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Marketers have long been talking about the importance of understanding their customers at an individual level and engaging them in a more relevant and personalized way. Gone are the days of generic marketing strategies that treat all customers the same and focus on averages; understanding your customers at a deeper level has become imperative for businesses. But what does it really mean to track and engage customers at an individual level? Does it mean knowing each of your customers by name? Knowing their birthday or what they like? Yes and no. It’s more complicated than just using a few personalization tokens. As much as adding a dynamic field for the customer’s name in an email is a step towards personalization at an individual level, it’s very far from true customer-level tracking and engagement.
Better understand your customers
By analyzing customer data at the individual level, businesses can uncover unique preferences, behaviors, and needs, allowing for highly personalized and targeted marketing strategies. This level of granularity enables businesses to build more accurate customer profiles, predict future behaviors, and tailor offerings to meet specific customer needs.
Reduce discount budget
Mass discounts and promotions can eat into a business's profits. By targeting discounts and promotions only to customers that need a nudge based on their individual behavior and preferences, businesses can reduce their discount budget while still driving sales.
Retain customers
Engaging with customers before they leave is key to customer retention. By tracking customer behavior at an individual level and identifying signs of disengagement, businesses can intervene with targeted offers or communications to re-engage customers and prevent them from churning.
Acquire better customers
By tracking your customers at an individual level, you can build better customer profiles and find your most profitable customers. You don’t buy clothes for your 2-year-old and your 10-year-old children based on the 6-year-old size. So why would you do it in marketing?
Build a more loyal customer base
Talking to customers as individuals helps create deeper brand connections. Customers who feel understood and valued are more likely to remain loyal to a brand, leading to repeat purchases and long-term relationships.
Get more… more data
The foundation of modeling customer behavior begins with data. To truly understand each customer and engage them at an individual level brands must go beyond demographics and surface-level data. Brands need to focus on collecting diverse data across touchpoints which involves gathering deep insights into customer behavior, preferences, and purchase history.
Follow them around
To build a comprehensive customer profile, brands need data across channels. Customers rarely engage with a brand in a linear way. One might like to check out the new brand collection on Instagram but will buy products based on personalized recommendations via email. Another customer might head straight to the store but then buy via a mobile app. All of these touchpoints are valuable signals that can help a brand build a holistic customer profile and understand individual purchase behavior and preferences.
Lead an (AI-powered) psychology session
What superpower should a marketer have? How about reading the minds of the customers? Well, that’s what AI is for. Just having access to data is not enough to have a deep understanding of your customers, brands should leverage AI to transform data into intelligence and insights into customer behavior, affinities, and preferences. With the help of AI, brands can analyze vast amounts of data, find patterns in customer behavior, and provide insights at a 1:1 level for a deeper understanding of each customer.
Ask a crystal ball (aka AI)
One of the key steps in customer-level engagement is modeling customer behavior to predict future actions. By analyzing past behavior and preferences, brands can predict customer propensity to take or not to take a certain action and offer personalized experiences that resonate with them. With the help of AI, brands can move from descriptive and diagnostic statistics to predictive and prescriptive insights and recommendations. As one of our data scientists once said: “I don’t need AI to tell me that my wife is mad at me, but I want AI to tell me when she’s going to get mad at me and what I should do to prevent it.”
Want to learn more ways AI can help you enhance your marketing? Read more.
Be in the moment
Customer-level engagement strategies can only reach their full potential with access to real-time data, which needs to be transformed in real time to actionable intelligence. Without real-time insights, businesses risk missing critical moments to connect with customers effectively. Knowing that your customer needs a baseball hat but sending a baseball hat offer after they’ve already bought it from a competitor likely means you lost a customer.
A crucial part of engaging your customers at an individual level is having the right tech stack that can analyze customer data, deliver predictive and prescriptive insights, and enable real-time customer marketing. Looking to optimize your tech stack? Read more on navigating the martech maze and how to build effective and connected martech ecosystems.
Modeling customer behavior and engaging them at an individual level requires a comprehensive approach that goes beyond traditional data collection methods and simple personalization tokens. By collecting diverse data, gaining deep insights into customer behavior, predicting future actions, and leveraging real-time data, brands can create personalized experiences that drive engagement and loyalty. So, why treat all customers the same when you can treat them as individuals?
Ready to move to 1:1 customer engagement? Let’s chat! Our suite of AI-native customer intelligence and activation software can help you build deeper relationships with your customers and grow a loyal customer base.
