segmentations. Or, perhaps, you will notice it is necessary to relate different data points and comprehend how specific characteristics affect the customer experience. Luckily, data mining provides many programmatic settings that can be adjusted to return the insights you are looking for. 

If you’re willing to fragment customers to create more dynamic and creative ads, customer data analysis will help you find segmentation opportunities. If your team needs to associate behavioral patterns to develop a new campaign, customer data analysis will gather helpful information to predict how people will respond to your strategy. The opportunities are countless.

Analyzing qualitative data

On the other side, when we talk about qualitative data, many companies face the challenge of making sense of subjective information, such as sentiment. People’s emotions and feelings vary individually, and being stuck in the middle of so many variations is an uncertain place for your company to be at. If you’re wondering how to absorb valuable insights from this context, we have good news for you: there are ways technology can track important keywords to translate qualitative data into actionable decisions.

When analyzing qualitative data, pay attention to patterns that might make the situation clearer. Are your customers using the same keywords when they give feedback? Are the stories they tell somehow similar? Are there common elements in the ideas they communicate that can help you create a further sense of how they feel about your brand?

Take advantage of what customers say to you in feedback interviews, surveys, and methods of the sort, to gather enough data and take action. 

Benefits of Customer Data Analysis

Relying on customer data will benefit you in countless ways. To help you understand how, we’ve listed some benefits in-detail right ahead:

1. Segmentation

Segmenting your customers is a smart way to get a broader view of what their issues are and how you can reach out to them more effectively. Separating them by age, demographics, gender, job title, and more makes it easier to plan specific marketing campaigns that will straightforwardly attract them, whether your goal is to attract them, engage them or make them buy more.

2. Personalization

People no longer wish to be contacted with general messages that lack a personal touch. Customer experience is a synonym of personalization and, if you don’t use data-based strategies to customize interactions with your consumers, it is highly likely that they will get frustrated by irrelevant content and mass communication. In contrast, personalization increases service quality and customer satisfaction.

3. Deeper audience understanding

Data is becoming the centerpiece of companies that desire is to remain relevant in customers’ minds. This happens because, without a detailed and precise understanding of their audience, companies will hardly add value to their customer base. 

Customer data is the key to understand customers beyond the confines of your own strategy, which makes you avoid dangerous assumptions to create relevant products and experiences. Continuously data analysis will help you to come up with solutions around creative, data, and media — the right combination to empower your marketing and business approaches.

4. Revenue

When used correctly, customer data helps you understand how to increase your consumers’ loyalty and lifetime value, reducing churn at the same time. It also gives you a better understanding of where to invest in valuable campaigns and trends that will bring you more ROI.

5. Humanization

Human connection isn’t just another trend. The fact customers need to embrace companies with a purpose is changing their relationships with brands. People don’t want to be treated as a transaction. On the contrary, they expect companies to act authentically and be transparent in what they believe in, treating them individually. Pulling the right customer data contributes to humanize your brand so it corresponds to these expectations. It also frees your team to have more time to focus on how to genuinely engage customers. 

Data-base your decisions

Now that you’ve come to the end of this article, you know there isn’t space for assumptions to guide your brand’s decisions anymore. More than ever, new ideas and improvements need to connect with customers’ expectations. In this context, embracing the right technologies to collect, extract, validate, and analyze data is crucial. 

To find out more advantages that the use of Customer Data can provide for your company, contact one of our consultants, and resolve any doubts on the subject.

Data-driven marketing: learn how to work it with your customers

Posted on by

Data-driven marketing belongs to a new customer service approach that unleashes companies’ potential to make better, scalable marketing decisions and benefit from higher marketing ROI. It represents the future of customer experience and meaningful branding messages.

You already know what people say: Knowledge is power. Facts, information, and skills acquired through experiences are gold mines for every company that wishes to stand out and stay relevant in their customers’ minds.

Customer data platforms tells marketers everything they need to know about their target audiences. Through digitalization and its multi-channels, it became possible to trace people’s actions across the digital and physical worlds to optimize the process of offering customized products and services that match individual needs.

However, these days, data must be smooth to access and easy to visualize. This happens because customers want quick responses, which timing and effectiveness are highly affected by delays and assumptions.

In this unforgiving environment, are you confident that your marketing decisions are based on facts? When important events on your field take place, how quickly can you respond to them? How many customized experiences do you actually deliver to your customers?

