Hyper-Personalization through Meaningful Data can Augment Your Sales and Marketing ROI

Author: Chirag Shivalker

The drastic shift in traditional business paradigm has made the marketplace extremely aggressive, in turn making the role of meaningful and updated data more powerful and hard to ignore. Since, the old-school marketing is swiftly getting replaced by more sophisticated forms; the landscape has turned more unfavorable and challenging.

While, modern-day marketers have become more reliant on accurate and real-time data processing for those split-second decisions; some of the old methods of guesswork and approximation have found a permanent place in trash bins.

Furthermore, the (high) barriers between sales and marketing are also evaporating quickly. Since, the boundaries are blurring and close collaborations have become a norm, seamless sharing of clutter-free, insightful and timely data needs to fall in place.

Owing to such extreme data-driven scenarios, increasing number of marketing and sales people are inclined towards agile and comprehensive data processing solutions.

Sales meet marketing

Sales and marketing has always been considered as two distinctive units. Distinguished not just by the nature of their tasks, but also by time, marketing department lays an emphasis on educating consumers about the brands/product. On other hand, the responsibility of closing and finalizing a deal solely lies with the sales department. However; even with these differences, there lies a common thread; their contribution to business growth and high profit margins cannot be overlooked.

Data revolution is here

Data has transformed the way leads are generated and a deal is closed as it provides ample insights allowing the marketers to respond accurately and quickly to the varying consumer behavior/preferences.

Needless to say, this automatically reduces the usual ‘time-delays’ between marketing and sales activity. A perfect alignment between sales and marketing, therefore; becomes an absolute necessity to successfully achieve business goals.

Does personalized marketing really counts?

Marketing becomes effective and more impactful when messages are directed to a targeted group of customers. Thanks to the massive volume of data gathered from various resources, marketers are now able to know their customers – both existing as well as prospective, in more intimate manner than before. Hyper-personalization works on the same principle, but on much larger scale, it is an evolved form of ‘regular’ personalization, where the former heavily relies on updated data.

Data processing helps the marketers to easily and quickly pool data, thus acquiring a panoramic perspective about the consumers and their brand position in the market.

This data, moreover, helps with gaining in-depth insights and see where a large of customers prefer to engage. Based on this, well-drafted content/messages can be floated among the targeted groups. This, eventually strike the right tone at the perfect moment.

The core message, here, is that the businesses actively listen, and are all ready to respond immediately and accurately. For that what matters the most is data, the one collected from different social media platforms and from other support & website analytics, which plays a pivotal role to results.

Data: The lost link

A clean CRM is indeed a boon to any business! CRM holds a huge cache of accurate and updated data which, helps every department, in one or the other way.

Since, departments are becoming dependent on data, CRM has found a key position in almost each organization. Relying on data to take sales and marketing decisions in real-time, specifically for activities like hyper-personalization needs thorough scrutiny at any given moment.

If any bad, dirty, outdated, redundant or unreliable data goes unnoticed, it leads to a pre-mature death of hyper-personalization. It becomes next to impossible to spread right message, if campaigns are based on such incorrect information. Further; bringing an alignment between sales and marketing activities, due to data challenges, gets all the more difficult.

Augmenting sales and marketing ROI

A dedicated focus on business data is one of the means that eventually improves the ROI. Targeting an already existing group of consumers will positively impact the ROI.

This, itself proves how critical data is in the entire process. Moreover, delving more into accurate data within the CRM, makes it possible to pass right message to the right kind of audience.

Hyper-personalization enables tracking the right audience across various social channels, websites and even within retail stores. This, thus provide, enormous insights into what the consumers’ actually want.

Based on this information, marketers can then increase expenditure per customer, and engage them to make repeat purchases. This is much cheaper as compared to converting new consumers. A dedicated loyalty program, thus, boosts the engagement.

Even for fresh leads, sales and marketing are able to combine their efforts to leverage data more effectively. This may imply:

  • Use of a common data analytics tool or marketing platform where CRM is integrated.
  • Sharing important terminologies across departments, to have a mutual agreement for baseline measurements.
  • Development of shared KPIs which take combined sales and marketing goals into consideration.
  • Wherever data quality is not up to the mark, creating a positive culture in every department becomes important. It should not remain isolated to just marketing and sales departments.
  • Providing sales and marketing a voice at the boardrooms, so that data quality gets due consideration with appropriate investment.

    • Time for data revolution

    Majority of businesses view data quality as an unclear thing, while some feel they require improvements, however; it does not find a place in the budget priority. Now that sales and marketing have become data dependent, it has resulted into an urgent and mandatory requirement for quality maintenance. The need to have quality data gets reinforced with the rise of hyper-personalization.