How personalization technologies are helping medical practices improve patient acquisition and retention.

The healthcare industry has become increasingly decentralized and consumer-centric, thanks to shifting patient expectations and insurance policies.

As people are taking a more active role in managing their health and wellbeing, they want their healthcare providers to do more than just making a diagnosis and writing a prescription.

Today’s savvy patients are used to receiving highly personalized services from businesses and they expect the same from their healthcare providers.

Here’s why personalization is the future of healthcare marketing:

1. Deliver a holistic patient experience

Healthcare isn’t a one-off transaction with a single seller. Patient experiences often involve interactions with multiple providers and facilities over time, as well as support for personal and emotional issues.

A personalization strategy, driven by a customer data management platform, allows healthcare providers to access all the patient data at a single location. They can gain a comprehensive understanding of each patient’s history and deliver a holistic experience that includes customized recommendations most relevant to each patient.

Not to mention, personalized interactions will help you build long-term and trusting relationships with your patients and improve the quality of care.

2. Improve patient acquisition and retention

Personalization technologies can help you acquire and retain more patients by delivering the right message in the right place at the right time to the right audience.

For example, you can send highly-targeted content to patients with specific conditions and reminders for checkups or vaccinations. This will help you stay top of mind, build trust, increase patient engagement, and get more patients to return to your practice for continuous care.


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When supported by a robust customer data management solution that provides a single customer view, your team can access each patient’s history and preferences in real time to improve efficiency and quality of care while reducing errors and frustrations.

For instance, by seeing all of a patient’s conditions and treatments in one place, you can help them better navigate their health insurance coverage. As you add value by personalizing patient interactions, you’ll also improve patient retention.

3. Increase patient satisfaction and word-of-mouth referrals

Personalization technologies help a medical team care for the patients more compassionately by developing personal relationships with them.

Such technologies also streamline the patient experience, making it more convenient and less time-consuming to visit a medical practice.

Patients will have more positive interactions with your practice, be more motivated to continue their care, and follow through with their treatments. This will lead to better outcomes and higher patient satisfaction.

Last but not least, most people still look for personal recommendations while choosing a healthcare provider. When you offer a highly personalized experience that improves treatment results and patient satisfaction, you’re more likely to get word-of-mouth referrals, which is often the best way to market your service.

How to increase the quality of your customer data for effective personalized marketing

Marketing personalization has become an indispensable strategy for retailers who aim to increase sales and improve customer loyalty through the use of targeted content and offers.

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While having the right technology is important, the foundation for implementing an effective personalization strategy is the quality of your customer data.

Without accurate information, you won’t be able to deliver targeted content in the right place at the right time to the right audience.

How to clean up your customer database for effective personalized marketing

It’s important that you regularly clean up your database and audit the sources from which you collect the information to ensure that the customer data is supporting your marketing personalization strategy:

Review web forms

If you’re generating leads by using web forms, ensure that you’re collecting relevant information that helps in targeting your audience effectively.

Consider whether you’re asking for the right kind of data at the right level of detail. Gathering too few details doesn’t allow you to effectively segment your audience while requesting too much information can cause form abandonment.

Audit data fields

Duplicate fields or repetitive information in your customer database can cause errors and confusion.

Ensure that the fields in your customer data management system are set up correctly so that data from web forms, lead generation mechanisms (from your website, social media, or messaging apps), and eCommerce platform is categorized and collated correctly to support your personalized marketing campaigns.

Refine segmentation

Audience segmentation isn’t “set it and forget it.”

Revisit the way you’re segmenting your audience periodically to ensure that it’s supporting your overall marketing strategy.

You can also enhance audience segmentation with the information you gather during the user-interaction sessions with your brand. This includes the products they’re interested in based on their browsing behavior and the questions they ask during a live chat session.

Set up single customer view

To effectively collect and utilize all the available customer data, you need to create a 360-degree customer profile so that the information can be stored in and accessed from a centralized location.

A single customer view allows you to gather relevant customer data and effectively leverage the information to deliver a customer-centric experience through personalization.

Review analytics

There are many different ways to deliver personalized content and offers. Are you leveraging the right customer data to form your strategy?