If the answers to those questions concern you, you’re at the right place, at the right time. Get ready to know how data-driven marketing can take you closer to the answers you wish you could give.

In this article, you’ll find out:

  • What is data-driven marketing;
  • Data-driven marketing benefits;
  • Impacts on customer experience;
  • How to work data-driven in consumer segmentation;
  • And examples of data-driven culture.

With that in mind, let’s move forward.

What is data-driven marketing?

Data-driven marketing is a strategy that uses customers’ reliable information to personalize whole marketing communications and experiences. From buying journeys to targeted media and in-store service, data-driven marketing accesses massive information to leverage decisions and make the right judgment about what customers need. This helps marketers to refine strategies based on facts, not guesswork.

But where does data-driven marketing get all the information from?

When you use your phone’s mobile apps or desktop devices to web navigate, you’re leaving traces all around the internet. The applications you use are designed to send data to companies so they know what websites you access, with who you’re interacting with, the locations you have been to, and more relevant information that clarifies your individual preferences and lifestyle.

Many organizations are already worried about data, but we must call attention to the fact that data-driven marketing goes beyond data itself.

The many devices, platforms, and other types of media you use are surely whispering into marketers’ ears over and over to help them build fact-based decisions that match your expectations. Even so, data-driven strategies merge a high-powered amount of digital and offline channels to give context, collect information, and arrange it in ways that are easy to visualize. Data-driven marketing aims at amazingly-designed customer experiences, but influences internal operations in ways companies have never seen before.

With so much information being generated at all times, data-driven marketing unites the right tools to track, segment, and optimize strategies. When used right, this groundbreaking approach will help you to invest in the right interactions to increase customer retention and bring you more marketing ROI.

Data-driven marketing benefits 

Now that you know the importance of data-driven and how it is revolutionizing marketing strategies, it is time to highlight some of its many benefits.

Segmentation

Data-driven marketing is the key to build marvelous customer experiences based on well-designed segmentation. The first step is to select the right customer segment to drive marketing efforts into. After that, you will be prepared to work on specific, tailored tactics to sharpen your customer touchpoints, whether they’re potential or not.

By segmenting a target market, it gets easier to develop products, solutions, and approaches that will attract the right people to your brand. Segmentation also provides transparency when you wish to know how your campaigns are resonating with the public and gives you a better understanding of particular users’ behavior.

Customer acquisition

Four essential questions must be answered very carefully when you decide to attract target audiences and contact potential customers:

  1. What message will you tell them?
  2. How will you communicate with them?
  3. When will you reach out to them?
  4. Where will you find them?

In a data-driven approach, all of these questions will be respectively answered based on:

  1. Goals and pain points;
  2. How they behave;
  3. The best timing according to their routine;
  4. And the digital and physical places you’re more likely to meet them.

Even if you have a large number of customers, it is possible to combine data to deliver special, tailored touchpoints that match their behavior and preference. It could be an e-mail, or an SMS, or a live event. Possibilities are countless, but you will surely pick the best ones once you know what customers expect from you and how to engage them.

Data-driven marketing works efficiently when it comes to continuously deliver interactions to match customers’ expectations throughout their journey. With so much information at the palm of your hand, you will be ready to transmit the right message (what) at the right time (when) and place (where).

Revenue

Every company director loves it when technology saves the day by cutting costs and returning investment. Gladly, this is pretty much the case with data-driven marketing.

According to the Forrester report “Insights-Driven Businesses Set the Pace for Global Growth“, data-driven organizations grow 30% per year more than companies that don’t base their strategies on data.

When we take a good look at different markets, it gets even clearer that data-driven strategies embody assertive communication that makes ROI possible.

Custom-made marketing campaigns reach proper audiences, which leads to customer acquisition, which leads to customer engagement – and ROI is coming back to you in each one of these stages. Not to mention the revenue currency that comes from these approaches.

Revenue is also possible by cutting costs, reducing churn, and democratizing information through different companies’ sectors.

Upgrade your marketing strategy

Automation was already a buzz when CRMs arrived to transform the way marketers dealt with customer data. From purchase details to personal information and preferences, CRM was and still is prepared to collect digital data at higher levels. This allows big data to play a more predominant role in marketing: Data is now at its core, deciding the directions companies should take to reach their goals.

It must be said that collecting data became a more complex task, especially when you take the number of multi-channels available these days. Still, this complexity isn’t an excuse: If brands don’t automate operations related to those channels, they will lose way too much time putting effort into what can be automatic, and marketers won’t be able to strengthen their creative side and propose remarkable tactics.

