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Are your customer insights a source of competitive advantage?

My prior post talked about the value of customer data.  Your next question will naturally be, “so how do I leverage what I know about my customers to my advantage?”  There are many ways to transform insights into  increased market share.  The lists below are examples but by no means the only things you can do.  However, I would suggest that you see your customer data and its application as a source of intellectual property, something to be guarded and leveraged wisely.

It can enable you to increase revenue by:

  • Identifying those likely to buy in the near term
  • Separating those customers who need an offer to get them to buy versus those who would buy regardless
  • Determining the right accessories or ancillary purchases to promote based on a customer’s purchase
  • Highlighting the “next best” products based on your customers’ purchase patterns

It will also help you retain your customers by:

  • Understanding the customer journey and the experiences that matter
  • Identifying those likely to defect
  • Ranking your customers by their lifetime value so you can reward your best customers

Lastly, it can also help you reduce your costs by:

  • Enabling you to conquest smartly, targeting those that look like your best customers
  • Determining the best conquest sources and communications

Are you leveraging your customers’ data to increase your market share?

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What are your crown jewels?

A former colleague of mine always referred to his clients’ customer data as their crown jewels.  He had a point.  No one else knows as much about your customers’ behavior, attitudes, and preferences.  If your customer data doesn’t seem valuable to you, imagine if your competitors had access to the very same information.  What would they do with it?

There has been lots of talk about analytics as a source of competitive advantage.  More recently, big data has promised to uncover untapped value and insights.  However, have you thought more holistically about the resulting customer insights and intelligence?  Used wisely, what you know about your customers can be a source of competitive advantage.  It can help you increase market share by promoting the right product at the right time to the right person using the right channel.  It can provide insights that enable you to improve marketing ROI, conversion rates, and conquesting.  It can help you identify customers likely to defect,  uncover what you need to do to retain them and help you determine if they are worth retaining based on their future lifetime value.

Finally, if you aren’t thinking about your “crown jewels”, I bet one of your competitors are.  They may be able to purchase data about your customers from a third party vendor and use it for conquesting.  If you don’t think customer data is valuable, your competitors do and they are willing to pay for it.

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Teaching a new dog old tricks

Remember the days when we asked ourselves, “What is the value of a like? A tweet?”  The debate is over. A social media strategy is a requirement for any business.  However, Social Media Specialists can apply best practices used regularly in other marketing channels to enhance the effectiveness and ROI of their campaigns.

Targeting. It is important that you identify the best targets for a promotion using a data driven approach.  You can leverage your CRM system and use customer insights to target your customers online who are are most likely to respond to your social media campaign.  Alternatively, you can use customer data to identify the conquests on-line who look like your best customers.

Post campaign measurement. Just because it is social media, doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t consider control groups and incremental lift. Here’s your chance to demonstrate the value of social media as a channel using the same rigorous methods as email and direct mail.

Combining data and insights across channels. Why not append your customer’s social media interactions to their off-line attributes and all the other customer data you have?  One client found that some of their best brand advocates on-line shopped mostly in stores.  Without linking off-line and on-line behavior, you don’t have a complete view of your customer.  For example, you might be tempted to remove these best customers from your online communications because they don’t shop online; however, in this case, email was driving them to the store!
Are you taking advantage of the analysis tools and approaches that work in traditional direct marketing to enhance your social campaigns?