The best way to find out is to review your analytics and see if your personalization strategy has been effective in driving traffic and generating sales.

If the metrics aren’t meeting your expectations, you’ll have to adjust and test your personalization rules to ensure that you’re using your customer data in a way that helps deliver the most effective content and offers.

Build a solid foundation with a robust customer data management system

After you put in the work to clean up your customer data, ensure that it’s managed and utilized in a way that will help you implement personalization marketing effectively.

A robust customer data management system has become indispensable for marketers who want to use personalization to increase the effectiveness of their omnichannel marketing initiatives.

Request a demo to see how our customer data management system can help you derive customer intelligence and actionable insights so you can make data-driven business decisions and achieve your marketing goals.

 

It’s a new year of retail technology and advancements in artificial intelligence are shaping customer expectations for personalization. In fact, 10 percent of purchasing decisions will be guided by intelligence agents this year, according to Forrester – making 2018 the first year that AI will have a measurable impact on consumer purchasing decisions. This is only the beginning of significant advancements in the field of personalization, as the fiscal impact of targeted suggestions from intelligent algorithms is only projected to grow.

Leaders Share Personalization Strategies

Personalization was the hot topic at the NRF Big Show this year and well-known retail leaders from such companies as Macy’s, The Children’s Place and the Neiman Marcus Group addressed how their companies plan to use personalization to differentiate themselves from the competition. As Karen Katz, President and CEO of the Neiman Marcus Group, told Forbes, “Great customer experience in 2018 will come from blending technology with a more personalized touch… people that can combine technology-powered personalization with a human will be the winners.”

Speaking the Language of Conversational Interface

Artificial intelligence-powered conversational platforms are becoming the preferred method for customers to interface with retail companies. Gartner predicts that by 2021, over 50 percent of companies will spend more per year on chatbots than they do on mobile app development. AI-powered chatbots and voice activated search platforms such as Amazon and Alexa enable retailers to offer targeted product suggestions and to resolve basic customer service issues. When AI-powered chatbots are used to facilitate a customer’s product search, they can take the customer through every phase of their purchasing process – from their first visit to a brand’s website to choosing the correct payment method for their final purchase. Customer service bots can be used to quickly to customer queries and direct shoppers to the appropriate branch of the company to handle their request.

Learning to Utilize Intelligent Algorithms  

Although most retailers know it’s necessary to implement niche technological developments such as chatbots and personalization platforms in order to compete, Forrester reports that 67 percent of retailers are still not prepared to leverage intelligent agents within their companies. This means that only 33 percent of retailers surveyed by Forrester understand the power of AI to disrupt the retail industry. However, disruption is inevitable. In 2018, it is advisable for retailers with stores of various sizes – across many different verticals – to implement intelligent personalization strategies across every branch of their retail store operations. Even the most advanced AI platforms depend on whittling customer data down to individual profiles to build loyalty strategies with authentic, applicable personalization. Yet the most effective personalization strategies take things yet a step further to suggest relevant marketing methods and formulate plans-of-action based on each customer’s unique search history, as well as their phase in the consumer lifecycle.

Integrating Marketing Touchpoints

The biggest mistake retailers make when implementing a burgeoning personalization strategy for their customer base is failing to update customer information each time a relevant transaction or communication takes place. When organizations fail to connect the dots across platforms, they cannot syndicate recommendations or register customer interactions, which often results in sending out duplicate communications or failing to follow-up with consumers. At NectarOM, we work to bridge the gap between various branches of our clients’ companies to create a unified, cohesive brand presence and customer outreach strategy across platforms. Don’t be one of the 67 percent of retailers that Forrester predicts will fall behind in the New Year – instead, partner with a solution provider with access to an intelligent, AI-fueled  personalization algorithm that produces measurable results.

Increase sales by leveraging the power of your CRM data

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software has become indispensable for both online and offline businesses. It’s likely that you have already collected a large amount of customer information from existing customers and prospects over time. However, sitting on a pile of data isn’t going to bring in revenue for your business.

