By Tim Watson and Nick Dennis

It is more and more important for online marketers to recognize customers as individuals and build one-to-one relationships with them. Marketers need to leverage all of the available tools to ensure they are offering personalized, relevant content to the right segment of their customer base. It’s not frequent emails that are an issue for consumers – it’s emails that hold no value to the consumer that cause fatigue, frustration and reflect negatively on a brand. Customer intelligence can be used to maintain the volume of email communication whilst improving the value in each communication.

To be successful, marketers need to send the right message to the right customer. Short of actually conversing with each individual, the best way to understand the customer and to better identify who is the best target and what are the most appropriate messages is to look at previous behavior. Gathering and analyzing data on these behaviors – what emails they opened, what they bought, what they shared – gives us Customer Intelligence. And with Customer Intelligence, we can increase the value of each communication. We can create more exact target segments, craft more successful marketing strategies and build stronger customer relationships.

For its low cost and high ROI, email marketing continues to be an important tool. Marketers understand the importance of relevance, yet many email campaigns are created with little or no segmentation, simply because they find it too hard to implement or lack the resources for proper data analysis. This is where Customer Intelligence solutions can be of immense benefit. An effective Customer Intelligence solution assists marketers by:

• Facilitating insights by enabling aggregation and visualization of transactional and email data in a digital ‘single customer view’;

• Offering fast, easy-to-use ‘train of thought’ analysis without burdening IT resources;

• Enabling the creation of highly-targeted segments for your campaigns by cross referencing large amounts of customer data based on purchase behavior, spend amount, product preference, recent purchases, and digital engagement.

Here are some scenarios that demonstrate how marketers can leverage customer intelligence:

1. Who needs a “Nudge?”

The best use of marketing spend is to focus on the customers of the highest potential value. It would be inefficient to constantly appeal to a base of consistent purchasers with significant discount offers. But what about that one customer who made a single purchase and hasn’t bought again within the expected time frame. With a good Customer Intelligence tool, the marketer can quickly and easily identify this customer and can deliver a “nudge” with the discount offer.

2. Who buys High and Who buys Low?

It’s rare that an economy car owner would suddenly run out and buy a top-of-the-line luxury sedan. And vice-versa. That general theme remains true throughout consumer behavior. Marketers should identify which of their customers make purchases at all points of the spectrum. To market a low-end product to a high-end buyer might actually encourage a lucrative customer to spend less. To market a high-end item to a lower-end buyer might be alienate them altogether. With good Customer Intelligence, marketers can tell who’s who and deliver range that’s just right.

3. Who Wants to Read about Bikinis when they’re Shopping for Down Parkas?

80% or more of all marketing emails go unopened. Why? Most marketers just send details of all offers to all customers. Customer Intelligence gives the opportunity to customize the offer according to the previous click, open and purchase behavior of each individual. Marketers can get an understanding of which offers the customer is likely to pay attention to and deliver a message that statistically has a better chance of interesting them. With this kind of segmentation, campaign subject lines can be clearer, more specific, and more appealing, lending to a higher open, click-through and purchase rate.

Leveraging customer intelligence is one of the most powerful ways for marketers deliver truly relevant, personalized, and timely messages for cross-sell, up-sell, reactivation and retention. Not only does this lead to increased responses and conversions, but can also maximize brand impact, and online ROI.

About the authors

Tim Watson, UK operations director at Emailvision, is a member of the Email Council of the Direct Marketing Association in the UK and an expert on best practices for email and digital marketing. As a regular contributor to the industry dialogue, Tim shares knowledge on how to achieve results by putting data and measurement at the heart of email and social marketing.

Nick Dennis is Customer Intelligence Guru and Pre-sales Manager at Emailvision. Formerly the Principal Consultant at smartFOCUS, Nick Dennis has created high value-added customer intelligence solutions for some of the world’s best-known brands.