How to use Data to Boost Customer Engagement

Looking at how engaged your customers are with your business is a big reflection on marketing performance. Your data does a lot of the groundwork for your campaigns. So if you’re not using a customer data platform to help inform your campaigns, then they won’t be reaching their full potential.

You’ll find that your campaigns won’t be as strong as they could be if you don’t treat your data properly. You may not realise it, but you’ll experience a major boost in customer engagement if you take the time to understand your customers first.

If you’re not customer centric in your campaigns, then whatever message you send them won’t be very well received. Personalisation and showing your customers you know them is the way to come out on top.

Respect The Power Of Your Data

Use data to understand your customers

A business’s most significant asset is the data it gathers. You can improve your decision-making and customer experience by storing your customer data in a customer data platform. However, you first need to understand how to use it. Once you do, your engagement rates will begin to increase.

Getting your hands on customer data isn’t the challenging part anymore. But you do need to understand that customers won’t give it away for nothing. They need to be assured that it will be worthwhile for them. For this to happen, you need to make sure you communicate how it will benefit their experience with your brand.

You can gather a wide variety of data to offer a fantastic experience. Through a customer’s purchase history, transactional data, and online behaviour, you can discover a lot about them.

Discovering in depth what’s important to your customers is the first step in creating high-quality customer communications.

Consolidate your data

Companies can gather and analyse the data at their disposal much more effectively when your data is combined and stored in one location. Businesses have benefited massively in the past with the use of a customer data platform. 

Once consolidated, there are numerous ways you can use it to further understand your customers and their behaviour. Making business decisions based on data guarantees that your choices are reliable and well-informed.

The ability to send offers and product promotions that you know the consumer will find interesting is made possible by the first collection of data. There was a time when you would send the same content to all of your customers every time. B2C marketing, however, has long since evolved past that.

Personalisation gets the best results and increases customer engagement. That all starts with proper data utilisation.

How Data Moulds Your Campaigns

The modern customer expects their favourite brands to understand them at a much deeper level than ever before. They will take notice of the ones that aren’t making the effort.

The degree to which your messages can be personalised depends on the quality of your data. You will develop a much deeper understanding of your customer if you unify your data under one roof. You will gain a deeper comprehension of their behaviours, desires, and requirements. Additionally, your campaigns will become far more relevant to the target audience.

If you don’t base your campaigns on your data analytics, you risk them becoming irrelevant and actually devaluing your brand perception. Don’t waste time and resources building campaigns that won’t be well received by anyone.

How data feeds into your campaigns comes in many forms.

Segmentation

At this point, you should be aware that treating every customer the same won’t work. Your website will be used by numerous visitors for various purposes. If you assume that everyone wants to see or hear the same thing, your messaging and communications will receive little to no engagement.

91% of consumers are more inclined to stay with a company that remembers them, understands them, and offers relevant content and suggestions. Here, the key term to focus on is relevance.

This is why segmentation is crucial. Using a customer data platform to segment consumers into buyer personas can help you better understand who you’re speaking to and why. Then, you can create timely communications that are relevant to their interests.

What comes from this is a far more personalised experience for the customer. Your engagement levels and the chance that customers will convert should both rise. This result comes off the back of segmentation.

Personalisation

Personalising your messaging gets you results when it comes to customer engagement. Even though it requires some effort, the benefits are well worth it.

You have the ability to develop some truly outstanding campaigns by incorporating various types of data to guide your messaging and personalisation. This goes a long way for both your customer and your business.

Personalisation isn’t always as blatant as using someone’s name in the message. For example, you could send content to customers based on a product they showed interest in in the past. Some visitors to your website could have been looking for shoes. Use that information when sending your messages to them.

Even knowing where your customer abandoned their basket and delivering a message that immediately redirects them is quite helpful. Every year, abandoned carts result in significant loss in revenue, so it’s important that you win that back where you can.

The use of a customer data platform to inform your messaging is what will aid in boosting customer engagement. Funnelling your data into a customer engagement platform will allow you to take personalisation to the next level. They allow you to create message templates using dynamic content snippets and leverage the rich customer data you have. You’ll find that when you go beyond a first name basis your customer relationship will deepen.

Identify lapsed customers and re-engage

Key success indicators include visits, opens, views, and clicks. Analysing activity on a customer data platform can help you create really engaging campaigns for your active customers

However, negative results can also be used to your advantage. You can start to identify customers who have become inactive. You should be using that data to build campaigns to get them back using your website or app.

Remind them that you’re still there and give them a reason to come back to you. Coax them back to your site with discounts, rewards, and other different promotions or incentives.

Re-engaging lapsed customers will add a little boost to your engagement rates. Setting up campaigns concentrating on these customers can be worth your while.

Product recommendations

Businesses these days use data primarily to inform their campaigns based on things customers are currently interested in. But something that boosts customer engagement and click through rates is using your data to send product recommendations.

Putting similar or complementary products in front of your customers can pique their interest. It may spark them to go ahead and add something new to their basket.

This is all down to studying your data, understanding what your customers like, and how they have behaved in the past. Analysing their purchase history allows you to make the recommendations in your messages more accurate.

Using product recommendations is a really exciting strategy to incorporate into your customer communication efforts. When you start using them properly they can bring in some great results and really increase customer engagement.

Wrapping Up

All the secrets of success can be unearthed in your data. Customers want you to know their likes, dislikes, and everything in between, as long as it leads to a good experience for them.

Put them into groups, understand their behaviours, and put things in front of them that they are interested in. 

At the end of the day, it’s not a difficult science to comprehend. But the hard yards have to go in at the beginning. Only then will you see the boost you’re looking for with your customer engagement.

If you want to know more about how customer data platforms can help you better engage with your customers, get in touch with us and we’ll show you how.