Concepts such as CRM, Lifetime Value , Return on Customer or customer loyalty , revolve around this idea.
While it is true that marketing professionals greatly value customer loyalty and retention strategies , it is also true that many of the reference companies in their respective industries lack a decisive commitment in this field. And not only that, but a poor design and implementation of relational strategies produce results below the expectations placed on those same strategies. Two surveys have recently been published aimed at marketing professionals in the United States around the idea of customer retention . The first of these hotmail email list was carried out in March 2012 by Acxiom, a marketing technology and services provider, and Loyalty 360, an association that brings together professionals in relational marketing in the US. The main conclusions reached were: – Only 49% of the executives surveyed said they knew who their most loyal customers were . – Although the vast majority of respondents (84.5%) said they carried out marketing strategies to retain their customers, only half considered these strategies beneficial for their company. – The main reasons explaining the poor collection of customer data were budget limitations (52%), lack of IT support (49%), and lack of adequate tools (48%). The second survey was carried out by Retail Systems Research, and it asked Retail Marketing professionals about the level of development of relational and loyalty strategies in their organizations. The most significant data from the survey are that – 51% of respondents believe that customer retention is becoming more difficult and will therefore demand more from loyalty strategies. – Only 56% of respondents believe that their company has identified and knows its best customers .
– 60% of the professionals surveyed from companies with sales growth of more than 5% per year consider that a better understanding of the user, based on adequate data collection, contributes positively to the company's results. However, this fact is accepted by 44% of the respondents from companies with sales growth of less than 5% per year.
In two parallel studies, IDC and Mashable predict that the amount of manageable data in the world will double every year.
It seems clear that companies capable of collecting, hosting, processing, analyzing and making decisions based on data will gain a significant competitive advantage over their competitors.
Indicative data on what interests a user, what channels of relationship with brands they prefer, when and through what devices they access the media, or what advertising formats provide the best customers, are a small sample of the multiplicity of data available to marketing professionals.
Knowing how to process, analyze and interpret it in order to better understand the consumer is the great marketing challenge of our time.
