Customer data analysis key to omnichannel business growth


Customer data analysis key to omnichannel business growth

Companies which collate and analyse customer data, both online and offline, have grown 16 per cent in the last year and are more than twice as likely to significantly exceed business goals and see strong return on investment (32 per cent versus 14 per cent), according to a global survey of 235 organisations with annual revenues of at least US$50m.

Research carried out by London Research in partnership with CDP vendor BlueVenn builds on the 2019 Customer Data Excellence report that focuses on the growing role of CDPs in the execution of effective marketing activity to meet business goals. The report finds that Covid-19 has served to increase the importance of CDPs as part of the marketing technology stack, with 78 per cent of companies reporting increased traffic to their digital properties. As a result, there has been a 24 per cent increase (51 per cent to 63 per cent) in the proportion of companies now using a CDP compared to 2019.

Despite the clear link between building a robust understanding of the customer and business success, only 9 per cent of responding companies have engineered a seamless customer experience across online and offline channels in the last 12 months. The most significant contributing factor to omnichannel marketing capabilities being held back is the apparent lack of C-suite involvement with the customer experience (CX); only 17 per cent of organisations have a dedicated CX team and ownership at executive level.

This research, which explores how companies are harnessing customer data to provide better customer experiences, finds that CDP-equipped companies are more than five times as likely to be using advanced customer data analytics to support real-time or time-based triggered messaging and personalisation (37 per cent vs. 7 per cent for non-CDP users). What’s more, they are over three times as likely to say they personalise the website/eCommerce store using offline customer variables as well as digital ones (23 per cent vs. 7 per cent).

Geographically, business adoption of customer data analysis is higher in the US than the UK (70 per cent vs. 64 per cent), demonstrating why US brands are significantly more likely to report having a full, cross-channel SCV (25 per cent vs. 16 per cent). The European market is positioned behind the US in its data analysis adoption cycle, but the research shows implementation is growing, with 29 per cent of UK respondents planning to use a CDP, compared with 20 per cent in the US.

Other key findings from the report are:

  • Organisations with clear customer data are almost twice as likely to have fully synchronised cross-channel communications that are coordinated over time and tailored to meet consumers’ needs (40 per cent vs. 24 per cent for non-CDP users)
  • More than half (56 per cent) of the companies without CDPs are still more channel-focused, which limits their ability to apply insights holistically across their marketing efforts
  • Transactional companies (D2C retail companies) are more than twice as likely as their non-transactional counterparts to have a fully customer-first approach, with a dedicated team and executive level responsibility for CX (20 per cent vs. 7 per cent)
  • While almost a third (30 per cent) of companies integrate their paid, owned and earned digital channels in a strategic fashion, only around a fifth (21 per cent) of those surveyed synchronise and coordinate both digital and offline activity across a variety of inbound channels in the context of customer acquisition

Commenting on the research findings, Steve Klin, CEO of BlueVenn, said: “When you can activate an SCV across the entire business ecosystem, it ensures that the website caters for past bookings and browsing history, call centre agents can have informed conversations, sales assistants can make great recommendations, and marketers can email those same offers and recommendations based on all past interactions. The path to omnichannel maturity is anything but straightforward, however. As this omnichannel maturity report shows, it will be some time before all organizations realise their omnichannel utopia. Companies are definitely getting better at mapping customer journeys, but only 9 per cent are delivering seamless experiences across both their online and offline channels. In large part, this is due to a cultural barrier, highlighted by the fact that only 17 per cent of organisations say they have CX representation at C-level. This failing will continue to obstruct many marketers from realising their goal of omnichannel excellence, and means that marketing systems and processes remain fragmented and channel-focused.”

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