Businesses thrive by attracting net-new customers and exist by retaining them. But new customers are increasingly harder to come by, and current customers are constantly being wooed by competitors. Brand loyalty has been replaced by customer experience—an experience that includes receiving personalized, tailored offerings that indicate a retailer is attentive to a shopper’s individual needs. The customer should feel like the retailer doesn’t want just anyone’s business—they want your business.
We’re all familiar with the glut of retailer emails, texts, and junk mail. Think about how often you actually click through or glance at, much less open and read. the email text, or mailer. If the offer isn’t personally interesting to you, you probably don’t spend much time looking at the details. But the devil is in the details—or more specifically, the data.
Today, there’s a lot of customer data up for grabs—from behavioral data, site cookies, and shopping patterns to social media and loyalty programs—and customers are more receptive to sharing it. According to Forbes “Customers want personalization—and are willing to share info to get it.”
Retailers that don’t leverage the power of that data are losing out on opportunities. The trick is to get a handle on all of it and distill it into something useful, like creating targeted advertising that resonates with customers to give them what they want, when they want it, at the right time and the right price.
In fact, the recent Google/SKIM Rethinking Readiness Study found that by tailoring advertising content to stated and inferred user needs, purchase intent rose 15 percent and click-through rates rose 30 percent versus ads with standard personalization. It’s time for a more targeted approach.
Targeted advertising
The ability to identify customer needs and create targeted advertising begins with data. Marrying that data from disparate sources and applications and different parameters and contextual information can be overwhelming—if you don’t have the right tools. In some cases, this has been a game of catch up for retailers that started as brick and mortar versus those that only have an online storefront.
While innovative, tech-driven companies capture new data from Internet of Things (IoT) devices, social media platforms, and other systems of engagement, traditional companies often rely on CRM and ERP systems of record that can include historical customer data. Regardless of the source of data for established or new companies, you must be able to aggregate it, and in some cases that may mean bridging the gap between historical systems and the latest technologies.
To do that—and cut out the clutter and noise so you can get straight to promoting the things your customers want to hear about—you need an application workflow orchestrator that digests, distills, and disseminates data from multiple sources to give you valuable insights at just the right time. Without it, you run the risk of getting out-advertised by your competitors.
Enter BMC’s Control-M platform
Control-M is that single point of control that can integrate and orchestrate application workflow development, scheduling, execution, and monitoring. Either on premises or as a service, it automates the process of ingesting, storing, processing, and analyzing customer data from multiple sources at scale. From there, you can harness that data to build timely, personalized, and relevant advertising delivered to customers at the right time. The result—your customers get advertising about products they actually want, and you create incredible customer experiences.
Conclusion
The old adage that the customer is always right has never been more accurate. In the race to attract and retain customers, businesses are seeking new and innovative ways to differentiate themselves. Finding that sweet spot with targeted advertising requires collecting and distilling volumes of data—and making sense of and yielding value from it. With BMC’s Control-M, you have a powerful solution to orchestrate and automate that process so you can get back to growing your business.
These postings are my own and do not necessarily represent BMC's position, strategies, or opinion.
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