Most telecommunications, financial services, and insurance (“services”) companies strive to be customer centric. They want to ensure they are meeting individual customer needs and delivering personalized experiences across all channels and at every stage of their journey, from acquisition to retention and beyond.
On the road to true customer centricity, many services companies prioritize new customer acquisition as a necessary first step. Indeed, research shows that 44% of businesses are focused on customer acquisition, while only 18% focus on customer retention.
While acquiring new customers is an essential aspect of any business, overwhelming data suggests there’s a major missed opportunity if you’re not investing in the customers you already have. In fact, boosting your customer retention by just 5% can lead to profit increases ranging from 25-95%.
But how can you become more customer centric in your approach when all your data is stored in siloed systems that are not interconnected and are managed by different teams and departments?
From Disconnected Data to Customer-Centric Success: The Role of a CDP
After acquiring a new customer, you want to ensure they remain a customer. But targeting customers with irrelevant messages can negatively impact how they experience your brand (Why am I receiving irrelevant emails, advertisements, or push notifications? Do they even know who I am??).
Delivering personalized experiences that win customers over and secure their long-term loyalty means having a single view of the customer, where all data points are integrated and accessible in one unified platform, enabling a comprehensive understanding of their interests, preferences, and behaviors across all touchpoints.
A pure-play customer data platform (CDP) like BlueConic does just that. BlueConic’s platform-agnostic approach enables you to connect any source of data to the CDP to unify your customer data at the individual level, including the products they own, revenue data, on-site behavioral data, and more. Equally important to building a single customer view, BlueConic makes that data easily accessible to marketing, customer experience, and other growth-focused teams when and where they need it to improve how they engage with customers, build segments, conduct modeling and analytics, and more.
Personalize, but with a purpose
While personalization can be a powerful way to engage and retain your customers, the presence of a CDP alone does not inherently provide a clear strategic direction or purpose. Just because it’s possible to personalize every touchpoint an existing customer has with your brand doesn’t mean you should. Starting with a simple, clearly defined use case not only allows you to tailor your personalization efforts strategically, but also enables you to speed time to value, learn from what you did, and evolve from there.
For example, let’s say you want to identify opportunities for cross-selling to drive retention and loyalty. Executing cross-sell use cases in BlueConic is not necessarily complex, but links back to data availability (i.e., the more detailed behavioral insight, predictive analytics inputs, and comprehensive purchase information you have, the more sophisticated cross-sell strategies you can execute).
Here are some progressive examples of how services companies like yours can use BlueConic to execute more simplistic cross-sell use cases and gradually advance their approach over time:
Cross-Sell - Novice:
Description
Create segments of existing customers who only own one product or service you are selling.
Collect
Leverage BlueConic data collectors (Listeners) to capture behavioral data, like Interests based on Engagement. Use these to enhance your segment of “offline” customers with engagement data for a particular product they have not yet purchased. Since they are already part of your “base” segment – customers with one product – you can easily extend this with any behavioral data point you capture on site.
Activate
Create a call to action on-site to highlight the benefits of purchasing the related product
Example in Insurance: (“Get a discount when you have a home insurance AND car insurance with us”)
Example in Finance (“Get a free first month of your Credit Card with your existing bank account”)
Example in Telco (“Did you know that our internet offering can be combined with our mobile offering, and you’ll get a free month of Netflix included?)
Success Criteria:
Increased CTR of personalized message
Increased speed to market
Reduction in manual tasks
Cross-Sell - Intermediate
Description:
Personalize onsite messaging based on campaign landing via UTMs and experiment with A/B testing for on-site personalization.
Collect:
Optimize Listeners and Segments created earlier.
By adding more specific interest ranker 2.0 listeners that only captures specific keywords based on engagement or exclude specific keywords now we’ve collected more data.
By using these properties to build smarter segments using AND/OR operators
Create and discover new segments which will help to activate at broader scale.
Activate:
Send the segment created in “Novice” phase to advertising platforms to find look-alikes (increase top of funnel traffic, and thus increase the likelihood to find new customers)
Implement content strategies to mimic a campaign landing page with on-site messaging and be customer-centric in tone.
Success Criteria:
Increased performance of media campaigns
Improved operational efficiency
Reduction in manual tasks
Increased flexibility and agility
Being able to scale personalization
Cross-Sell - Advanced
Description:
Use Lifecycles to orchestrate messaging across channels
Collect:
Implement Lifecycles
Add additional touchpoints, like Customer Service for outbound messaging, In-App recommendations for cross-sell products, E-Mail, In-Store POS systems, and more.
Activate:
Personalize the customer journey by orchestrating based on behavior using various tactics, including onsite messaging, advertising, email, SMS, push notifications, and more!
Success Criteria:
Increased CLV
Increased NPS
Increased consumers with multiple products
What’s Next?
Cross-selling is just one of the infinite number of use cases you can power with the BlueConic platform. And once successfully stood up, you can even re-use certain aspects of it in the next retention use case you are going to launch, such as re-engagement campaigns, loyalty programs, referral programs, and more.
But when it gets really interesting is when you can personalize at scale across the entire customer journey, from awareness and acquisition to engagement and conversion, and finally to retention, advocacy, and loyalty. With access to unified, actionable profiles in BlueConic, the possibilities are endless!
Want to learn more? Book your demo and start unleashing growth today.
