Integrate around customers and their preferences: 6 tips

A 360° view of customers is essential for the modern marketer. According to Stefaan Claes,  International CRM & Digital Marketing Director at Kinepolis, the customer is in the driving seat and he doesn’t intend leaving it.

Moreover, Stefaan says, the customer has become ‘mature’ and recognizes (the games of) marketing. People more than ever want honesty, transparency and authenticity. However, most of all they seek relevance.

The importance of a single customer view

Relevance, Stefaan says, is earned through, among others, personalization, depending on customer preferences. Permission is not enough anymore. What matters most is understanding the preferences of your customers and acting upon them by being relevant.

This is impossible without knowing your customers, regardless of interactions. A 360° view of customers is essentials and a single-channel approach, for instance via email, does not suffice anymore. Integrate around customers and their preferences.

At Kinepolis, this vision is implemented throughout the whole marketing strategy as you can read in this Kinepolis success story.

In a recent (Dutch) collaborative white paper, Stefaan offers some tips.

Six customer-centric tips

1. Put customer experiences first. Make sure you can measure them, using an index or other reports. Use methods such as NPS (Net Promoter Score).
2. Ask your customers what they think. They appreciate being involved and asked about their opinion, when properly done.
3. Let relevance be your obsession. Personalization, segmentation, relevant content and other ways to be as preference-driven as possible are a must.
4. Think and work across and beyond individual channels. It’s important to drive personalization, segmentation and automation as far as possible. Your goal is to provide customer experiences, whether it’s in e-mail, on your website, in mobile apps, on social media or any other channel where contact moments occur.
5. Couple all sales, CRM, marketing and other data systems to obtain a single customer view.
6. Evolve, experiment and keep improving. Customer-centricity, relevance and the customer experience are key in these processes of continuous innovation and improvement.

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Customer understanding is the secret of effective marketing. You build it through customer research, interactions, data capture and behavioral analysis. Selligent taps into all your current data sources to give you a central 360° customer view. Read more.