STRATEGY
Get a competitive edge so you can make better customer connections.
Through the customer relationship management system, the enterprise marketing management system, e-commerce interactions, and transactions on other channels, a wealth of information is collected from customers during the normal course of business operations.
Building Strategy with Customer Insights
Information like transaction patterns, purchase history, web behavior, communication channel preferences, service concerns and sales and marketing interactions are all captured in your normal course of operations, but can you fully understand and utilize it to build marketing strategy? Most organizations use only a small portion of this when marketing to customers simply because they lack access to the full range of customer info they need to see, plan, and act.
Formulate a customer information strategy
Pinpoint’s Marketing Technology Strategy Services help you formulate a customer information strategy that enables more effective marketing, sales and service, and is aligned with your overall business strategy and objectives. This service addresses key questions such as:
- What information from around the enterprise is most important to marketers?
- How does the detailed information need to be transformed and aggregated in order to be easily interpreted and actionable?
- When is the information needed (how soon after it is collected) in order to be useful for marketing purposes?
Our Strategy Services include a road-map/plan for data, technology and process improvements that implement your customer information strategy using an incremental, prioritized approach. Each increment of the plan is designed to produce measurable marketing and financial results.
Pinpoint’s Marketing Software Strategy Services include:
Customer Information Strategy
Marketing Technology Strategy
Marketing Technology Planning
Customer Information Strategy
Tune In to Customer Needs
Individuals and businesses today have access to virtually complete information about the marketplace of products and services of interest, and increasingly are using that access to make decisions about their purchases. To retain and grow customer relationships in this environment, organizations must be in tune with customer needs and be proactive with timely communications. One of the enablers of this is actionable customer information. Examples of questions every business must address are:
- What information about a customer is needed by the website to drive a personalized web experience?
- What do I need to do to reach customers on their mobile devices with timely and relevant messages?
- Where are the information gaps that are preventing customers from enjoying a consistent experience across all sales and marketing channels?
- What information must be made available to marketing processes in a more timely manner in order to reach each customer at the right time?
Actionable Customer Information
Pinpoint’s Customer Information Strategy Service provides answers to these and other questions so you can begin utilizing your customer information to optimize the lifetime value of your customer relationships.
Our service typically begins by understanding how you use your available customer information to drive sales, improve customer relationships and increase customer lifetime value. As elements of this process, Pinpoint works with you to:
- Establish the key marketing goals and quantitative objectives that are aligned with the overall corporate strategy, such as “reduce customer attrition from x to y”, or “achieve a cross-sell penetration of X% for a given product”
- Identify the key pieces of information required to achieve each of the goals just identified (e.g., channel preferences, transaction history, purchase history, model-derived data)
- Identify the source(s) of customer information collected around the enterprise as well as new opportunities to acquire additional data needed by the strategy
The benefits of Pinpoint’s Customer Information Strategy Service include...
- Facilitating articulation of the often implicit marketing strategy
- Identifying mismatches or gaps between available data or existing processes and the marketing goals
- Identifying areas where performance can improve relative to industry best practices around leveraging customer information
Marketing Automation Strategy
Architecting Systems to Work For You
Pinpoint’s Marketing Technology Strategy Service produces a data and application architecture that delivers timely and relevant information to your processes, customers, customer-facing employees and knowledge workers. We perform a holistic assessment of existing marketing systems and business processes against customer information needs. Then our system architects design the interconnections and modifications to existing systems, and recommend new or replacement applications where legacy applications cannot meet key requirements.
Pinpoint’s approach is to assess your existing technologies as they relate to the customer information strategy; these technologies may include a customer relationship management (CRM) system, the marketing subsystem of an ERP, the corporate website, a call-center automation system, a print production and/or traffic management application, an email-marketing support system (or outsourced service), and the customer database (or frequently, databases). It is not uncommon to discover a rich multiplicity of such “stovepiped” systems and databases, poorly integrated (if at all); and such a technology environment is literally standing in the way of realizing the organization’s marketing goals.
Pinpoint’s principal effort here is to specify the changes required in order to enable realization of the customer information strategy. This may involve: the selective replacement of some systems; upgrading and/or creating new or modified interfaces to others; and perhaps simply eliminating certain standalone databases which create more problems than they solve. Where replacement is the best option, we specify new components that help move the environment in a more “open” direction. In the data-management arena, we specify creation or modification of a customer data warehouse, conforming to a data architecture that minimizes duplication.
Pinpoint’s Marketing Automation Technology Strategy service produces “as-is” and “to-be” maps, clearly showing how the recommended technology structure will better support the desired business capabilities. The architectures created are designed to enable the consistent application of business rules across systems, functions and customer touch points.
Marketing & Customer Technology Planning
Cohesive plan to address information strategy
Too often technology improvement projects are performed in a piecemeal manner to address the business needs of individual departments, resulting in overlapping efforts, disconnected systems and data silos. Even though there may be a strong business case for a particular localized solution, the piecemeal course of action likely will produce sub-optimal results in the long term. To get the greatest yield from your investments in customer information technology, a holistic, cohesive plan is needed that addresses the cross-department customer information strategy – marketing, sales and customer service across all channels.
Pinpoint’s Marketing & Customer Technology Planning Service produces a recommended sequence of technology and process improvement projects to achieve a best-practices customer data and technology architecture that realizes your customer information strategy. Pinpoint’s offering provides a comprehensive technology plan, which lays out the complete set of projects – each with associated timelines, resource assignments and budgets – necessary to realize the technology strategy. We prioritize the projects according to the business case for each; in this way, we help you realize as great an ROI on technology investments as possible, as soon as possible.
Produce a recommended sequence
Our service includes an annual review and revision of the plan we produce, to ensure that customer information technology and process improvement investments continue to be aligned with corporate strategy and objectives.
Let’s talk about how your martech can do more for you.