Your information is only as good as how well it’s leveraged to engage with your customers and generate more sales. Here’s what you can do to boost your revenue using customer data:

1. Create targeted campaigns

Your data can give you unique insights into each individual customer’s demographic information, interests, preferences, location, browsing history, and purchasing behaviors enabling you to deliver targeted content and offers in the right place at the right time to maximize conversion.

For example, when a registered customer shows interest in a product but hasn’t placed an order, you can send an email with a special offer to entice them to complete the purchase.

According to Forrester, 30% of eCommerce repeat purchases come from email marketing. In addition, targeted campaigns can be delivered via social media, mobile app, and direct mail.

2. Improve customer service

Outstanding customer experience is the key to increasing conversion and boosting customer lifetime value.

When your customers contact your company through various touch points, such as website, social media, or email, the interactions can be recorded in the 360-degree customer profile. Your customer service representatives can use the information to construct a better picture of the customer’s history, pick up where they left off, and offer the most relevant and appropriate response.

3. Support personalization strategies

Personalization strategies have been proven to increase sales and conversion and become the priority of many marketing professionals. Your CRM data can inform a variety of personalization strategies on channels such as website, email, and social media by allowing you to:

  • Offer personalized product recommendations on your website, a strategy that’s found to increase store revenue by 300%, conversion rate by 150%, and average order value by 50%.
  • Use email personalization to deliver relevant and timely content or offers that’ll increase engagement and conversion.
  • Combine customer data with retargeting campaigns, such as social media or Google Adwords, to drive customers to products they’ve already shown interest in.

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4. Attract new prospects

People who share similar demographic profiles, preferences, browsing behaviors, or purchase history with your current customers are more likely to be interested in your products or services. You can use the data from existing customers to determine the audience of your marketing campaigns.

For instance, you can upload a list of existing customers and use it to target a “look-alike” audience for your Facebook ads. In addition, for many B2B companies or B2C merchants selling higher-priced products, lead scoring can be used to identify the most qualified prospects by comparing new leads against the attributes of your most valuable customers.

A powerful customer data management (CDM) system

The ability to leverage customer data starts with a powerful CDM system that allows you to create a single customer view and collect data from multiple touch points. You’ll then be able to leverage the unique preferences, brand interactions, and habits of customers to deliver the most timely and relevant omnichannel campaigns that’ll drive conversion and sales.

How to supercharge your omnichannel marketing campaign with personalization by leveraging customer data.

Most data-driven marketers take information gathered from surveys or focus groups with a grain of salt because of the biases and errors inherent in the methodology.

Simply put, there are often discrepancies between what the consumers say and their purchasing behaviors.

A much better way to understand what your customers really want is to gather data on how they behave—namely, how they vote with their wallets.

The use of consumer data and behavioral analytics is now driving the growth of many successful businesses through personalized marketing campaigns.

More than 60% of Netflix’s rentals stem from recommendations while 35% of Amazon’s sales originate from product recommendations based on individual consumer’s past interactions with the website.

Such personalized recommendations are helping brands become more relevant to the individual consumer, resulting in higher conversion rates and improved customer loyalty.

Customer Behavioral Data

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Collecting and Utilizing Customer Behavioral Data

The first step to leveraging customer behavior analytics is, of course, to have the right kind of data.

Start by capturing as much information as possible to avoid blind spots. Collect and collate data from all customer touch points with the help of an omnichannel marketing software to give you a complete picture of your customers’ behaviors.

Stay objective and don’t assume anything about what your customers want or need.

The data you select to use in your analytics should help inform how personalized content, promotions, and product recommendations are delivered to each individual customer.

The aggregation of such information will also allow you to identify trends and anticipate consumer needs, as well as predict the preferences of unregistered prospects by comparing their behaviors with customer information on your database.

Take advantage of your omnichannel marketing software’s ability to respond to your customers’ behaviors in real-time to deliver an outstanding customer experience that increases sales and builds brand loyalty.

Applying Customer Behavioral Data To Marketing Campaigns

Use the data you have gathered to inform how you deliver targeted content and messaging to your prospects and customers.

Here are a few ways to integrate customer behavioral data to personalized marketing campaigns:

Targeted Content

A study by Forrester found that when their marketing messages match consumer behaviors to products, marketers saw a 15% revenue lift and a 667% ROI.

