SFMC: Clues to pick from your customer data for building stronger relationships

With consumer data becoming the world’s most valuable resource, it certainly is a great way of building stronger customer relationships. In order to be successful in the long run of business, marketers need to do a lot more than just selling products and services. Therefore, it becomes imperative to develop and nurture relationships with your customers. This is where collecting and storing detailed consumer data comes in handy. From what time an email gets opened to what items a customer purchases frequently, you can gather a lot of information about your target audience. Simply put, when you make your decisions based on data-driven marketing, you get deep insights about customer behavior, thereby helping you drive your sales and ROI. 

Now, the question is, what kind of data do you need to collect? Let’s take a brief look at the three broad categories: 

• Big-picture data

It gives you insight into demographic information along with high-level trends. Such data play a critical role in helping you see the big-picture of your target audience. You can collect such data easily through third-party companies. 

• Granular data

As the name itself suggests, granular data is the opposite of the big picture data. It gives you an idea about every individual customer while taking into account their attitude and behaviors. 

• Transactional data

Transactional data gives you detailed information about the purchases a customer has made. From the kind of products or services purchased to the frequency of the purchase and the method of payment opted for completing the purchase, you can extract it all through transactional data. 

Now you know all about the types of data. But how can you leverage these high-end databases to build a stronger customer relationship? By making extensive use of Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC). Working as an omnichannel marketing platform, SFMC helps marketers in creating impeccable campaigns while nurturing customer relationships. An important component of the Salesforce’s Customer Success Platform, SFMC helps in maintaining one to one communication with your customers while helping you facilitate a data-driven marketing strategy. Here’s how it helps in tracking and analyzing the customer data for effective communication. 

• Facilitates effective campaign creation

SFMC makes extensive use of marketing automation along with a plethora of creative tools and analytics features to create campaigns that resonate with your customer base. 

• Has robust data management facilities

The data management capabilities of Marketing Cloud are impeccable. That’s the reason top-notch brands resort to SFMC for seamless management of their data and security. It doesn’t only help marketers in real-time data analysis but also let’s them do customized reporting. 

• Takes a flexible approach

SFMC allows marketers to extract data from any source and create campaigns on any channel. And if that’s not enough, its flexible approach also lets the marketers access the key metrics along with optimizing their data-driven marketing strategy with every stage as their customers evolve. 

• Keeps an eye on customer behavior

It makes tracking customer behavior and monitoring the performance of email campaigns seamless. In fact, the facility of real-time reporting makes the analysis of data, optimization of campaign and sharing critical data with stakeholders easy. 

• Targets precise customer base

We all know how email marketing is all about sending the right message to the right customer at the right time. The ability of SFMC to leverage data and target the customer base on their attributes and behavior helps marketers hit the right chord. 

• Makes extensive use of predictive analytics

SFMC makes extensive use of predictive analytics to facilitate data-driven marketing strategies that promote engagement, conversions and click-through rates. 

All in all, Salesforce Marketing Cloud works towards discovering and understanding customers on a personal level while helping marketers create winning campaigns and nurturing customer relationships. However, to extract the benefits of SFMC for implementing a data-driven strategy, it becomes imperative to know about the various ways to find clues in customer data to foster stronger relationships with them. Here’s a quick look at the clues that you should pay attention to and also how you can leverage them for better customer engagement.

1. Email open time

It is critical to know when the majority of your subscribers are opening their emails. Once you know this, you can adjust the time of sending the email accordingly. In this context, you can make use of Einstein Send Time Optimization. It makes extensive use of AI to automatically come up with the best time of sending emails to increase customer engagement and mitigate the risk of unsubscribes. 

2. Most effective CTA

Knowing exactly which CTA worked best for you can do wonders in customer engagement and conversions. Consequently, you can make extensive use of the CTA that gives you optimum results. You can even resort to testing different words along with different button sizes and colors.

3. Subject lines with higher open rates

Subject lines can make or break your campaign. Therefore, it becomes imperative to get hold of the words in the subject lines that have motivated your subscribers to open your emails. You can use those words in different ways within your subject line and draft a message that best resonates with your customer base. 

4. Emails with highest click-through rates

Get hold of the emails that give you the best click-through results. If a particular email is doing pretty well, you can leverage it as a template. Further, you can even take some elements from it and test it with your other email sends.

5. Images and links resonating with the customers

Having a deep insight on the images and links that customers are clicking the most can help you make your email marketing strategy top-notch. Simply put, such data can act as a powerful tool to understand what the customer wants. It doesn’t only help you in knowing what your customer base is actually interested in but also lets you target them with relatable content in your future emails. This is where Einstein Content Tagging can come in handy. It has the ability to tag a plethora of accurate images within the content library with its image recognition feature, thereby helping you save on time and efforts to find the best images. 

6. Customer’s purchasing behavior

Keeping a close look at your customers past purchases and sales funnel position will help you categorize them by their buying interests and segment them accordingly.

7. Information downloaded from your site

Have a clear idea about the kind of information your customer base is downloading from your site. As a result, you would be able to create personalized offers and special discounts based on their category of interest. 

These are few of the many clues that can tell you what exactly resonates well with your customers. 

Wrap up

SFMC is all about providing robust solutions that have the ability to deliver personalized offers and communication across your entire client base. Now, since you know how to find clues within customer data and leverage it with the help of SFMC, make sure you extract its benefits to the core and see your business touch new heights of success.