The role of customer marketing is evolving rapidly. Increasingly, business leaders are looking to marketers to extract more and more customer insights to inform wider business strategies – from customer experience initiatives to promotion and markdown allocation decisions, and even ESG policies.

Whilst this shift is one customer marketeers have been waiting for, many know that to provide those valuable insights they first need to fix shaky customer data foundations. Not only will stronger foundations make leveraging data for the wider business easier, it will help marketers drive customer retention. Quickly understanding and reacting to brand interactions, and easily anticipating behaviours, is fundamental to enabling effective personalisation that bolsters retention.

Yet, in order to uncover and leverage insights, investment in building strong customer data foundations is critical. As such, here’s where marketers must focus their attention.

Easy access to data

Our recent research revealed that, despite collecting customer data, the majority of marketing teams struggle to access it. Only 21% of participants strongly agreed that they could easily access and analyse customer data when they needed it. As long as this continues, marketing teams will struggle to access the insights required to drive retention, as well as inform wider business strategies.

Easing access to customer data requires the right technology, processes, and training. It’s important that customer marketers prioritise technology solutions that integrate real-time insights from all data sources, from website analytics to social media channels and offline interactions, into a single customer view (SCV). Then, implementing streamlined data retrieval processes through predefined queries and customisable reporting templates can help ease access further. Additionally, providing training and support to marketing teams on using these tools and implementing effective processes can ensure proficiency and encourage widespread adoption.

Improving reporting tools

As an important strand of this renovation, marketing teams will need to reconsider the reporting tools that they use. Their ability to extract insights is as important as the data itself when personalising campaigns and informing wider business strategies. But pressure on analysts, data teams, and marketing budgets mean that marketing teams will need to become more self-sufficient. They’ll need to find ways of performing their own analysis and optimisation.

Self-serve reporting and analytics tools will, therefore, become more popular in 2024. This will improve marketing teams’ agility by allowing them to respond quickly to customer behaviour. These tools will also pave the way toward a true data democracy, which is one of the cornerstones of a customer-first strategy and a crucial step in the marketing measurement revolution.

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Enhancing loyalty programmes

A loyalty programme is also an important element of any customer data strategy. Yes, loyalty programmes can help to retain customers by offering incentives tailored to individual customers. But the real treasure is in the personal data they allow marketers to harvest. They can allow businesses to know exactly which customers are buying what, and when – no matter what form of payment they use.

The information obtained through loyalty programmes can, in theory, facilitate the level of hyper-personalisation that marketing teams are seeking to achieve. But, to make use of it with the resources available to them, marketing teams will need to embrace one of the newer tools at their disposal…

Embracing AI

Data organisation, reporting tools, and loyalty programmes are all foundational elements of customer marketing, and must be the focus for achieving strong data foundations. But to get the most out of their data in 2024, marketing teams will need to integrate generative AI into their operations.

AI will arguably be most useful to marketing teams in their efforts to enable personalisation at scale. Our research revealed that half of senior customer marketing professionals would describe their level of personalisation as ‘unsophisticated’. This leads to that generic marketing copy we receive often as customers, personalised with nothing but our name.

Consumers are so overwhelmed with commercial communications today that only the best, most personal messages offering the right products at the right times will connect with them. Our research shows that personalising recommendations can increase customers’ basket sizes by at least 20% – a winning advantage in the current economic climate.

Up until now, personalisation at scale has been impossible for most businesses due to the required time investment. But for the first time, AI could help marketing teams analyse their data to anticipate customer behaviour, enabling a rapid response. In combination with analytical software, generative AI tools could then serve up hyper-personalised content to consumers based on their preferences, purchase history, and the current context, as well as all the other first-party data. It will be a game changer.

2024 could be the year when marketing teams start using customer data to inform wider business decisions, and finally enable personalisation at scale, which will be critical to driving retention. They must recognise the need to fix the foundations of their strategies, as well as embrace the most advanced tools available to them. Their approach to data – how they access it, organise it, and use it – will determine the outcome.

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