By focusing on individual consumers rather than mass segmentation, you can use personalized content to drive purchases.

Real-Time Interactions

Whether your customers are interacting with your brand online or in-store, responding to their behaviors in real time can lead to a much higher conversion rate.

You can use an omnichannel marketing platform to trigger an email campaign based on a customer’s past and present interactions with your brand across all touch points.

You can also change content on your website dynamically as a response to each visitor’s history, interest, and real-time behaviors to deliver the most relevant information and recommendations.

Trend Recommendations

With the help of sophisticated technologies, you can take product recommendations to the next level.

The insights on shopper behaviors can be used to show unique product combinations that encompass purchasing trends from “people like them” by uncovering correlations that most marketers might miss.

The use of customer behavior analytics is taking personalized marketing campaign to the next level. It’s a trend that marketers can’t afford to ignore.

NectorOm’s omnichannel marketing software is designed to help data-driven marketers glean the right insight so you can always be in the right place at the right time with the right message. Learn more about our suite of solutions.

Customer data is driving the next generation of omnichannel marketing strategies. What you can do to stay ahead of your competition.

Every time you interact with your customers, you have the opportunity to aggregate invaluable information. That data can inform your marketing strategies if you leverage it and turn it into actionable insights.

McKinsey predicts that data-activated marketing can boost total sales by 15 to 20 percent (and even more for digital sales) while significantly improving the ROI on marketing budget across all channels.

These strategies are based on a customer’s real-time needs, interests, and behaviors.

We’re not talking about the same old “Hi [ FIRST NAME ]” kind of personalization.

The way companies used to segment their audience is too isolated and simplistic, failing to take into account the complex manner in which consumers interact with brands across all channels, and at various stages of their customer journeys.   

With the information available to today’s businesses, it’s not the lack of data that plagues marketers.

Instead, they have access to more data than they know how to utilize effectively.

Thankfully, new technologies are emerging to help brands leverage the vast amount of customer data to deliver personalized messages across all customer touch points, creating an exceptional customer experience.

Personalized Marketing Campaigns

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Here’s how you can activate customer data by implementing personalized marketing campaigns across all channels:

1. Create Single Customer View

A 360-degree customer profile is the foundation of any successful omnichannel personalized marketing campaign.

By using an omnichannel marketing software, you can consolidate all customer data and collect signals from ongoing interactions to aid in the creation of targeted messages and offers.

2. Make Decisions Based On Signals

When customers interact with your brand at different touch points, they leave behind “signals” that can inform your next personalized marketing message.

These “signals” could be cart abandonment, Facebook “check in” at a store, entering an area within your “geo fence,” or returning to your website shortly after a purchase.

3. Deliver Real-Time Personalized Experiences and Offers

By combining signals from a customer’s real-time interaction with your brand and the customer’s history, habits, and preferences, you can deliver the most relevant content or offer in the right place at the right time.

Utilize a centralized platform to implement your personalized marketing campaign so you can deliver consistent messaging across all channels.

This will ensure that all content is working synergistically to move your customers seamlessly along the buyer’s journey.

4. Send Personalized Email

Consumers are fed up with getting one-size-fits-all content and promotions that have nothing to do with their interests, preferences, or habits.

Email is one of the best ways to tailor unique messages. Having them sent at the appropriate frequency positions your brand as relevant and valuable.

It’s an easy way to reach mobile users, a transactional medium perfect for coupons, and allows you to track metrics to understand what works so you can refine your campaigns.

5. Offer Individualized Content On Website

When your customers log onto your website, you can leverage their behavioral data (such as browsing history and interactions with your brand) to deliver relevant and valuable content such as useful articles, localized information, product recommendations or special offers.

Personalized Marketing Campaigns

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Your customer data is a treasure trove of information and it’s the next frontier in personalized marketing.

With the help of today’s technology, you can now tap into that knowledge to help maximize engagement and increase ROI.

Explore our library of resource to see how you can get more leads and generate more sales with omnichannel marketing.

Omnichannel personalized marketing is no longer just “nice to have” in today’s marketplace, especially with customer experience becoming a key brand differentiator.