Fortunately, there is a considerable amount of data-driven tools that optimize, clean, and filter important data from multiple sources, whether they’re 1st (directly extracted from customers) or 3rd party (found in the market).

Data-driven marketing automation saves you time, money, and free your team to focus on more important tasks that require human abilities, such as creativity. That is how you truly upgrade your marketing strategy: By quickly analyzing qualitative data and returning a creative response to customers’ issues.

This means a wider customer reach, more relatable content, targeted ads, and personalized customer journeys – to only quote a few.

Don’t forget that numbers and reports play a crucial role in data, but the outcome will only be useful if the human eye analyzing them gets the right insights and develops accurate replies to get closer to customers.

Impacts on customer experience

Lincoln Murphy, known as the Customer Success guru, says that Customer Success is only achieved by combining what customers need to an appropriate experience while delivering the right interactions. As you know now, this has everything to do with data-driven.

Data-driven marketing is a new shift in customer care. It prioritizes customer experience in smart and strategic ways, such as we have never seen before.

Many marketers around the world have embedded data-driven strategies into their routines, taking their time to analyze information that will drive to ideal customer experience. With so many benefits, data-based decisions impact consumers on profuse levels. Take a look at some of the impacts:

Personalize customer interactions 

Needless to say, real engagement is closely related to giving customers a personal touch in everything you do.

Irrelevant content, general messages, and ordinary offers will only frustrate the current consumer. People expect brands to customize every touchpoint and suit them to previous steps of their consumer journey. This means companies need to enrich and individualize communications that work in a one-to-one approach to get in touch with customers and prospects.

While 74% of consumers feel frustrated by irrelevant content, 56% of them would reward personalization with a purchase.

Data-driven tactics are the perfect response to this personalization requirement. It allows you to incorporate consumers’ inclinations, pain points, and attitudes to deliver personalized experiences both in digital and physical fields.

Content personalization also turns your communication more persuasive, improves customer conversions, and boosts engagement.

Improve products and services

Products and services can also be personalized and better designed to respond to buyers’ expectations. Analyzing clear data will help you understand whether you need to develop a new product or give an existing one new functionalities to match your customers’ needs. This kind of information also guides you to make the right decisions on when to invest in innovation and when to change small details that make a difference.

Besides, data-driven marketing ensures companies always keep an eye on the market to launch tailored, untried products. Data will assist you in when to launch something new, to know how much people are willing to pay for your products and services, and what can be enhanced to increase customer satisfaction.

Ask for feedback 

Another way data-driven marketing impacts customer experience is via feedback. Remember that people use social media to discuss brands and experiences, and when they talk about your company, you should be the first to know. Practices like social listening will help you monitor what people say on social media networks and collect precise data to gather feedback and insights into what’s working and what needs refinement.

Predict customer trends and market changes

Customers are avid for brands that can communicate and act based both on their individual preferences and what’s going on around the globe. Sustainability, social responsibility, storytelling… These are all actual trends that brands should pay attention to while planning their year. Closing your eyes to the market and only focusing on customer behavior is dangerous, as the external environment can dictate what trends will create buzz and what you can do to make people more interested in your brand.

Data-based predictions are important to keep you one step ahead of your competition, especially in times of change. Timing is crucial: Losing the chance to reply quickly to changes and real-time events might harm your brand in ways you never thought possible. With that in mind, make sure you use data to be prepared for change.

Reach customers where they are

Uncovering the best channels for promoting your brand can be a challenge, but data-driven marketing clarifies what those channels are and how your customers use them. This will prevent you from investing unnecessarily in channels that have bad ROI and planning media usage poorly.

With a more concise understanding of trends, you may get a broader view of channels’ tendencies to use them correctly, building more responsive communications. Batches of customers will also benefit from an enhanced content distribution from your part.

Make customers more engaged

Data automation is the ultimate principle to direct creativity into engaging strategies. In the past, marketers could only deliver a few types of customer service — versions back then didn’t vary, and general communication was even acceptable. Nowadays, though, our hectic and ever-changing routine requires more from brands. If you want to truly engage customers and make them loyal to your brand, you better start seeing data as the main resource to achieve better engagement rates.

More interested in experiences than in products, customers these days expect to be listened to and empowered by appropriate brand responses. Not only people are willing to pay more for better experiences — engaged customers are ready to invest emotionally in brands, and this is vital to any long term customer relationship.

