In recent years, marketing automation software has transformed the ability of retailers to reach their customers at scale, across an increasing range of digital channels. But all too often this descends into a numbers game – blasting broad messages to loose customer segments. It’s doomed to fail.
We know that more relevant, timely marketing can help. But when it comes to implementing a personalised approach, businesses often stumble at the first hurdle. They have the data they need, but struggle to translate this data into insight to improve the customer experience – at scale – across their customer base.
Recent research by Econsultancy reveals that businesses know that their data structure is a barrier. In fact, only 4% of strongly agreed with the statement, âOur current data structure is an enabler for personalisationâ.
Customer personas and lifecycle stages can help
In an attempt to stay relevant, some businesses have developed customer personas to âpaint a pictureâ of their key customer types â alongside lifecycle models. These concepts have been around for a while, but when it comes to marketing automation many businesses find it tricky to put them into practical use.
It’s against this backdrop that we’re delighted to announce a key update to our HTK Horizon platform, enabling marketers to focus on each customer by putting personas and lifecycle stages at the heart of their approach. Horizon automatically identifies which persona each customer belongs to and pinpoints where they are in the lifecycle â for example whether they’re a prospect, an active customer or about to lapse.
We’re empowering businesses to use insight and automation to grow customer lifetime value. For example, by quickly understanding new customers, up-selling more effectively, or pinpointing customer who are at risk of churn.
At HTK, we’re on a mission to bring the most important information about each customer right to the surface within our HTK Horizon platform â and put it into the hands of marketers. Customer personas and lifecycle stages are a key part of this.
