Marketing never stands still. As customers become ever more savvy and aware of the innovative techniques being used, marketers need a new edge: Customer Experience Marketing (CEM).

CEM is about placing the customer at the heart of the marketing strategy. Long gone are the days when customers would be willing to listen whilst you try and sell them the great features and benefits of your latest product. It’s time to understand why customers want to engage with you or why they are viewing your marketing material in the first place.

A good place to start is to look at the “Three Vs” of big data and appreciate how they are integral to your organisation’s successful relationship with its customers:

• Variety: Translating large volumes of transactional information into decisions is always difficult, especially with the advent of social media and mobile. Variety includes tabular data (databases), hierarchical data, documents, email, metering data, video, still images, audio, stock ticker data, financial transactions and more, categorised as “Unstructured”. 
• Velocity: Most people are aware of the fact that we live in a speed obsessed society, data is continuously being required quicker. This is where Velocity comes in producing fast data in order to meet demand.
• Volume: The Zetabytes of data produced today creates a storage issue; but more important to consider is that too much data is also a massive analysis issue.

These points should be considered in depth before being incorporated into your CEM strategy, along with the four core points of reference, which are:

Identification: allowing you to identify your customer’s digital footprint.

Intelligence: explore and visualise data naturally as you really get to know your customers.

Orchestration: marketers make all sorts of decisions around conversion, retention and re-activation - be sure to do this with insight from your data.

Interaction: based on what the customer expects rather than the points we want to message or sell to them.

Customer expectations are changing: they want an experience that is consistent across all channels and they are prepared to share information in order to receive more value and personalised experience. Marketing that focuses solely on boosting sales is missing the point:  in this time pressured and marketing savvy society you can’t just blast emails blindly and hope for the best.

The onus is now on marketers to gather as much data as possible to create your CEM strategy; come up with a creative marketing campaign that wows your potential and current client base; and gets them on board and keeps them there.

To stay ahead of the competition, marketing must reflect actual customer expectation. Personalising content that reflects each individual’s requirements is key to developing a sustainable, long term relationship.

To better understand the implementation of the customer experience marketing strategy, download Blue Sheep’s Whitepaper ‘Customer Experience Marketing in the World of Big Data’ by clicking here.