Hello again! This blog series is designed to help retail marketers improve their data literacy and get more from their data.
In this second part, we explore the first of our 5 top metrics marketers should be looking at to boost customer acquisition, retention, and engagement – your Single Customer View.
What is a Single Customer View (SCV)
Let’s start with the basics. SCV (also known as a 360°, or unified, view of the customer) is a process to integrate, consolidate, cleanse and enhance customer data from multiple, disparate sources, both online and offline, into a single record.
It acts as the single source of truth about your customers, providing a rich view of customers’ profiles and interactions, enabling you to understand every customer’s entire relationship with you.
Data types can include transactional (sales, returns, payment types, delivery methods), behavioural, device, contact details, marketing and product preferences, and subscriber and suppression requests from all sign-up sources and sales channels.
How to obtain a SCV?
The best way to obtain a SCV is through a Customer Data Platform (CDP).
A CDP integrates and de-deduplicates all available data (whether it's current or historical, structured or unstructured) from all sources into a master database, transforms it into valuable insights and makes it accessible to multiple, cross-functional users, and other systems.
Without a CDP, creating a single customer view is particularly painful. Many different point solutions need connecting together, coupled with laborious extracts of data with complicated formulae to bring it all together. It’s hard, manual, time-consuming and error-prone, and makes it difficult to validate and trust the data.
Identity resolution, both on and offline, is crucial to obtain a true single customer view and a more accurate lifetime value. CDPs commonly identify, match and de-dupe customer data using email addresses. This works perfectly for e-commerce data, (and even for guest check-out processes), but also works well in-store where retailers have robust processes for obtaining email addresses (e-receipts and loyalty programmes are great examples).
There’s also direct mail, which is enjoying a renaissance given direct mail subscribers typically have a higher average order value, propensity to buy again, and referral rate. It’s also brilliant for exposing people to new products and is a great medium for brand and product discovery.
Identity resolution for direct mail campaigns should not rely on physical addresses alone given the likelihood of different people in the same household. As an example, Datitude has designed several, very sophisticated, processes to deduplicate customer data including several de-dupe keys (variations of postal addresses being one), enabling marketers to decide whether to mail at an individual, household, or residence level.
But why is SCV so important?
At its core, SCV enables you to truly understand your customers and engage with them as individuals as you know who they are, their behaviours and preferences. SCV also enables you to;
more accurately attribute customer acquisition costs across all your sales and marketing channels
better understand your customers’ journeys and behaviours including when, where, how and why they engage with you
identify your most valuable customers more confidently
segment prospects and customers more effectively
improve data accuracy and insights.
So how do I use SCV?
With SCV it’s easy to target customers and prospects more accurately and deliver the right message, with greater personalisation, using the right channel at the right time.
Plus, you understand the true costs and effectiveness of acquisition and retention across channels and can optimise spend accordingly, including eliminating duplicate and incorrect marketing communications.
Once you have a single customer view, you’ll be able to measure customer lifetime value and that’s what we’ll be focusing on in the next blog in this series. If you’d like to be reminded when new blog posts are published, follow us on LinkedIn.
Our other top metrics and tips to boost customer acquisition, retention, and engagement, which we discuss as part of this blog series, are:
Blog 3 - Measure customer lifetime value
If you missed the first blog in this series, you can read it here: Improve your data literacy.
About Datitude
We do data! Datitude is a fast, robust, customer and retail data platform that helps businesses make sense of their data. Combining data warehouse and data lake, systems integration, and business intelligence, Datitude's platform integrates, processes and unifies your key data from multiple systems and channels, both on and offline, to unleash the most powerful customer and trading insights. Whatever the data source, we can process it.
Business intelligence, reports, and analytics are built-in and automated as standard, including visualisations and sophisticated interactive dashboards. Get a single customer view, lifetime value, segmentation analysis, product and customer loyalty analytics, device insights, and more.
If you need to turn your data into valuable intelligence, insight, and action, we'd love to talk!