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Consumers are now interacting with brands across multiple channels. Not only do they expect relevant content but they also want the ability to “pick up where they left off” when they switch from one channel to another.

Many retailers consider implementing omnichannel personalization as one of the key strategies to generate growth and increase revenue through providing a customer-centric brand experience. In fact, many retailers see an increase in revenue and new customer conversion rate when they start offering personalized customer experience.

A study by Invesp has shown that personalization has been proven to improve customer loyalty and increase conversion:

  • 53% of online shoppers consider customization valuable.
  • 45% of shoppers prefer to shop on sites offering personalized recommendations.
  • Personalized ads have a conversion rate 10 times higher than “one-size-fits-all” ads.

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However, there are many moving pieces to ensure the successful implementation of such strategy, including the collection, integration, and synthesis of a large amount of customer data and the ability to turn it into actionable insights.

Thankfully, there are many tools you can use to help gather customer data and apply them to improve customer experience. Here are a few helpful features to look for:

Customer Data Management (CDM)

Information on your customers’ behaviors and preferences will help you cultivate relationships and increase retention rate. Data collection is the first step to implementing a personalization strategy.

To see CDM in action, look no further than online retail giant Amazon.com. Customer information is collected and utilized for making recommendations that leads to increase in sales, as well as improving customer relationships with more personal services.

To get the most out of your customer data, you should:

  • Decide on the critical data to collect so you don’t end up having to parse through irrelevant information
  • Clean up your data to avoid duplication
  • Funnel all information into one centralized database to construct 360° customer profiles
  • Avoid siloed internal practice and encourage collaboration between departments
  • Make the information and customer profiles easily accessible to sales personnel in the field.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

After you have constructed 360° Customer Profiles that aggregate your customers’ unique preferences, brand interactions, and habits, it’s time to take that information to the next level.

You can leverage the analytics capabilities of your software to make data-backed business decisions based on the level of brand interaction and projected lifetime value of each of your individual customers.

To leverage the power of CRM, follow these best practices:

  • Create targeted content for specific customer segment to help your brand stay relevant and top of mind. For example, P&G developed the Being Girl microsite to share relevant content with a specific customer segment
  • Use geo-location to target customers who are in the vicinity of a physical store
  • Learn customer habits and preferences to create offers and deliver services that are timely, customized, and relevant
  • Implement Omnichannel marketing and customer care to deliver a seamless customer experience across all touch points

Automated Personalization

You can also leverage the information about your customers to create personalized campaigns and communications that help you deliver the most relevant information to specific customer segments in a timely manner.

This will not only allow you to nurture customer relationships and improve retention rate but also entice new customers to engage with your business by sending out highly relevant offers at the critical moments of their customer journey.

These are some of the ways you can leverage automated personalization to increase sales:

  • Segment and target high-quality leads that are likely to convert
  • Implement personalized lead nurturing campaigns to deliver the most relevant content and offers
  • Increase customer lifetime value by improving customer satisfaction and loyalty with relevant offers
  • Leverage your social media presence to deliver a seamless experience that moves customer along their purchasing path

The Best Marketing Speaks To What Makes Your Customers Tick

The effectiveness of one-size-fits-all marketing messages is plummeting as consumers are becoming increasingly savvy and expect for customized content and offers from brands.

As a marketer, you need to deliver a personalized customer experience across all channels and make sure your copy, content, and offer are highly relevant while appearing in front of your audience in the right place at the right time to get the highest ROI on your marketing budget.

Leverage big data for your omnichannel marketing strategies

Big data is everywhere, but do you know what to do with it?

Marketers are tapping into customer data to generate insights that have never been available before.

If you aren’t leveraging this gold mine of information, you’re missing out on a vast opportunity to surprise and delight your prospects and customers.

The problem for most marketers isn’t the lack of such data.

In fact, you’re probably sitting on a large amount of information gathered from various customer touch points—website, email, social media, call center, live chat, or in-store interactions.

All this information can be very overwhelming if you don’t have a plan to utilize it for your business.

What can you do with this data to advance your marketing and sales efforts?

