What does the “360˚ customer view” actually mean? (part 1)

Your customers' money talks. And it's saying "I want you to be more relevant! Use more data!"

In techie marketing, I’m going to be breaking down the walls of the jargon that marketers use to discuss end goals into the tactics and understanding of how we (as techie marketers, of course!) can begin to execute on these end goals. The key to this whole thing is sifting through the fluff. When looking at how you can begin to understand your customers or prospects and what they’re going to do, you must first understand what they have already done (read: lots and lots of data). In the techie world, we call this a “relational database.” Establishing relationship points within your data will help you bring it together to actually use it.

Data on your prospect or customer can come from many different places:

• Web analytics: What he is doing on your website on web application
• Profile data: Tracking how he has interacted with previous campaigns, where he’s coming from, what size his business is, what his title is, what industry, etc.
• Previous buying behavior
• Comparative analysis: What the decisions of other people like him (similar industry, title, etc.) have done and what has worked
• Overarching knowledge: Your knowledge and understanding as a marketer what works and what doesn’t work

A CRM like Salesforce.com, Siebel, or SAP will take a monumental effort to implement. If you’re reading this and you’ve gone through migration of services, I’m sure you can relate. Integration can be painful, but the most important thing is that it is set up for success through discovery, requirements gathering, and a deep understanding of the solution by all parties involved (including marketers).

A relational database (your CRM in this case) is constructed in such a way that data moves in and out in the most efficient way possible. A well-designed relational database can maintain a couple of important things to marketers: the integrity of data and the ability to organize & store massive amounts of data that all can be read in a consistent manner. A relational database would be made up of a series of tables that house data related to one another by properties called “primary keys” and “foreign keys.”

A primary key is a unique identifier of any individual product, person, place, or thing in a database. It is identified by this primary key across the entire database.

Example: You store all of your purchases in a relational database. Because it’s different for every customer, a purchase may have any variable number of products and may reference a variable number of shipping or billing addresses. Therefore, to support this structure with a relational database, you would have a table to store orders that would relate to a table that stores n line items & product SKUs. That database was designed to ensure that no data existed in two places—that it was optimized through relationships in your data tables.

How does this relate to the 360˚ customer view?

Thinking about your customer from all sides of your business comes back to thinking of your customer as the primary key of your relational database. Every piece of data that you leverage in your marketing campaigns can be tied back to them based on what you know.

What should I use as my unique identifier or primary key? Especially when it comes to one-to-one marketing or email marketing, many companies struggle with what to do here. My answer is always that you should store a unique identifier on your subscriber and map all other unique identifiers to your own. Always try to have your own so that you can easily create integration points with all the tools in your tool belt.

How do I begin to unify all my data to create a holistic customer experience? The more data you use in your campaigns the better. A customer is always more likely to buy when an offer is relevant. By keying in on how you can establish relationships across your data tied to your customer as the primary key, trends start to come through on how to better target your customers.

The data is always there. It takes more effort to analyze it first and foremost, and then to make nimble, efficient business decisions based on data that you will soon be able to compile in your own way.

(And if the data is not there, I’ll have just the post for you next week.)