Just two decades ago, the notion of a "customer journey" was limited to how a customer traversed the aisles of retail stores. The path to conversion and the checkout counter was short, straight, and narrow. A customer saw a mass-media advertisement for a product and went to a local store to buy it.
The Internet, of course, changed all that. Today's plethora of online, mobile, and social channels has created an often circuitous path-to-purchase as consumers use a variety of channels to research, explore, connect, and buy.
How can marketers keep up with this quick-shifting, multiscreen, channel-hopping shopper? Knowing customers in a single channel is no longer good enough. Knowing and recognizing your customers at every point of interaction is a must.
To see true, one-on-one marketing success, marketers must develop a full, holistic view of their customers that leads to a rich bounty of insights.
Marketers know this cross-channel perspective goes hand in hand with the business benefits that come from a broad and deep understanding of the customer journey. Nine in 10 marketers rank cross-channel identity and a unified customer view as critical to helping them to meet their marketing goals, according to Signal's recent study, "Preparing for Cross-Channel Success: Solving the Identify Puzzle."
Here are four important ways that cross-channel identity helps marketers drive business benefits to boost the bottom line.
1. A cross-channel identity is the key to truly knowing your customers
Consumers expect the brands they buy from to provide a seamless experience from start to finish, no matter which or how many channels they choose. Cross-channel identity solutions can help unlock the deep customer understanding—of behavior, channel choice, and communication preferences—required to provide the frictionless exploration that consumers want. Because of the latest cross-channel technologies, you can use your own first-party data to create deep and rich profiles of your customers to understand their individual journeys and deliver optimal experiences across all touchpoints.
2. It will unleash the next big leap in marketing ROI
For two decades, marketers have invested heavily in every corner of the digital space. They have pushed the envelope with new social media tools, attention-getting interactive ads, mobile apps, and other innovations.
Unfortunately, though, single channel optimization can only get you so far.
Marketers are rapidly realizing there's little to be gained working on a silo-by-silo basis, so they have turned their attention to connecting customer signals and interactions across devices and channels to create the next large gain in marketing ROI. By resolving cross-channel identity to uncover unprecedented insights at the customer level, brands can be more efficient, judicious, and productive in targeting their in-market customers.