In a pre-GDPR world having a healthy number of contacts in your marketing database was the norm. However, when GDPR came along many businesses went into a full-blown panic. The worry was that GDPR was going to remove their legal basis to contact their existing and potential customers.
There was a lot of noise around GDPR before it came into force, you may remember the stream of updated privacy policy emails, but since then less has been said about the seemingly controversial law. Read more about GDPR laws and make sure your business is compliant.
How GDRP Changed the rules of engagement
Essentially, GDPR changed the rules for how we can engage with customers, but it wasn’t quite the Data Armageddon that some had cautioned. In fact, the new data protection laws present an opportunity for those looking to engage better with their customers.
One of the most common struggles when it comes to managing large databases is exactly that; they’re too large. It becomes extremely difficult to understand your customers on a personal level and cut through the noise. The key here is reducing the size of your database but preserving the quality contacts, those that genuinely engage with your business for example. By using engagement as a metric, you can begin to understand your data and therefore your customers better.
Quality data, not quantity
A customer that invokes their right to be deleted or opts out of marketing communications, was unlikely to be a good customer to begin with. In essence you haven’t lost anything, in fact they might have helped you tidy up your data.
The ideal scenario is to be able to take a holistic view of your customers’ touch-points throughout the buyers journey so you can really begin to understand the value they bring to your business. Channels like email still play an important role when it comes to engaging with your customers. But you need to be thinking about personalised, targeted and automated campaigns, as opposed to blanket mailshot campaigns.
Using data to develop a deeper understanding of your customers
With a smaller database to deal with you can begin to dig into the data and have more one-to-one time with your customers. A great example of this is the idea of using the ‘jobs to be done’ framework for creating marketing personas. This personal contact with customers will not only strengthen relationships but help give you a clearer idea of who your customers really are.
Understanding your customers isn’t just about face to face contact though, it’s about being able to see through the noise of a large database and find the key touch-points within genuine customer journeys.
The future of Customer Engagement
According to David Schwarz’s (former SrVP of Global Ecommerce at Carrefour Group) recent talk at The Freshworks Experience Roadshow the future of customer engagement is likely to be defined as much by an ageing population and their relationship with technology as it is by the technology itself.
Schwarz went on to define customer engagement:
“It’s about how easy you make it for your customers to do business with you.”
Businesses then need to be able to take a far more personalised approach to engage with these users and use data to develop deeper relationships with them.
If you want more advice on how you can leverage customer data to form engaging relationships, contact the Innovation Visual team.
