The role of customer data in personalized marketing
You can’t do one-to-one marketing without collecting customer data – it’s the foundation for personalization.
The first step in any personalized strategy is collecting and connecting the data that tells you who your customers are, what they care about, and how they interact with your brand.
What kind of data are we talking about?
It can include purchase history, website analytics (pages viewed, items clicked), email engagement, loyalty program activity, customer service interactions, social media behavior and feedback, demographic information, and more.
In fact, with so many channels today, companies are drowning in data points. The challenge (and opportunity) lies in bringing these together into a unified view of each customer, often called a “single customer view.”
Combining sales data with social and behavioral data can uncover meaningful insights about each person. For example, social media listening might reveal that a segment of your customers is buzzing about a certain product feature or that an individual customer often complains about delivery times. These insights are gold for crafting personalized outreach.
Marketing technology is rising to meet this data challenge, too. For example, with Brandwatch Consumer Research you can gather and analyze customer data from across the web and use AI to instantly analyze consumer conversations from all sorts of online sources.
This kind of tool helps marketers go beyond their own customer records and tap into broader consumer sentiments and feedback – so you’re not just personalizing based on what you know but also what the world is saying about your brand or products.
Of course, data alone isn’t useful until it’s analyzed. This is where analytics models and AI come in. Advanced analytics can crunch through your customer data to spot patterns and predict behaviors. Many brands are also now using generative AI to help create personalized content variations on the fly (more on that shortly).
Data integration is crucial, too. For true one-to-one marketing, your various systems – customer relationship management, email marketing, social media management, ecommerce platform, etc – need to share data. When someone interacts with your brand on X, your CRM should update; when they make a purchase, your email system should know what they bought.
Breaking down data silos allows real-time, automated decision-making that powers personalization at scale. To get you started, Brandwatch Social Media Management offers a Salesforce CRM integration that seamlessly sends leads from social channels into Salesforce, complete with all the interaction details.