Today, we all have huge amounts of data at our fingertips.  In business, this contextually rich insight can help us make business decisions in addition to ensuring our marketing messages are more relevant.  Indeed, in the age of personalisation, the ability to deliver content that is tailored to the unique interests and preferences of each individual customer is starting to be seen as a vital component of marketing rather than something that is a ‘nice to have’.

The internet can be used for many business purposes yet it can also be overwhelming, as with all this data, it can be hard to make sense of it and use the data to fuel key business decisions and functions.

This is where companies like gartner master data management can help, though there are a few top tips almost all people can start to use, for making the most of their customer data to drive their business forwards.  In this article, we are going to uncover a few of these top tips.

1. SELL MORE VIA PERSONALISATION

By effectively utilising customer data, you can make more personalised recommendations in a similar way to how Amazon recommends related products that clearly has a huge positive effect on increasing average order value and the purchase of add-on products.

If you’re looking to maximise your cross-sell and up-sell opportunities then you need to be using the rich customer data you have access to.  The challenge can be obtaining contextually relevant data, however, this can be as simple as asking people a few questions upon signing up to your mailing list – this way, you can create segmented lists and tailor your communication to these more targeted lists.

2. BUILD CUSTOMER LOYALTY

The simplicity of leveraging a customer’s date of birth to glean when there birthday is can boost customer loyalty significantly.  Unfortunately, the majority of companies use this as an opportunity to sell them something – offering a special discount can be a nice incentive, yet, a more uncommon approach is to simply send a birthday card wishing them a great year; with no promotional content.

This way, you will stand out a little more, and be viewed as a company with integrity that cares about its customers rather than seeing what it can sell its customers.

3. INFORM NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

With so much data available, you can use this to inform new product development – of course, it would be handy if you could just ask your customers some direct questions and have them fill in a questionnaire about what products they would like you to develop, but such direct insight is hard to elicit as most customers won’t be incentivised or motivated to provide this data.

Therefore, you need to look to implicit data sources to reveal contextual factors that are relevant to  creating new products. For instance, if you found that 80% of your customers used a particular search term on your website you could develop a product based around that search term.