Besides making you relevant in consumers’ minds, engagement pays your bills. Companies that have improved engagement increase purchase frequency and order sizes. This keeps revenue coming in and customers satisfied with relevant buying and connection experiences.

How to work data-driven in consumer segmentation

To apply data-driven marketing in your company, you need to be ready to extract, treat, compare, and analyze digital information from multi-channels, transforming it into knowledge.

We know this multi-channel information means millions and millions of data coming from social media, website analytics, cookies, CRMs, consultancies, market data, competitors, and more. But, thanks to technology and digital transformation, data-driven companies use analytics and algorithms to filter and select types of data that matter the most to them.

There are data-driven solutions — software and methods — that will help you segment your customers and visualize information in intuitive reports. With the advances of machine learning and artificial intelligence, machines gather data around and bring it to you whenever you need it.

One of these tools is the Customer Data Platform, also known as CDP. A CDP should provide you with the right insights to create personas, attract and qualify leads, create new content strategies, and develop customer relationships.

Be aware that marketing segmentation is a key-strategy when it comes to the data-driven mindset. Separating customers by interests, job titles, age, location, gender, and more is an amazing strategy for companies that wish to come up with outstanding marketing strategies instead of sending mass emails and trying to acquire leads through general advertising. Segmentation will pull you closer to generate real-time audience engagement.

For example, in 2015 Very.co.uk combined customer preferences with data about the weather to create personalized homepages to attract consumers to their e-commerce. In the process, 1.2 million versions of the website could be displayed, matching customers’ interest. For example, if you were looking for homeware, your homepage would bring special promotional messages that had everything to do with the products you were looking for. It is completely personalized — and that was only possible because Very.co.uk data scientists created complex algorithms to predict customer behavior.

Nubank, the largest Fintech in Latin American, is another company that embraces data-driven marketing to customize the customer experience. Nubank created ‘wows’, the name given to specific gifts customers receive when assistants feel a special type of connection while serving them.

Every gift is designed especially to the customer, considering their preferences and context. Nubank recently gave a consumer that owns 85 dogs a box full of dog toys, bone-shaped letters (written to the customer herself), and a device that throws dog treats in the air.

Examples of data-driven culture

Data-driven marketing has been so relevant it is leading a policy of its own, known as data-driven culture.

Data-driven culture allows organizations to replace opinions and guesswork with data-derived facts. Here, data is the main resource for collecting and leveraging insights in every company’s department. For this reason, all operations and routines will revolve around it, creating a new decision framework that relies on collaboration to move, integrate, and combine data more efficiently.

This means information must flow effortlessly through people, processes, and solutions so decisions can be made in a matter of seconds. There is no time for waiting: Business intelligence, technology, sales, product, marketing, and many other teams must have quick access to data to enhance customer interactions as swiftly as possible.

To give you a real case example, The Coca-Cola Company in Brazil assembles a data-driven culture to machine learning and AI to analyze its market and consumers. From three to three months, Coca-Cola employees set goals based on data and measure their progress through indicators and continuous information exchange.

It is also interesting to mention that Coca-Cola uses digital as a leading measurement tool and values people diversity to boost collective learning.

Worldwide, Coca-Cola is also known for its successful data-driven campaigns and agile mindset. In practice, data helped Coca-Cola deliver the Cherry Sprite flavor, which was inspired by the fact many customers mixed their drinks in self-service drink fountains. It also drove the company to create personalized AI assistants for vending machines that can behave differently and allow consumers to personalize drinks.

To mention one more example, Coca-Cola has been using data-driven marketing to track photographs of its drinks on social media, using image-recognition technology — this allows the company to target customers and deliver more efficient adverts, considering their consumption behavior.

At the end of the day, it’s clear to see that companies that have absorbed data-driven culture are completely different from companies that haven’t. Data-driven companies achieve tremendous results by dealing with complex multimedia channels — like videos, social media, ads, email, and liveblogs; — to reach customers with the right message at the right time. This ability is closely tied to automation and analytical approaches, which permits operations to be optimized, and audiences to be attracted more effortlessly.

Data-driven marketing is the future 

We know making the best marketing decisions is a challenge as much as it is a basic requirement. Moreover, facts tell us the future of organizations will be decided by the ability to use data wisely — and we know you don’t want to be left behind.

Arena helps media companies all around the world to encourage engagement and streamline customer data to smart marketing campaigns.

