As the advertising and marketing technology ecosystem continues to rapidly evolve, increasingly companies are making it a top priority to enhance the customer experience. Amidst escalating competition for customer attention and brand loyalty, customers now have countless options when choosing how and where to consume and engage with content. Therefore, personalization is a key factor to success. As such, it is fast becoming increasingly important to emphasize customer engagement; however, proper audience segmentation is instrumental to maximizing effectiveness. Identifying basic demographics such as age and residence location can be helpful when implemented targeted advertising to a consumer, but it is simply not enough to produce an experience that truly resonates.
When it comes to marketing campaigns, businesses need to take a holistic approach, and think outside the box, to truly understand customer preference and how loyalty is built, improved, and maintained, as well as where and how he or she engages with your brand.
In eMarketer’s latest report, Understanding Customer Engagement, Jay Stocki, Experian’s Head of Strategy and CMO for Experian’s Marketing Services division, provides insight on the importance of custom segments to gain a full understanding of segment effectiveness, as opposed to using off-the-shelf segment models. By leveraging custom segments, marketers are able to establish the appropriate objectives, match the tactics to the desired audience, and then identify and implement the metrics that are best suited to the measurement and evaluation of campaign results. The key word here is measurement – if you don’t take a true data driven approach by mapping your target channels and results, you will likely have a tough time maximizing the potential of your future tactics and objectives, encounter challenges in seeking to make informed marketing decisions, and ultimately fall short on robust customer engagements.
According to eMarketer, most brands (48% surveyed) cite lack of technology or tools, or complexity of tools, as the top challenge in measuring return on investment (ref: chart below). Based on eMarketer’s research, some see customer engagement as a single-channel exercise, while others look at it as the sum of all touchpoints and interactions. Companies’ definition of customer engagement depends on what their end goals are for those interactions, whether it’s sales, loyalty, or some multi-faceted combination therein.
Experian tackles these challenges head on with MarketingConnectTM, a new solution that enables marketers to access, manage, and activate offline and online customer identity attributes through a single, unified platform. Helping brands create the highly-coveted single-customer-view, build custom audience segments, implement cross-channel advertising campaigns, and generate comprehensive measurement reporting, MarketingConnect offers the complete toolset to help marketers maximize customer engagement and achieve their strategic business goals.
A single customer view is more important than ever. Learn more about why identity matters to marketers…and consumers, here.
Also, download Winterberry Group’s new identity resolution white paper, “Know Your Audience: The Evolution of Identity in a Consumer-Centric Marketplace.”