We have been thinking a lot recently about our customers’ requests. They all seem to be converging into similar digital vision, digital path, a multi-channel path. Having a website and updating it once in a while is no longer an option. A website needs to talk to other websites, make friends in manner of speaking. Businesses now want to have very cohesive view of their customers. They want to merge the data from social networks, mobile apps, websites, print campaigns, in-store walk-in’s and email marketing. They want to find patterns, create a rich segment that truly identifies a customer’s habits, patterns, purchases across channels and reward them accordingly.
Of course, with each additional channel, there comes a new level of complexity and sophistication in analytics. Not many small businesses can dedicate resources and analysts, measure response rates, retarget, re-segment and iterate. It is, however, a noticeable trend that as a small business evolves into a medium-sized business, the needs become more complex and integration becomes key.
So it is necessary to plan ahead, plan for growth, plan for success and try to imagine how success would look like. How will you interact with your customers in the future? How will you influence purchase, re-target and re-activate, trigger campaigns and at which intervals? For a startup, it might not be the top priority, but it will become clear quite fast when a platform is needed that can handle complex data streams and automate processes.
Starting this process early on can save a lot of time and money down the road. Costly platform integrations could easily be avoided by planning and using a platform that merges all the data streams and automates the marketing process. One platform that can scale up as you grow and not break the bank at the start.