If you’re willing to be assisted by a Customer Data Platform to boost your audience and work data-driven marketing with your customers, get to know more about how we can create powerful experiences for your users.

9 reasons why you should start doing it

Posted on by

Being all ears to your customers has amazing benefits. It increases customer acquisition and makes them brand loyal. It also improves branding strategies and gives you powerful insights about your industry, connecting you to new market opportunities.

If you don’t want to miss out on these benefits, you better start embracing social listening. 

Reputation is critical to any company that is willing to increase customer loyalty and build confidence in the market. With the many digital channels that allow conversations between customers and brands, organizations from the B2C and B2B sectors work hard to be positively recognized by potential and current clients. One efficient way of generating awareness is to have a strong social media presence and reach out to customers with helpful and engaging interactions.

Still, these interactions can only be valuable if brands are ready to actively listen instead of guessing what people want. 

When customers talk to you, whether they’re feeling good or bad about your brand, they expect you to talk back accurately. The last thing you want is to make them feel like you don’t care about what they have to say – or that you’re not making any effort to understand what they mean.

And that is why you should start using social listening.

What is social listening?

Social listening is the act of monitoring your brand’s social media accounts and channels to search for customer feedback and give appropriate responses. 

In order to social listen, you firstly need to track your brand’s mentions and discussions, which can be done by social media monitoring tools. Only then, you’ll manage to do its core task: analyze conversations’ context to make better and more proactive communication decisions.

Think about an ordinary conversation. When someone talks to you, you listen before replying, right? You do that because you know dialogues and interactions won’t make sense unless you assimilate what’s being stated. When it comes to brands and consumers communicating with each other, the line of thought is the same.

By being an active social listener, you’ll be able to reply to some very important questions: Why are people talking about you? Where and how are they doing it? What do they truly want? How can you connect with them?

These questions can lead to a powerful understanding of how to improve content for your customers, create better relationships with your followers, and increase consumer satisfaction.

We separate social listening into four important actions: find, listen, understand, and take action.

  • By finding, you monitor and track the right places and discussions that gravitate around your brand.
  • By listening, you pay attention to what is being said.
  • By understanding, you address issues that are being presented and collect important feedback.
  • By taking action, you work on solutions that will remedy the situation and make your customers happier.

Practice makes perfect, so make sure you find, listen, understand, and take action continuously.

Why is social listening important?

When customers talk, they’re doing an amazing job for you. Their feedback lets you know what you should keep and what you should change in your business. If you listen clearly to consumers and give them what they need in return, they will remember you for solving their problems. Now, try ignoring customers to see how bad it can get. An unresponsive customer service approach will cost you a high number of consumers that will never do business with your brand again.

A bad brand reputation can be a way to downfall, and we are not exaggerating. Remember what happened to Kodak? It once led the photographic film market but failed to understand people were growing more and more fond of digital photography and went bankrupt. 

We have to emphasize that customer-centric cultures have never been so popular. By putting customers at the center of everything they do, these cultures put efforts into anticipating consumers’ needs and creating proactive strategies to give them what they want: new products, services, loyalty programs, and much more.

Information is everywhere and anywhere and it’s vital to track your brand’s social media to try and be wary of what people are saying about and to you. And that is the very least.

9 reasons why you should use social listening

Ahead, we give you detailed reasons why you should embrace social listening to proactively respond to your followers and consumers.

1. Customers expect you to speak out accordingly

Responsiveness is very important, as your audience expects you to speak out when relevant discussions and events take place. In 2018, a survey made by Clutch discovered that 76% of people expect brands to reply on social media. When we talk about millennials, 80% of takers expect brands to reply and 90% want to get an answer on the same day.

However, recall that an inappropriate response will only frustrate your customers, no matter how fast you’re able to reply.

If you want to make your clients brand loyal and boost customer retention, you better start replying accordingly to what they say — and, by accordingly, we mean you have to thoughtfully understand your customers’ issues to shape valuable responses. Keep this in mind: replying is good, but replying accordingly is what social listening is all about.

2. Have a better understanding of your audience

One of the many reasons organizations keep clear interactions with consumers is to generate and gather high-perspective data that maps their concerns and issues. Social listening will guide you to big pictures that exemplify your consumers’ concerns and how you can act on them.

Combined with the need to have a better audience understanding, social listening offers fresh data to get audience insights related to the public perception of your brand, from competitive analysis — whether in brand or product level — to how marketing campaigns resonate.

