How Customer Insights Offer Opportunity for Better Brand Engagement

Infinite information cannot guarantee marketing success or higher conversion rates. However, customer insights gleaned from such data offer brands the opportunity to take a more targeted approach in translating customer data into actionable steps that drive brand engagement and sales.

An Evolving Customer Journey

Today’s consumers enjoy longer, more complex, and more exciting customer journeys than ever before. McKinsey reports that omnichannel shopping is fast becoming the norm, with 60%-70% of consumers completing purchases both in stores and online. Social media has become the virtual Fifth Avenue of window shopping, augmented by real-world purchasing power.

These developments have revealed new avenues for meeting customers wherever they are in their journey rather than limiting conversions to a single point of sale. Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) like Treasure Data’s CDP help close the gap between brands and customers by providing businesses with customer insights and delivering incentives to shoppers for continued engagement. 

Customer Insights = Opportunity

Tracking thousands of customer actions across hundreds of touchpoints requires massive processing power, which also happens to be a competitive advantage of CDPs over legacy systems. In addition, CDPs also use AI and machine learning to spot trends and patterns in millions of data points. Lastly, for the pièce de résistance: CDPs activate customer insights to target consumers in precise but personal ways at the right channel and time. Below are five ways you can use a Customer Data Platform  to unlock the opportunity that customer insights present for increasing brand awareness and sales.

1. Create a Multi-Touch Attribution Model

A CDP acts like a powerful lens equipped with both wide-angle and ultra-zoom capabilities. It not only gives you a comprehensive view of the customer journey from start to finish but also provides granular detail for each touchpoint engagement. This enables brands to create a multi-touch attribution model that exceeds the accuracy of deterministic models (e.g., first-touch, last-touch, W-shaped attribution).

Treasure Data, in particular, has developed a one-of-a-kind multi-touch attribution (MTA) model that tells marketers which channels work best for certain audiences by using deep learning and Shapley values. The Shapley values model, based on a game theory concept by economist and Nobel laureate Lloyd Shapley, employs a unique method to calculate payouts in a cooperative game. It determines which players contribute the most to winning a shared goal and assigns them a corresponding Shapley value. In the same way, Treasure Data’s MTA model calculates a Shapley value for different channels and touchpoints in a brand’s marketing mix. This helps brands and marketers identify the strongest-performing channels and allocate their marketing budgets accordingly.

The dashboard below shows a sample marketing campaign and its channels. In this example, direct website traffic earns the highest Shapley value (30% attribution), as it contributes the most toward the probability that the customer journey will end in conversion. Email and paid search follow at 27% and 16%, respectively, while affiliate traffic carries the lowest Shapley value at 5%.

Treasure Data offers the only CDP that uses this type of advanced machine learning to create customized, multi-touch attribution models for unique customers and their journeys. Users can further determine which KPIs will measure attribution before analyzing customer data.

2. Identify Omnichannel Opportunities

A CDP not only provides visibility into the customer journey but also identifies omnichannel opportunities for engagement. Marketers can use CDPs to track point-to-point purchasing patterns and determine which channels…

  • Attract a lot of traffic but few high-prospect leads
  • Convert audiences into actual leads
  • Have a long-term impact on lead generation
  • Only perform well at the end stage of a campaign

Acting on these insights allows brands to set up smart marketing triggers. Based on trends and correlations that predict the most efficacious next steps for specific channels and audience segments, these triggers adapt to customer behavior as they move across channels. A CDP is particularly useful for delivering incentives to keep audiences engaged with the right message at the right time and place.

Watch Treasure Data’s CDP in action as it identifies omnichannel opportunity and delivers timely incentives to convert a lead into a loyal customer.

Treasure Data CDP Retail Demo

3. Explore Audience Segments

With greater visibility into the customer journey and new omnichannel opportunities, marketers can explore audience segments for more actionable insights.

A CDP helps brands uncover certain traits and behaviors in audiences that can be leveraged to drive engagement. For example, a sports energy drink brand may discover that its main audience segment shows interest in auto shows, racing, and boxing. The brand can act on this customer insight opportunity by sponsoring auto racing or boxing events to encourage brand awareness.

