Bristol, (UK) and Raleigh, NC (US) - Jan. 17, 2019

Park Group plc, the UK’s leading provider of prepaid gift cards, multi-retailer gift vouchers and digital rewards services, has selected the BlueVenn Marketing Hub to enhance its multi-channel marketing and real-time personalization capabilities.

• Park Group will use the advanced analytics and marketing automation capabilities of BlueVenn for targeted, multi-channel marketing.
  
  
• The platform will enable cross channel personalization by integrating email, mobile, direct mail and SMS marketing channels.

In a really interesting new research piece in November from Gartner called ‘Distilling Marketer Adoption, Views and Misperceptions of Customer Data Platforms’ it showed the results from a survey to 504 marketers, whereby 51% of respondents claimed that their CDP was their CRM system.

As the report states, “this misperception of a CDP as a CRM solution reflects a lack of appreciation for the advantages that many CDPs have over heritage CRM applications. These include scale, profile unification, segmentation and connection to marketing systems.”

As anyone familiar with Scott Brinker’s annual Marketing Technology Landscape ‘supergraphic’ will know, it can be challenging to keep up with new technologies – particularly with the proliferation of buzzwords, acronyms, and with many vendors in different categories claiming to have similar functionality.

In 2014 ‘Big Data’ was a buzzword that caught the marketing world, but has faded away to nothing more than an ambiguous term that really only defines the storage of lots of structured and unstructured data.

Last week a customer told me "you can’t serve a customer you don’t understand, and you can’t understand a customer without knowing their behavior". Now there is nothing controversial about this statement and I think that most marketing professionals would agree. But although these principles are central for marketers to provide a personalized and omnichannel customer experience, it doesn’t mean they are necessarily doing everything they can to adhere to them.

Most marketers would agree that creating targeted campaigns based on clean, deduplicated customer data is a highly effective way of improving your marketing efforts. But when you ask the average marketer what their biggest problems are, you can be sure that a lack of clean, useable data will be nearly always be at the top of their list. 

There’s no doubting that customers have more control over the buying process than ever before. Meandering through seemingly unlimited online and offline channels, perhaps even someone browsing on a mobile device or placing an order whilst physically in your store or premises, the journeys that our customers take are more complex, more varied and, plain and simply, different from the old days of linear marketing campaigns.

But how do you execute or measure a customer journey? How do you practically track a customer that could meander in any direction and lead them towards a conversion? Do campaigns still have a role to play?

BlueVenn combines the ability to create a Single Customer View with award-winning omnichannel marketing automation capabilities. This week we’ve released a series of requested updates to the campaign planner and customer journey engine. These will further improve the testing, coordination and analysis of marketing campaigns.

The prospect of becoming an omnichannel retailer certainly sounds appealing: a seamless buying experience, happy customers and increased sales. However, becoming one is easier said than done.

Customers are now more in tune than ever before with knowing what they want from a brand experience, and how they want to be engaged with. According to Accenture, 81% of consumers want brands to understand them better and know when, and when not, to approach them.

It’s clear that marketers understand this too because 77% believe real-time personalization through customer data is crucial. However, despite knowing this, only 33% of marketers admit to actually being able to truly personalize the customer experience in real-time.

Customer retention is valuable in more ways than you might initially expect. In fact, the cost of retaining a customer is up to seven times less than acquiring a new one. Moreover, repeat customers spend on average 33% more than new customers!

So whilst many companies are borderline obsessed with spending increasing amounts of time and budget dedicated to the acquisition of new customers, retaining customers is where you should really be focusing your efforts.