The most successful marketing campaigns today incorporate information on customer demographics, preferences, lifestyles, and trigger events–not just customer purchase history. By understanding the latest trends in developing a customer-centric marketing plan, you can implement the leading-edge  strategies used by larger organizations to drive growth.

Most companies implement marketing plans using incomplete customer and contact information from a variety of data sources. They base their marketing decisions almost exclusively on historical sales data with little insight into the customer perspectives that influenced these purchases.  Marketing plans are often driven more by new product launch and production schedules than by the needs and events in a customer’s life.

There are common roadblocks that prevent companies from adopting a more advanced analysis of customer data. Companies often have incomplete or out-of-date information about customers that is stored in different data files that are not easily integrated. Most companies do not collect information on the needs and preferences of customers, making it difficult to understand how to attract new consumers. Most companies do not have the know-how or resources to analyze the data. Most importantly, they do not have a way to quantify the benefits.

The good news is that advances in marketing technology and analytics make it easier than ever for you to take advantage of the tools used by larger companies to increase response and ROI.  There are basic tools that every company can adopt easily, and more sophisticated next-generation solutions on the horizon.

Collect Complete and Accurate Customer Data

Let’s begin with marketing 101.  Without complete, accurate, up-to-date contact information, you will not reach your customers effectively. In an age of multi-channel marketing, you need more than a mailing address.  Customer mailing addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers are important information for effective lead generation and customer cultivation.

Step 1 is to be sure you are collecting the most complete and accurate information about your customers, leads, and prospects.  Start with a well-designed contact management system, so it is easy to store all the information you need.  There are a wide range of contact management systems that are easy-to-use and very affordable including Hirise from 37 Signals and Quickbase from Intuit.  More robust systems like SalesForce.com include complete marketing campaign management and deployment capability. 

Find a champion to be in charge of your contact information system—someone who is detailed, a leader, and a good communicator who can rally the troops to be sure your sales and order entry teams are capturing and entering all the information they can.

Stay Connected to Your Customers

A critical component of a customer-centric marketing plan is to stay connected to your customers and leads on a regular basis. Any opportunity to reconnect is an opportunity to update information, make your customers and contacts feel valued—and make another sale.

Data quality quickly degenerates over time and that’s a challenge to any customer-centric marketing program. According to a study completed in 2002 by The Data Warehousing Institute, 2% of records in a customer file become obsolete in one month because customers divorce, marry, move or pass away.

The best remedy for this is to keep in touch with your customers and leads on an ongoing basis. Vary your touch-points with different messages and communications.  Use both print and online delivery.  Send press releases, newsletters, case studies, success stories, surveys, and special offers.  Always include a call to action so you can follow up by phone with customers who show interest.

Enhance Your Customer File with External Consumer Data

Consider enhancing your own internal customer data with external consumer data? This is an important step to becoming more customer-centric.  External consumer data can help you understand your customer interests and preferences.  It can also help you identify stages in your customers’ lives that lead them to make purchasing decisions.  These decisions are often triggered by life events like getting married, having children, purchasing a home, buying a car, and reaching retirement age.

The first step in enhancing your customer file is to profile your customers against a national consumer database to identify the “profile” or characteristics of your customers.  Are they older or younger? What is their average income? Are they married with children? Do they own their own home? What are their lifestyle interests and preferences?  All this information, and more, can be gleaned by matching your customers against an external consumer database.  The more accurate your customer information, the more reliable and complete your “match” will be, and the better the results.

A customer profile alone provides a wealth of information to help you select geographic areas that are better for local advertising, select publications for advertising with the highest affinity, and make list selections that will improve your mailing results.

To profile and enhance customer data, companies partner with an experienced data analytics company who can walk you through the steps involved and help you analyze and apply the results. Acxiom’s InfoBase and Personicx products are industry-leading solutions that can provide you with this invaluable information.

The Next Generation in Customer-Centric Marketing

Life events have a powerful impact on consumer behavior, and purchasing decisions.  Consumers graduate from college, relocate, get married, have children, purchase a home, and then send their children to college.  As consumers go through the different passages of life, their needs for products and services shift—dramatically.  As individuals enter professions and rise up the career ladder, their incomes rise to a peak in their prime years.  As they get older, thoughts turn to financial and retirement planning.

This constant movement through the stages of life drives consumer purchasing decisions. Information used to address today’s consumers must be fresh — nobody wants to see a fabulous financing offer three weeks after purchasing a new car or receive a diaper offer as their child is entering kindergarten.

To reach the next generation of consumers, companies must send relevant marketing messages based on accurate, fresh and multi- dimensional data built from a wider range of lifestyle, behavior and demographic options.

To address this need, Acxiom is building its next generation InfoBase® platform. Currently in development, the next generation of InfoBase begins with the most robust data asset — thousands of individual elements — available in the industry today. The new platform provides tools and easy-to-use interfaces that let companies design and deliver data to solve specific problems. The next generation of InfoBase is unique in its ability to deliver only the data elements that clients specify and only when that data changes in ways that are relevant to the client’s business objectives.  It can be used to deliver the most effective messages to consumers when, where and how they prefer to be contacted. It provides the flexibility companies need to craft, package and deliver meaningful marketing messages to consumers today and to adjust event-driven packages as consumers’ needs change over time.

Recommendations

By developing a more customer-centric marketing program, you can position your company for extraordinary, long-term growth.  With next-generation solutions on the way, now is the time to lay the foundation so you are ready to use the newest tools as soon as they are ready.  Here are the building blocks of a more effective marketing program:

• Collect complete and accurate customer and contact information.
• Implement a good contact management database system.
• Keep in touch with customers on an ongoing basis with a variety of communications—press releases, newsletters, surveys, and special offers.
• Conduct a customer profile analysis to learn more about your current customers.
• Test using trigger-event data to evaluate its impact on your marketing campaigns.
• Talk with Acxiom about how our new InfoBase platform can help you implement next-generation solutions to help you reach your business objectives.

For more information, contact your Acxiom IBLE Express Account Team at 866-977-6018 or email us at IBLExpress@Acxiom.com.

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