Treasure Data helps brands create customer insights opportunities with Audience Studio, an advanced enterprise audience segmentation tool. Audience Studio uses machine learning to identify behavior patterns and common traits through Predictive Scoring. Its user-friendly dashboard provides an immediate visualization of audience characteristics and enables marketers to activate specific segments to partner marketing systems.

With Audience Studio, you can:

  • Easily create audience segments with a user-friendly interface
  • Narrow segments based on customer attributes, behaviors, and characteristics
  • View data at Parent segment, targeted segment, or individual customer profile levels
  • Identify behavior patterns or common traits in Parent segments using Predictive Scoring
  • Create customer journeys to reflect accurately where buyers are in the funnel
  • Respond to market trends and modify Parent segments as necessary
  • Activate segments through personalized marketing campaigns

Case Study: Stripe International

“Kazuki Enomoto, Stripe International’s Director of the Digital Transformation Division, said, “Demand prediction and stock optimization prevented opportunity losses, maximized sales, and improved the bottom line. And another indirect benefit is that as their work efficiency increased, staff were able to spend more time attending to the customers, which contributed to better customer experience. We received positive feedback from the store staff.”

Read the full Stripe case study here.

4. Leverage Precise Targeting

A CDP’s capacity to process and analyze millions of customer profiles does not compromise its ability to target smaller segments with laser precision.

Unlike legacy systems, CDPs can differentiate between which customer profiles are:

  • Nearest to making a purchase decision
  • Most likely to purchase within a short time–within a few weeks
  • Not interested in an immediate purchase, just browsing around
  • Just window shopping or fantasizing about a purchase

Once it identifies where customers are in their journey, the CDP decides on the best plan of action by analyzing trigger points and comparing several past steps already taken. The platform then recommends the next best steps based on previous results to keep customers engaged.

CDPs can also identify those profiles most likely to churn and suggest proactive steps toward retention. In the same way, they can reward loyal customers at the right time to improve lifetime value. With precise targeting, CDPs help marketers stretch their budgets while also ensuring the right profiles receive the right incentives.

Treasure Data enables precise targeting of smaller groups within larger audience segments as well as individual profiles. Moreover, Treasure Data can automate the next steps you take to maximize customer insights opportunities. Target segments with email marketing systems, ad platforms, marketing automation systems, CRM, cloud services, ERP, and others. See how brands can reward loyal customers with a targeted email campaign orchestrated by Treasure Data’s CDP below:

Reward Loyal Customers using a Targeted Email Campaign

5. Extend Reach With Lookalike Audiences

A CDP opens up another customer insights opportunity by extending a brand’s reach through lookalike audiences. Lookalike marketing depends largely on existing customer profiles to identify similar audience segments to target. Using its customer data foundation, a CDP looks for commonalities within a brand’s existing audience and applies these trends to build a lookalike model of new prospects.

Treasure Data’s CDP helps brands and marketers find variables that are statistically proven to contribute to conversion. Specific audience behavior that indicates high conversion propensity occurs at low frequency and can be hard to find. But using machine learning, our platform parses thousands of customer attributes and selects audience behavior signaling a high propensity for conversion. Treasure Data then helps you coordinate the targeting of these potential profiles on online platforms.

Maruti Suzuki is one of the leading brands that employed Treasure Data’s lookalike modeling to drive sales. After unifying 87 million customer data profiles, Maruti Suzuki was able to extract customer insights to locate new prospects. The company enjoyed a 200% higher CTR on advertisements through lookalike modeling.

To read the full case study, click here.

Create Customer Insights Opportunity

Treasure Data helps you transform customer intelligence into tangible results through machine learning-powered insights, cross-channel personalization, tailored customer views, and enterprise-grade security and privacy. We help you target specific audience segments and even individual profiles with timely incentives that keep the conversation–and the conversions–going.

To learn how to create customer insights opportunity for your brand, consult an expert today. Want to learn more? Request a demo, call +1.866.899.5386, or contact us for more information.