Melissa, a leading provider of global data quality and address management solutions, announced strategies for marketers to eliminate the knowledge gap in customer data, enabling personalization at scale. With aggregated data from disparate resources, Melissa’s tools and services resolve customer identity and enhance profiles by connecting to and between marketing channels such as email, social, direct, and in-store options. Marketers gain access to a single view of the customer, allowing clear, comprehensive insight into customer behavior and preferences.

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“Consider the spectrum of distinct channels for customer interaction, such as your website, mobile app, blogs, gated content, social apps like Messenger or Twitter, live chat, phone, email, in-store, and more. When mapped effectively, marketers can analyze past behavior to better understand customer needs at each touchpoint and personalize future interactions,” said Greg Brown, vice president of global marketing, Melissa. “It’s smart, but not simple, which is why so many marketers have blind spots that ultimately drive irrelevant messaging and annoying disruptions to the buyer’s journey. Marketers of course care but often just don’t understand what their customers are saying on social media, what they’re buying or how they’re engaging in stores, on mobile devices, and online.”

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Industry research indicates only 35% of customer experience officers believe they understand their customers well, and just 23% of customers say businesses understand them as individuals and cater to their preferences. Melissa’s strategy for becoming a customer champion is based on three key considerations, addressing the knowledge gap between customer expectations and the realities of their experience with a brand:

• Get and keep data clean by verifying data at the point of entry; standardizing, linking and de-duping the data is key.
• Build stronger customer profiles by linking a full spectrum of external data. Fill in gaps in customer records with third party data such as email addresses, postal addresses, geocodes, demographics, mobile IDs, and more.
• Leverage data across channels to initiate a single customer view, choosing a unique, consistent, and static customer identifier such as a personal email address.

‘Knowing your customer’ imparts true insight that improves the customer experience and extends customer centricity. For example, marketers can uncover new customers with ‘lookalike’ attributes, such as demographics, psychographics, buying habits, preferences, even firmographics. Creating a ‘best customer’ profile can power campaigns designed to reach new prospects in specific channels. Adding a postal or email address allows multi-channel outreach, such as targeting an online customer with a direct mail campaign using a store coupon.