By social listening, you can identify demographics, preferences, and customer behaviors as much as the general sentiment about your brand. Once you have tangible reports, you can analyze qualitative data and leverage it to grow your brand strategy and take action.

We will sound obvious, but it’s true: your social listening data will only be valuable if you know what to do with it. For this reason, it is essential to set up a frequency to investigate the information you’re getting and think about how you’ll keep track of the results from time to time.

3. Monitor new industry opportunities

Is there anything that’s trending in your industry that you should know? Any social issue related to your brand that needs to be addressed? Any gap in your sector that people are talking about? Any questions from customers that you can answer better than your competitors? Social listening can help you find the answers to these questions. 

By tracking industry buzzwords and trends, social listening will bring you precious insights about your area of expertise and shed light on discussions that can be amazing opportunities for your brand. That is an efficient way to keep a hear out for market trends, discover what’s lacking in your industry and what you can do to innovate and attract more customers. 

4. Keep track of your brand’s health

Social listening is an effective way of developing better elements that shape your brand in customers’ minds. As soon as you continuously keep track of what people say on the internet, you’re able to make sense of what and how users would like your brand to communicate. Attentively listening to consumers’ feedback is essential to come up with interesting brand strategies.

Social listening is also an excellent way of providing constant investigation towards bad reviews and comments that can affect your brand negatively. Never forget that anything can go viral on social media. Unhappy customers and displeased staff members know they can freely express themselves on online networks and be heard. Social channels empower their voices and reach people who might be going through the same issues. With that in mind, it is completely possible that a single complaint could be reinforced by others and create unwanted attention. 

Being ready to address brand disasters and manage a crisis isn’t overreacting in this fast-paced environment we call the internet — and, trust us, you’ll be glad to have the right tools and tactics to deal with harmful posts and remedy the damage. 

It’s true that you won’t be able to control everything people say about your brand, but you can control how you react to it and mitigate the negative impact. Learn with your previous experiences and prepare not to just reply to undesirable controversy, but to avoid it before it happens. For example, if your launch sales were affected because your website was down, you better start looking for infrastructure tests that will strengthen your website and avoid outages. 

5. Increase customer acquisition 

Another reason you should embrace social listening is that data provided by it will lead you to create content people care about. When you start shaping your content to followers’ preferences, chances are you’ll attract more users that connect with you and have a genuine interest in what you have to say. 

You already know it — expressing your brand message in social media through responses, hashtags, live streaming, and more, calls the attention of content viewers and make it easier for you to convert them into leads. This works better than driving traffic through ads to people who have never heard of you before.

Pay attention to what audiences are looking for and what type of content they enjoy viewing and sharing. Photos, videos, mentions, polls… All of these are instruments you can use to increase customer acquisition smartly and more humanly.

Quick example: Netflix is one of the top-references for brands that want to stand out on social media and attract public attention. With unique humor, Netflix memes its own shows, retweets Netflix-related posts made by followers, and replies with a tone its audience can positively connect with. 

6. Keep old customers engaged

It is quite simple to understand how social listening can help you maintain old customers engaged and retained. If you ignore what consumers say when they reach out to you, it shows you don’t care about their experiences. By neglecting them, you’re paving the way for your customers to switch for competitors that are ready to offer valuable interactions.

Recall that many consumers’ stories are being told on social media, especially those where customers need your support. It isn’t unusual for clients to reach out to brands on Twitter or Instagram to get an issue addressed. Actually, they message and mention your brand on those channels because they expect you to reply and solve their problems quickly. No one has the time and patience it takes to hang on the line anymore. The good news is that social listening can absolutely help you to excel at fast, assertive support, and keep old customers engaged.

Engaged customers are more likely to be brand loyal, especially when you can keep meaningful interactions going on and offer them what quench their thirst for information, interactivity, and good customer experience.

7. Address common issues

If the same questions are made by your customers over and over, how can you make it easier for them to find the answer? If a considerable number of buyers are complaining about the same products, how can you give them a detailed, honest assessment of the problem? These are more questions you can wisely reply to by social listening.

If the big picture tells you your customers have the same common issues, maybe it is time to find out how to solve those issues and respond effectively to them.

Monitoring social media accounts to find these types of problems can make you arrive earlier in the game to prevent more consumers from being affected and provide the right solution to solve the issues of those who have already reached out for support.

