FEATURE


Single Customer View – moving into three dimensions By Andy Wood, Chairman Go Inspire Insight


Back in the pre-digital world, understanding a customer amounted to keeping a record of where they lived, what their typical purchases were, their family structure, their household geodemographics, their in-store and mail-order transactions, then maybe tailoring contact and campaigns across a couple of channels such as direct mail and telephone. Direct marketing was a science of the likely behaviour of groups of similar customers. How times have changed. Group marketing has now given way


to individualised marketing – or at least the expectation that offers are relevant to the individual customer. Channels and potential contact points have proliferated and the market for consumer attention is very saturated. We now let brands into our lives via a wide range of channels – mobile, email and affiliate email, interactive TV, cash-back schemes, telephone, SMS, Instant


Messaging, display, pay-per-click and social media advertising and so on. Delivering targeted messages and trying to attract the customer’s attention with top-class creative is no longer enough to stand out from the crowds, while personalisation is the new frontier. By the same token, marketers now have to examine, and harness, a vast range of behavioural information on customers – derived from all these channels. Sheer quantity of data does not make the marketer’s life


easier but brings its own set of challenges. Just think of email: even when a digital database is deduplicated, this is not the end of the story as many people have more than one email, share email addresses, or provide inactive ones. Reports show that the average person has just under two email accounts (1.86)1


another is used for items that are considered ‘junk’. Far too many businesses are unable to tell whether they are regularly contacting a customer on an email address that is not checked and therefore effectively wasting a communication. Add to this that around one in ten consumers will open multiple accounts with a single online retailer and the picture becomes yet more cloudy. It is important to remember that there are numerous other


touchpoints that need to be integrated and analysed to identify the most effective mix for that particular client, and it becomes clear that integrating this information is a science in its own right. Combining a physical name and address with browsing history, abandoned baskets, ecommerce and store transactions, email data and mobile data, even data from WiFi within stores is no longer a nice-to-have. It is becoming the norm of best practice for understanding customers, keeping their custom, and delighting them to the extent that they want to purchase more (and higher value) products, increasing their life time value to the company. The phrase, Single Customer View (SCV), has been around


10 www.isopps.com


and that only one of these is regularly checked, while


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