In the last blog, we introduced our Universal Customer Journey Model and promised to do a deeper exploration of each stage of the customer journey. Here, we’ll cover the customer touchpoints when a shopper is in the process of gaining awareness of their need or want. Over the next four blogs, we’ll cover all the “use cases” that we outlined in the last blog’s graphic. Here is the part of the graphic that we’ll cover in this blog:
ANATOMY OF BENEFIT
Before delving into the use cases, let’s first talk about the value, or benefit, of integrating customer touchpoints. Online retailers place very high value on customer knowledge, individually and in segmented aggregates. Would traditional retailers fortify their march to digital if they learnt to value customer knowledge like online retailers do? Online, consumer-facing organizations are constantly measuring customer behaviors and attitudes against internal, industry-wide benchmarks (see Shopify’s blog “67 key performance indicator examples for ecommerce”). In comparison, retailers with a brick-and-mortar heritage have great difficulty getting insights from their fragmented customer data sources.
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The takeaway here is that, when retailers evaluate return on investment of initiatives to capture and integrate customer data, they must look at investment the same way their shareholders do. Reducing expenses and increasing productivity still apply but pale in comparison to more progressive techniques to measure benefit, such as:
• Increased return on information assets
• Greater shareholder value
• Improved customer knowledge
• Increased market share
CUSTOMER AWARENESS USE CASES
Now let’s turn to the use cases:
Digital ads.
These take form in both the physical (digital signage) and online or mobile worlds (Google-Facebook, store apps and ad agencies). Retailers are being served by dozens of well-vetted solutions, but their value is in proportion to the granularity of the enterprise data they leverage. If ads are delivered in the context of shopper history and preference, they drive better outcomes. The enterprise tables that will be useful in this use case are: Customer, Product, Price and Location.
Referrals.
Three forms of referrals can occur during the “Awareness” phase of the Customer Journey: Business to Business (B2B), Business to Customer (B2C) and Customer to Customer (C2C). A successful digital customer acquisition strategy demands the tracking of:
• B2B links from search engines, influencers, mall sites, brand sites.
• B2C interactions when a new customer is motivated through a business partner or introductory coupons.
• C2C when a customer is referred by another.
The enterprise tables that are most useful in tracking referral interactions are Customer, Product, and Location.
Conventional customer acquisitions and reactivation tactics.
These borrow from database marketing and take on more power and relevance in the digital age. This use case leverages information from an internal or third party information source to make a specific offer. Again, the more information about product, location, customer and price, the better.
Social media activity.
Perhaps the most productive use case is when information about social media activity uncovers some consumer need or interest about which your organization would otherwise be uninvolved or ignorant. This can lead you to initiate social media interaction that leverages information from your enterprise tables.
TAKEAWAY
To summarize, there are dozens of use cases at the intersection of Customer Awareness and Enterprise Information. The more specific and targeted you can get in your response, the more benefits you will reap. And the biggest and most important way to measure benefit is shareholder value.