8. Get quick feedback

From knowing how you can improve your products to where your audience is willing to communicate with you, feedback can give you constructive criticism about mostly anything. 

Launched a new product? Want to know how your brand positioning is doing? Have doubts if the last live event you promoted is matching your followers’ expectations? What people post on social media will certainly help you get a clear idea about those, and more.

Plus, if customers are talking about something that’s not working, you should be the first to know. Make sure to take their considerations into account and acknowledge their feedback, then start working on what will fix the problem. A new feature? A new product? A new campaign? Getting feedback — and, most importantly, fast feedback — will help you find your consumers’ pain points and understand how to solve them.

Quick example: Starbucks recently released an open letter based on a user’s negative feedback regarding the Black Lives Matter movement. After social listening to the critique, Starbucks used a respectful tone and gave an immediate solution to what the customer was talking about, showing how its employees can now support the movements while working. 

Don’t forget that positive feedback is important too. If customers love a campaign or the tone you’re using to reply to them, make sure you get it to generate more content that will match their preferences.

9. Identify influencers and user-generated content

You won’t be surprised by the fact social networks are full of potential influencers that can help you promote your brand — or threat it. Remember that even people who only had good experiences with your brand can be influenced if someone important they follow feels bad about you (and good about your competitors).

Another social listening advantage is that it allows you to track user-generated content to keep your followers updated. Being continuously connected to monitor what digital influencers say and do will lead you to understand who you can partner with. Search for hashtags, keywords, accounts, and more to keep your brand aware of what’s going on in real-time. You can also start mapping people who your audience connects with and listen to what they say so you don’t miss out on collaboration opportunities.

The role of social listening on live streaming

It’s no secret to you that people love when you go live and cover news and events as they happen. Live streaming has become extremely popular in the last years and it is a gold mine for brands that want to keep relevant by connecting with customers in real-time. The spectator customer profile is being replaced by the active customer, who wants to join brands in emotional and thrilling experiences.

But how do live events and streaming connect with social listening? Well, social listening is a powerful tool when it comes to combining the right strategies to go live.

From sports games to elections, live streams are effective event coverage mechanisms that allow customers to participate in what’s going on even if they’re far away. Meanwhile, social listening uses social streams to monitor and interpret the viewers’ behavior and comments to get insights.

When done right, social listening can be unbeatable in content creation. The reason why is that live streaming gives you engaging methods, such as live discussions and Q&As, that will transform into data — and, as you know, social listening will turn data into action. 

At Arena, we recognize the power of social listening in social streams and event monitoring.

Our social monitoring stream tool publishes content from different sources automatically or manually and provides results coming in real-time. You can adapt filters and search parameters to improve results and post the freshest content to engage your audience. Besides, our social stream feature easily integrates your search stream with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, and more personalized RSS feeds.

[Real case example]

Grow your brand by social listening

We’re a bit biased, it’s true, but Arena is ready to empower companies to grow their audience in their websites by creating meaningful live experiences.

So, if you’re considering having a social monitoring stream and finding interactive ways to get in touch with your followers, we recommend you keep an eye on ongoing discussions related to your brand and make your own website the go-to place for relevant, instantaneous content.

It’s easier to be an authority in your field when you’re able to mix different sources and formats automatically into your website, all while providing your customer with an exclusive space for debating and chatting. Fortunately, we have the perfect tool that will do that for you.

A live blog will give your brand the chance to use a smart variety of tools to cover a particular event and engage users that are watching remotely.

By using it, you can publish news to your website as they happen, all while adding users’ reactions from social media and witnessing in-progress-discussions on live chats. Our tool is highly customizable and handles in-feed comments, connects with your video platform, creates polls, and posts social content that engages and keeps your followers updated.

Join us and be able to:

  • Increase time spent on your website
  • Let users engage with your posts
  • Automate content distribution
  • Cover field events that matter to your customers

From bloggers to large enterprises, from Oscars to Super Bowl, Arena is ideal to manage any type of live experience and to help you grow your brand by social listening.

Want to capture audience attention and feed your followers with fresh content at all times? Learn more about the subject in our Live Blog article!

Listen to your audience – and take back its ownership

When talking to your spectators and customers, you assume they’ll talk back to you. This dialog and communication are what, for the most part, define audience engagement.

In general, the question “what is audience engagement” has many different answers, but all of them will lead to the same essence. Keep reading to learn our Ultimate Guide to Audience Engagement.