How to develop a single customer view

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Valuable customer relationships take time to develop, and failure to do this properly could mean losing out on the ability to engage with your audience and build those key relationships effectively. One way to get ahead of the game and give yourself the best opportunity to build those relationships is through the use of single customer view (SCV), also referred to as a 360-degree view. 

What is single customer view?

SCV is a holistic overview of the data an organization holds on its customers. The data is pulled together into a single place so that businesses can efficiently see a broad overview of their customers, their interests, and what drives them and their purchasing habits. This data combined enables brands to engage with customers through hyper-personalized campaigns.

To effectively build a SCV you need to capture real-time data across all your channels (and internal systems where relevant). These channels can include email, website, customer service interactions, and more. Once this data has been gathered, it must be cleaned and stored in a central location where relevant teams and tools are able to access it without the need to lean on analysts or engineers. SCV data needs to be constantly updated using customer information that is recent and relevant – if not, you’ll be sending messages, recommendations or offers to customers that push your customers away.

For example, if a customer purchased a product on your website yesterday and you offer them a discount coupon for that same product today – they’re not going to be particularly thrilled. The data can then be used to deliver highly personalized marketing campaigns which send the right message at the right time, resonate better with your customers, and help give them the confidence that you know and understand them, which leads to increased lifetime value and higher loyalty.

What are the benefits of SCV?

SCV combines customer behavior data from a variety of sources, such as email, SMS, purchase history, and more. There are many benefits of using SCV when it comes to your marketing. These include benefits such as:

  • Improved profitability through more effective customer-level marketing
  • Reduced time in consolidating data when a quick decision is needed
  • Strengthened brand loyalty by moving to a customer-centric model
  • A full overview of your customer and increased confidence that you’re sending them the most relevant information

These factors take away the guesswork when it comes to sorting your customer data, ensuring that you’re sending your customers offers relevant to them. In turn, this will boost customer engagement, as you’ll be offering them the products and services relevant to them.

We know that SCV is highly important and that your customers want to receive personalized content. Earlier this year, a report using data from the likes of Accenture, Adobe, and Econsultancy found that of customers shopping online, 74% were frustrated when web content wasn’t personalized to them, and 91% of customers said they’d be more likely to return to a brand which provided them with relevant recommendations and offers. A whopping 95% of businesses reported that their ROI increased at least three times within a year of their personalization efforts increasing.

How does Dotdigital’s SCV support you?

Dotdigital’s SCV gives you a holistic view of each and every one of your customers. You can see real-time engagement and sales data, as well as any subscriber status and preferences, making it easier to look back on what’s worked in the past, so that you can optimize your future campaigns. Since we launched our SCV functionality giving you a 360-degree view of your customers, we’ve strived to make continuous improvements. The result; today our SCV is infinitely more actionable.

Our functionality makes it easier to create and develop more targeted messages for your customers, with increased levels of personalization. You can develop a clearer understanding of your customers by looking at how they’ve interacted with previous campaigns. This shows you increased visibility and flexibility and is great for seasonal or holiday campaigns as you can see what your customers did last year, and use this information to target them better this time around.

You can even use our expanded customer view to help you identify likely product recommendations which will keep your customers engaged. You can see what customer ‘A’ purchased that customer ‘B’ will also like and can show customers products they’ll like and see your conversion rate increase.

Our SCV also makes it easy to create lookalike segments of your ideal customer, so you can develop more targeted and personalized messages for all of your customers – all with a single click. To support this, we’ve included affinity scores to show you a percentage of how confident you can be that a particular product fits the needs and desires of an individual customer. You can see the affinity score when you preview a product recommendation against a particular customer.

We’re offering all of this whilst being proud of the responsible marketing practices that we champion. And remember, Dotdigital is not only ISO 27001, ISO 27701, but also ISO 14001 certified, meaning you can rest assured you are developing out a single view of your customer in a platform that puts our customers first, encourages responsible marketing practices and will benefit your business in the long run. You can learn more about our credentials in our trust center.

To find out more about Dotdigital and how our platform can help you develop your single customer view, get in touch with us today.

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