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Marketers: Are You Focused On Attracting App Users?

Marketers -- are you focused on attracting app users? 

If you’re not, you should be. 

Brands spend billions on Big Data and advanced analytics, gathering customer insights to personalize relationships and cultivate brand loyalty. Yet despite the huge investments made, there is still a knowledge gap in the data-driven insights that brand marketers are currently relying on to personalize interactions and anticipate what customers actually want and need, because clearly customers “just aren’t feeling it.” 

According to a recent Bond Brand Loyalty Survey, only 28% of loyalty members feel satisfied that they get a personalized experience from their loyalty programs, and only 34% of members agree that they would recommend their loyalty programs to others. 

Whether your goal is to extend lifetime value, grow share of wallet, keep loyal customers from defecting, attract a new demographic or “all of the above,” the data-driven customer insights you have access to — or don’t — may make the difference between success and failure. 

And one of the most conclusive sources of customer knowledge that marketers can use to fill the knowledge gap can come from a digital asset that already exists in their digital product suite — their mobile app. 

Brands’ CRM databases, enhanced with third-party data, are vital tools in the endless quest for revenue generation, loyalty cultivation and new customer acquisition.  Along with advanced analytics, they are often the centerpieces for gaining knowledge and organizing customers into segments to predict buying intent, develop relevant, personalized offers and content and determine optimal touchpoints.

But do traditional data sources and segmentation methods provide the level of insight that marketers can trust to know customers and predict and act on buying intent?

Consider this:

  • Customer spending level is certainly an indicator of value, but it tells marketers nothing about why they spend with a brand, leaving marketers unarmed to respond when their spending habits change.  
  • Purchase transaction history provides an indicator of interests and needs, but tells marketers little about what’s driving customers to purchase what they do and who they buy for, leaving marketers ill equipped to confidently anticipate and act on future buying intent.    
  • Demographic data provide insight into buying-power and help inform buying intent, but they are often based on geo-clusters tagged at the household level — leaving marketers unable to speak to customers based on their individual wants and needs.   

With the explosion in smartphone adoption, brands have naturally developed digital assets to meet the needs of their customers -- namely, mobile-adapted Web sites and mobile apps. At the same time, app-based local behavioral analytics and segmentation solutions have emerged, giving marketers access to up-to-the moment, highly predictive psychographic customer knowledge in an anonymous way.

App-enabled location-based analytics give marketers an unprecedented source for gaining definitive customers knowledge — on an individual basis — based on where they go, what they do, when and why to uncover their interests, affinities and passions. Where customers go offline and what they do in their spare time tells marketers a lot about them. This data-driven insight, combined with traditional sources including spending level, purchase history and demographics, gives marketers the complete knowledge they need to anticipate their needs, personalize engagement and influence their buying behavior.    

Savvy marketers have already begun to take advantage of the powerful local offline intelligence their apps can deliver, using knowledge of what customers most value in their personal lives to create engaging and relevant interactions and in-the-moment targeting, both within their app and across their customer-facing channels — all in a privacy-friendly manner.

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