The COVID-19 crisis is creating a new kind of consumer—one with ever-changing preferences and new shopping behaviors. For marketers to continue engaging consumers in an efficient and effective manner, it’s vital to have a real-time view of every single prospect and customer.

Obtaining this view means adhering to the best practices for customer data management…but what exactly are those best practices?

That’s the question we’ll answer in this article.

#1 — Don’t settle for siloed data

Almost every enterprise brand silos customer data across multiple departments. Such segmentation exists because of competing priorities within organizations.

(The CIO has data warehousing needs, the CTO requires specific views for their team, and Marketing is left with unique revenue-driving needs of their own.)

Unfortunately, siloed data is broken data and makes it difficult for all the stakeholders within an organization to achieve their customer-related goals.

In 2021, make a commitment to unify your data around a customer-obsessed culture.

Connect your existing, disparate data sources from across your organization via a robust ETL and a data unification process that generates unified user records. Ensure your solution can recommend optimal, actionable engagements in real-time. And last, make sure your solution is connected to all the various paid and owned channels so that you can put your data to work.

#2 — Embrace and enrich known and anonymous data

In the non-digital world, some customers are easy to recognize. Others may require the help of an associate to identify, and yet others are completely new to your business. An integrated understanding of customers and prospects doesn’t exist. In the digital world, we gain a tremendous advantage that we can use to our advantage. Your data management strategy should be able to understand prospects and customers alike. Your engagement strategy should orchestrate subtle, yet effective experiences for all of them.

The proper identity graph will be able to stitch together multiple identifiers into the same record, even before that individual converts on your platform. In many ways, this brings acquisition and retention marketing into focus through a unified view of an individual. Further, when your data strategy includes an enrichment partner or step – at the individual level – you can garner new insights on how to create relevance in your engagement strategy. With the right technology in place, you have the opportunity to usher each individual into the gates of your brand with white-gloved service.

Managing known and anonymous customer data is step one. As important, if not more, is your ability to enrich that data. It is impossible to achieve best-in-class data management (and, therefore, impossible to deliver a best-in-class customer experience) without robust profile management and real-time profile enrichment. Reliable profile management and enrichment will make it possible for your brand to recognize customers across all channels and secure a real-time understanding of their engagement (transactions, products of interest, likelihood to take action, etc.).

#3 — Put your data to work now

Data within your organization exists for a variety of reasons – and all of them should drive revenue growth. With the above two recommendations, you can start making progress on a variety of new use cases that you can orchestrate for new and existing consumer experiences.

For example:

• Orchestrate all user experiences from one view based on your customer-obsessed marketing strategy. This brings your acquisition and retention funnels together for a consistent user experience and creates efficiencies for your valuable content & creative assets.
• Bring consistency to decision making across sales, marketing, customer success, and support teams. Each team will require different views for their tasks, but a unified understanding of the individual will drive better customer outcomes.

With the right customer data management strategy in place, you’ll be able to understand and engage with the real-time interests of consumers and take advantage of new sales opportunities as they emerge.

In summary…

Remember that the stakes will be higher than ever for marketers in 2021. The pressure to create better customer experiences will be unprecedented. That means the ability to manage, enrich, and leverage data at every touchpoint in the customer journey will likely be the difference between a successful brand and one that will struggle to survive.