Transforming Customer Data into Customer Journeys

Your customers are interacting with you across many avenues — from Twitter and Facebook, to emails, texting, and the web. And all along the way, you’re collecting valuable information about them, and building extensive customer profiles with preferences, purchase history, and even personal details like birthdays or anniversaries. But how well are you using this information to build your customer relationships? Your customers want to be treated like unique individuals — and one size fits all messages are not the most effective way to engage with your customers.

It’s more important than ever to develop real relationships with your customers, and to do that, you have to be able to leverage all of that customer information to personalize every interaction you have with your customer. Chances are you have much of your customer information gathered neatly for the sales team. But how well is the rest of your organization utilizing that gold mine of customer data? By capturing your customer information, you’ve already done the heavy lifting. Now, you just need to unify it with all of your customer interactions.

The convenience of a single view of the customer provides you with a holistic view of information, so everyone in your organization can see everything they need to know about the customer, how they are reacting to marketing campaigns, what products they own, service interactions, and more —That is the foundation to driving a customer journey.

You need to personalize every interaction by leveraging that customer data in your digital marketing campaigns. This is the beginning of a relationship. It shows your customers you understand their interests and needs and you’re not just throwing a big net out there to see how many fish you can catch. Based on how a customer is engaging with you, you have the opportunity to lead them on the journey and lead them to decision points or events that you have planned. Based on your understanding of a customer, you can build future plans on how to continue to engage with them, and you can personalize every message to their specific interests or needs.

The more ways your customers are engaging with you, the stronger your relationship is, and the more loyal they become. By transforming what you know about your customers into a journey that is specific to them, you are more apt to keep them as long-term customers, or perhaps even advocates that talk to others about your brand. And the only way you can do that is if you’re leveraging customer data in your digital marketing campaigns to personalize every interaction you have with your customers

This post originally appeared on the Salesforce Blog. Written by FEBRUARY 10, 201 5Karalee Slayto