This is the third post in a series about how marketers are leveraging Designer Cloud, following our first post on onboarding marketing data and our second post on marketing analytics. In this post, we discuss how Designer Cloud is being used to increase upsell opportunities through customer marketing.
The most cost-effective form of marketing is to your existing customers. With your customers, you’ve already won half the battle of marketing—they trust your brand and, presumably, like your product—which makes any marketing dollars spent on them stretch further than they would on prospective customers. Depending on the industry, acquiring a new customer is anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one. Customer marketing and customer loyalty programs are essential structures to have in place in order to retain and expand your partnership with existing customers.
A 360º View of the Customer Experience
The first step in effective customer marketing is understanding your customers. How often do they use your product? How satisfied are they with the experience? Historically, these questions were largely answered through face-to-face interactions, which made any analysis inevitably subjective. However, with today’s prevalence of cloud-based customer interactions—everything from web chats to social media to online forums—there’s more objective data points than ever to identify opportunities that will increase customer satisfaction and promote upsells. What’s known as the “360-degree customer view” is increasingly attainable given the trail of data that customers leave through every interaction with a brand.
But while that trail of data brings us closer to a customer 360º in theory, pulling all of that data into one comprehensible view is a challenge in practice. It resides in different formats, is increasingly complex, and, with the rate of customer interactions, accumulates in huge volumes. For marketers who typically rely on spreadsheet tools like Excel, attempting analysis of social media data or text files often requires technical help. Then, the inevitable delay from waiting for their data requirements can have a huge impact on the accuracy of customer behavior—customer interactions occur at a fast clip, and determining when to send out personalized offers can vary greatly from day to day, let alone in the weeks or months it could take to clean and analyze customer data.
At Alteryx, we’re starting to see a significant number of customers leverage our data engineering cloud platform to accelerate the process of preparing data for customer marketing initiatives. With the help of Designer Cloud, some of the biggest brands in the world are now more agile in how they develop personalized offers and respond to customer needs.
Customer Marketing at Leading Global Brands
One such company is a globally recognized coffee chain that wanted to be able to better analyze the activity generated through its customer loyalty cards, mobile app and in-store purchases to understand the behavior of loyal customers. Previously, the business team responsible for the success of this program wasn’t able to access or prepare customer data themselves, which forced them to make assumptions about the state of the raw data and led to delays in waiting for the right data from IT. With Designer Cloud, this coffee chain has been able to transition the data preparation work to its business users, which puts them in the driver’s seat and allows them to more quickly understand the data, prototype new ideas, and prepare the necessary data. With an overall decreased time to insight, the coffee chain now has a better understanding of which offers work best for which demographic and a higher responsiveness in pushing out the right offers.
Similarly, The Royal Bank of Scotland had amassed web chat data from customers that they knew could be used to help shape product, service, and business offerings. Using Designer Cloud, they were able to structure and analyze 100% of the data they’d gathered to understand their customers. Cutting time to market for new analytics by 70-90% led to transformational insights that substantially increased their Net Promoter Score among their 250,000 monthly customers.
Designer Cloud for Customer Marketing
The challenge of building a 360º view of customer behavior is growing, with in-store sensor data, personalized billboards and more on the horizon. But as the data grows increasingly complex, one thing will remain constant—it’s the marketers themselves who will always know what they need from the data. They are the ones best suited to transform the data for analytic use, and they should be able to prepare it themselves. I’ve been excited to see Designer Cloud used as a real solution for improving the customer experience and increasing brand loyalty.
To get a sense of the other features that make Designer Cloud, a great fit for preparing data for customer marketing initiatives, see firsthand why The Royal Bank of Scotland selected Designer Cloud. After watching, we welcome you to try out the technology yourself—sign up for our 30-day free trial.