How to utilise data from various touchpoints to deliver a personalised online customer experience

Website, online store, newsletter, hotline, chatbox, Messenger, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, job search websites, webinars, brick-and-mortar stores – the list of places where your brand meets customers is quite extensive. Each of these channels consists of so-called touchpoints, places and moments when your customers interact directly with your brand.

These touchpoints generate valuable data that can be used to improve your offer, products and services. If you are an entrepreneur, your ultimate goal should be to get more customers and keep them satisfied. Now, in order to achieve this objective, you should consider:

• Understand your customers and know their needs
• Understand how they interact with your brand and your touchpoints
• Provide them with excellent customer service and UX
• Regularly promote your services while keeping the first two points in mind

As you can see, it all starts with data. The data allows you to understand customers, know their habits and expectations, and get useful conclusions concerning their behaviour and actions. How can you benefit from that insight?

The data management issue

For starters, you have to understand what role data plays in modern marketing and sales. Suppose you run an online store. Thanks to accurate data management solutions (starting with Google Analytics, but there are many more options, we are going to talk about that in a minute), you can track:

• How many customers visit your website
• How much time they spend on it
• What products are the most interesting to them
• What actions they take, what product categories they visit
• How many customers open an account and place orders
• Which step of the purchasing process has the highest percentage of rejections
• How many of your customers are regular ones, and so on.

This insight can be used to get vital information on possible problems and issues that could cause your customers to leave your store and go elsewhere. For instance, if 7 out of 10 customers don’t finish the purchasing process, you know that something is wrong with your cart. Perhaps it’s too complicated, or there is a glitch at some point. You can use this information to improve your cart and deal with possible issues. As a result, you can retain more customers, close more deals, and eventually – grow sales.

It’s a similar story regardless of the business sector you operate in. Each website has certain business goals and you can analyse behaviour of your users to increase purchases (e-commerce), sales lead generation (B2B), registration on events, and many more elements.

What should you do with data?

Shortly put, you should use all the data you have access to in order to:

• Collect information from various touchpoints, including real-time insights
• Analyse concurrent flows and customer activities
• Cross-examine data coming from different sources
• Store it for future purposes

This way, you will be able to make the most of the information that your company processes either way.

Use data to automate specific areas of your digital activity

When it comes to marketing data, you should think about automation as well. Today, thanks to various tools and plugins, you can automate almost every part of your marketing. Marketing automation helps you save time and money on online campaigns, primarily concerning such aspects as remarketing, email marketing, personalisation, segmentation, etc. Thanks to automation, you can reach customers with the right message precisely when they need it. This way, your odds of closing a deal or placing an order grow exponentially.

Data management tools

Today, you are simply flooded with various data management tools. Let’s consider some examples. When you want to find out more about your website’s activity and traffic, you should pick Google Analytics. It’s a comprehensive (and free!) data management solution that gives you a lot of valuable information on what happens within your website. If you’re after marketing automation to create more effective, personalised campaigns targeted to appropriate target groups, you can choose Hubspot, Pardot or Marketo. If you want to analyse data about your customers, go with one of the CRM systems (e.g,: Salesforce). Do you want to manage all of your social media channels? Choose Hootsuite or NapoleonCat. And if you want to level up and start using BI (business intelligence) to improve the overall way your company works and grows, think about Sisence or PowerBI.

Each of these tools serves different purposes and may be used by different teams in the organisation, but they all have one common goal – increase marketing and sales results. When working with marketing data, it’s useful to make sure that these systems are well integrated to create one effective digital ecosystem.

Collecting data concerning user behaviour in different channels and touchpoints is much easier when you leverage a digital experience platform instead of a typical CMS platform, which becomes outdated these days.

The role of DXPs in marketing data management

Digital experience platforms are frequently referred to as advanced content management systems (CMS). However, don’t be misled here. Although it’s true, and the main purpose of a DXP is to improve content management in your company, that’s just the beginning of what these platforms are capable of. DXPs improve communication through different channels and touchpoints and help collect data concerning user behaviour from these touchpoints.

Furthermore, DXPs provide consistent content distribution, allowing for effortless management across different channels and touchpoints. In other words, when you use a DXP, you have access to one comprehensive source of data with all the variables in order.

DXPs, when properly integrated with CRMs and marketing automation tools, allow you to build one comprehensive digital ecosystem where user behaviour data can be combined with customer and marketing data. As a result, you end up with an all-in-one data management platform that allows you to optimize efforts and costs around marketing activities, at the same time significantly increasing conversions and generating business in an inbound way.

With digital experience platforms, you have a straightforward way to manage:

• All the digital touchpoints (including web, social media, mobile, AR, IoT, and others)
• Your company’s digital products (CMS, e-commerce platforms, intranet)
• Customer data

Secondly, thanks to so-called smart integrations, you can integrate your DXP platform with almost any plugin, feature and external app you use to manage your company’s campaigns and activity. DXP have whatever it takes to effectively manage all the content, communication channels, and new technologies in your company, including big data, cloud computing, digital learning platforms, wearables and web/mobile apps. And the list goes on and on.

Getting to the point: Use data from various touchpoints and improve CX

So, how should we answer the title question? How can you utilise data from various touchpoints to deliver a personalised online customer experience? The answer consists of four critical elements:

1. Organise data management in your company in order to get all the information possible concerning your customers and their activity
2. Use traffic analysis tools to find bottlenecks and places with highest users drop-out to increase conversion
3. Connect your web platform with CRM and marketing automation tools to bundle data about visitors, your contacts (clients, marketing leads) and marketing campaigns
4. Consider modern architecture of your web platform to leverage DxPs, in order to ease the integrations with several touchpoints and pulling their data towards CRM and MA systems

And if you want to know more about DXPs, we have two interesting articles for you. We warmly invite you to read them! Surely, they will allow you to wrap your head around efficient content and data management:

• DXP – a must-have in every modern company
• Streamlining communication and marketing in an international organisation through a CMS

And if you need any help with data and content management in your company, the NoA Ignite Team is at your service. Just drop us a line, and tell us how we can help.