What will differentiate your brand from the competition is the ability to create a value exchange with the consumer in every moment of engagement. Offering something of value or utility is key to removing the friction from the consumer experience and ensuring they are able to share information about their interests, hopes and aspirations. This is exactly what Forrester Research calls “zero-party data”. Then it’s about continuing the dialog over time and enriching and enhancing what we know about the customer and continuously building the single customer view which can be used to generate great experiences over and over again.
Acquisition and enrichment strategies enable you to drive new customer growth, engage existing customers, and generate key psychographic data on customers and prospects to fuel personalization efforts, inform business strategy, and drive more efficient advertising efforts.
In fact, building great relationships with consumers is key, according to a recent Cheetah eBook 65% of marketers admit bad data hinders their ability to provide excellent personalized service, and 92% of marketers believe using first-party or zero-party data is critical to their growth. Getting this right can lead to a 35% increase in open rates on emails, and millions in potential incremental revenue.
In order to master the art of acquisition and enrichment of customer data, these are the top five questions you should ask your martech vendor:
- Do you have the tools and tactics to easily capture customer data and preferences? This is about the ability to learn more about the consumer over time. You need to have the mechanisms to capture insights around consumer likes, loves, interests and go beyond first-party data and be able to capture zero-party data, which is the crown jewel of any marketing data. The concept of “ABC”- always be collecting data and asking questions of consumers and providing them a clear value exchange through a sweepstakes or prize can create quick wins.
- Can you acquire customers across paid, earned, and owned channels? Are you able to exist wherever and whenever the consumer is, can you be there in the right channels, touchpoints and moments to provide value based on context? It goes beyond properties that you own, to paid media and ads and allowing for feedback and the capture of insights along the way. If you are delivering a cross-channel experience, ensure that the left hand and right hand are aligned and coordinated and you are not mis-communicating offers and content with consumers in various channels.
- Can you create fun and engaging ways to capture consumer insights? It’s all about having fun and sharing your passion and love for brands and products with consumers and letting them foster a community of engagement. This might take the form of quizzes, games, sweepstakes, and contests. One great example of an interactive quiz is what Air New Zealand does with their “You Say Yay” campaign that asks consumers about their favorite foods, music, and locations in order to help create unique travel experiences. This helps inform contextual recommendations that the airline provides as a call to action and has generated incremental bookings and revenue.
- Do you use privacy-compliant methods to capture consumer insights? Privacy compliance is crucial in a GDPR and CCPA world, with many additional US states coming online soon, it’s all about an opt-in culture. Ensure you are respecting the right to be forgotten or the right to have data masked or deleted. You need to understand consumer preferences and capture data from them directly, not inferring it from third party sources or deriving insights that the consumer does not prefer to share.
- Can you target experiences to customers based on their preferences and interests? This is about taking the next best action. After we have learned a lot about the consumer, what pathways, journeys, offers, or messages should be provided? How quickly can you react? The key here is to engage in ways that are meaningful, timely, contextual, and valuable. The feedback loop is key in ensuring people are comfortable in the way you engage with them.
The value in adopting an acquisition and enrichment strategy is to generate incremental revenue through smarter personalization, increase shopping frequency and average order value, increase renewals and customer lifetime value, and capture insights for more relevant and contextual engagement.
To learn more about increasing your marketing engagement strategies, take our Customer Engagement Maturity Assessment.