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Optimize Pricing at Customer-Product Level

McKinsey has found that on average, a 1 percent price increase translates into an 8.7 percent rise in operating profits.

Yet up to 30 percent of all pricing decisions made by companies fail to deliver the best price.

The ability to analyze customer preferences and behaviors can help you fine-tune pricing of each product for individual customers to maximize profit.

Attain Greater Customer Responsiveness With Relationship-Driven Strategies

A Forrester study found that 36% of B2C marketers are actively using analytics and data mining to plan relationship-driven strategies.

These strategies have been found to increase customer acquisition, reduce customer churn, and improve existing products for more sales.

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You can leverage data and implement the insights with a robust customer relationship management (CRM) platform to build relationships with your customers. The key is to give them what they want when they want it to increase engagement, loyalty, and customer lifetime value.

Embed Intelligence Into Contextual Marketing

By bringing together evolving customer preferences and interactions across channels, marketers can now take contextual marketing to the next level.

When a customer enters a search term on your website or app, you can combine the search term with the customer’s purchasing history to improve the relevance of the search results and product recommendations.

Develop Customer-Centric Strategies

The use of customer data and single customer view  turns the focus from executing discrete campaigns to managing customer lifecycle.

Through improving customer experience across all touch points, companies are better positioned to cultivate long-term relationships that lead to greater customer loyalty and lifetime value.

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Optimize Go-To Market Plans Using Geoanalytics

Customer data can show you how demand differs across geographic regions.

Using this insight, you can align your sales and go-to-market strategies with territories that have the greatest sales potential to increase sales, improve supply chain efficiency, and reduce cost.

Identify VIP Buyers To Increase Sales

By analyzing average purchase amount, lifetime value, acquisition cost, and retention, you can identify your “VIP” customers that are of highest value to your business.

You can then focus your customer care efforts to nurture relationships with this segment with a personalized shopping experience and targeted content or offers to increase engagement and loyalty.

Deliver Consistent Omnichannel Customer Experience

The use of robust Customer Data Management (CDM) technologies is making it possible for businesses to orchestrate excellent omnichannel customer experiences across a selling network.

This allows you to effectively move prospects along the buyer’s journey to engage with and purchase from your brand.

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The technologies for tapping into the power of customer data are now available at your fingertips.

You can finally collect data, collate information, generate insights, and turn them into implementable strategies that will dramatically increase your marketing ROI.

Discover how NectarOm’s suite of tools can help you leverage customer data and take your marketing to the next level.

Why You Need Clickstream Data. And How You Should Use It

Clickstream Analysis: Understanding your Customers Online
Clickstream Analysis: Understanding your Customers Online

Almost everyone in online retail knows about clickstream tracking.  Many companies utilize click tracking on their sites.  However much of it is either not utilized or under-utilized as a tool to improve the customer shopping experience.  When clickstream data is analyzed, it is typically to understand usage patterns or the types of customers visiting the site.  Recently, e-retailers have begun using clickstream data to serve up improved content choices to its visitors–think of the “You May Also Like” or “Customers Who Viewed _____ also Viewed_____” widgets found on many websites today.

All these current uses are beneficial to the company and its customers.  The usage patterns can help inform a better path design to improve the customer experience.  The new content widgets provide improved relevancy to the customer, also improving their shopping experience.

However, clickstream tracking can deliver even more value when combined with other customer data, including their transactions, email interactions, mobile and social information, CRM data and so on.  When you combine click data with other data you have about your customer, you go from delivering potentially relevant content to delivering hyper-personalized communications. When you use hyper-personalized messages–what they want, when they want it, where they want it–to communicate with your customers, they are more engaged, more loyal and give you more of their business.

So why don’t brands use their click tracking data in this manner?  Below are a few reasons:

  1. Many brands use companies whose clickstream tracking is just too complicated to make real-time decisions.
  2. Even when they have easy access to their clickstream data, companies are not sure how to combine that data with other customer data.
  3. Using clickstream data as outlined above is just another “to-do” in a long list of “to-dos” marketers and IT departments have.

Do you use clickstream data?  Have you found what works and what doesn’t? Please let us know in the comments below.

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