The customer is the single most important asset in any organization. So why is marketing strategy often so disconnected from customer experience?
An effective customer strategy leverages a data-driven approach to understanding the opportunity within your customer base to drive marketing and business outcomes. It starts with identifying opportunities in your customer portfolio, aligning your marketing investments, and informing meaningful, differentiated customer experiences that lead to long-term value.
We help you gain a unique comprehension of the total customer value that leads to incremental gains for your brand. And, we combine that with a methodical approach to business transformation that supports the people, processes, and technologies required to embrace today’s digital consumer economy.
Among eight customer database and engagement agencies, Merkle is top ranked in the Strategy category and the Analytics Services criterion.
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Strategy DevelopmentThere are five steps to customer strategy development:
- What does your success look like and what are the constraints?
- What is your business situation and who is the “winnable” market?
- Where is your opportunity for success, and how do you best segment to align with success?
- How does your marketing plan capture customer opportunities?
- How do you activate against your marketing plan?
Customer strategy is defined by the application of data and analytics within each step of the process.
We bring you deep, industry-tested experience in banking, wealth management, insurance, health insurance, health systems, pharmaceuticals, non-profit, retail and consumer goods in combination with a proven history in creating and adopting customer centricity across the business.
As digital channels and new measurements advance, more data is available to generate insight, but organizations are struggling to apply this insight and quickly establish a succinct customer strategy.
We take an outside-in approach to helping you create your customer strategy plan. We’ll work together to assess the full lifecycle customer experience — moments of truth and pain points, marketplace trends, competitive insights, customer behaviors and awareness across segments, channels, traditional media and social network influences.
You'll get our knowledge of leading practices, benchmarks, and case history to identify opportunities that make sense for your business. From plan inception through execution and measurement, we’re with you through the process — aligning your KPIs and making recommendations for ongoing improvement.
Once your marketing plan is in place, our customer-centric transformation team works with you to execute the vision.
We help you set your performance standard with scientifically designed customer journeys
Understanding your audience boils down to two main components — the behaviors of the customer and the motivations that drive those behaviors. Behaviors are captured by customers every day, primarily through digital exhaust. Engagement, purchase, search, browse — these are all examples of behavioral clues that our customers leave us every day.
Achieve the following with a data-driven audience strategy:
- Align: Create a comprehensive, thoughtfully designed customer journey that is based on behaviors and motivations
- Impact: Customers notice messaging that hits on what they care about most.
- Performance: Experiences built on motivations have shown up to 80% improvement over controls.
- Innovation: Tap into a neglected field of psychology and big data to create customer journeys that resonate.
