• by Eric Keating , Columnist, March 26, 2018

What matters more to your B2C business, a new customer buying your product, or the new marketing channel that brought in the new customer?

The question may seem difficult at first, but it’s not. The marketing channel is only important because it brought in the customer. The people who buy from you matter; the marketing channels they find you through don’t. Your marketing should always be a direct response to what your buyers want, not the other way around.

If your B2C marketing strategy today is completely focused on marketing channels, then you’re thinking about marketing all wrong. You must shift your focus from “which channel should we optimize next?” to “how do our customers want to buy from us and how can we make this easiest for them?” 

The key to success in B2C marketing is to understand your customers and try to determine what they really want from your brand. Since it’s impossible to call each and every one of your buyers, you need a more scalable option. You can get to know customers by collecting as much information on their preferences as they interact with your brand, including:

• How they communicate with your brand;

• When they last engaged with your brand, particularly the customer service department;

• Their preferred channels and how they want to buy; and

• How often they visit your website.

Simply collecting this information isn’t enough, however, especially if it’s siloed across your e-commerce, email marketing and marketing automation systems. You need to unify the data so you can build up asingle view of your customer. This will enable you to better personalize every communication to engage your customers at the right moment in the right way — no matter the channel. To be able to accurately do that, you need to be able to track your customers as they move across channels. With identity resolution, you can piece together every interaction your buyers make on different channels and start to personalize your marketing, no matter the channel.

Now that you have a single view of your customers across all channels, you can really begin to understand your buyers better and execute your marketing campaigns using this data. You’ll quickly realize that to most buyers, the channel matters very little and the experience matters far more. You have to be thoughtful about who your target market is, what they respond to, and run detailedA/B testing on almost everything.

A consistent message is crucial, no matter where the customer is shopping. There is no surefire way of knowing which channel a customer will choose to interact with your brand on next -- it’s all about whatever is convenient for them. If they find a different price or different offer for one channel and not the other then chances are you’ll have just lost a customer. Again, it all comes back to focusing on the person and seeing their experience with your brand from their perspective.