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Marketers have access to so much customer data. Every click, purchase, campaign interaction and abandoned cart tells us something about what customers want and how their behaviour is changing.
Yet for many marketing teams, having an abundance of data hasn’t necessarily made decision-making any easier. It can feel like having a kitchen full of ingredients, but no recipe: everything you need is there, but working out what to make with it can be the hardest part.
There is already plenty of customer data available for marketers. The challenge is knowing which signals matter and how to act on them in a scalable way.
Find clarity in the data
Customer behaviour can rarely be explained by a single data point. For example, an email open may indicate interest, but looking at it alongside browsing or purchase history can provide a clearer picture of what a customer is actually interested in.
Customer data is usually spread across different platforms. Email engagement may sit in one system, while ecommerce activity and website behaviour sit somewhere else. This fragmentation can make it harder for marketers to connect the dots and understand what those interactions mean together.
The result is that marketers can end up reporting on individual interactions rather than understanding the customer journey as a whole. A marketer may know that engagement has changed or that a customer has become more active, without having an easy way to connect that behaviour with what the customer has done elsewhere.
When marketers can see those interactions together, it’s easier to spot who’s ready to buy, who’s losing interest and who may need a different approach.
Build audiences around behaviour, not assumptions
That understanding can help marketers build more relevant audiences.
Purchase history, engagement, browsing behaviour and intent can help distinguish a first-time purchaser from a repeat or lapsed customer.
Instead of grouping customers by demographics alone, marketers can zoom in on how people actually engage with the brand. Who is this customer, where are they in their journey, and what are they most likely to need next?
Customers want interactions that reflect their relationship with the brand. Personalisation is about making their experience more relevant, whether that’s a timely reminder or an offer that fits their interests.
Use AI to shorten the path from insight to action
Finding and making sense of those patterns is where AI can help.
Instead of manually exporting reports or digging through spreadsheets, AI-assisted analysis can help marketers ask questions in plain language and explore campaign performance.
It can also surface patterns across large amounts of information, such as a specific segment of customers showing stronger purchase intent, or certain campaign tactics leading to better engagement. That matters because the value of an insight declines if it takes a week to find it. AI can help marketers move more quickly from ‘What happened?’ to ‘What should we do next?’
While AI can help get to those answers faster, human judgement still matters. It takes a marketer to understand the context, decide what matters and determine how the brand should respond.
Shift from reporting on the past to planning the next move
For many teams, campaign reporting happens after everything has wrapped up, serving as a way to assess performance and evaluate whether KPIs were met, before moving on to the next thing. In this case, customer data is useful, but spotting a problem early enough to fix it can make a much bigger difference.
Rather than waiting for a post-campaign review, marketers can use emerging patterns to refine their approach and decide where to focus next.
Those insights can help marketers shape the next campaign and encourage teams to test personalisation while a campaign is still live.
Making that happen requires data to become part of the marketing process. Otherwise, valuable signals can remain sitting in dashboards long after the opportunity to use them has passed.
Put the ingredients you already have to work
For marketers, there is plenty to gain from taking stock of the data already within reach. Look at which customer signals are being collected and whether they are actually influencing what the team does next.
AI can help spot patterns across customer interactions. But marketers still need to decide which insights matter, what they mean for the customer and how they should shape the next campaign. The opportunity isn’t to collect more ingredients, it’s to get better at using the ones already in the kitchen.
After all, a well-stocked kitchen only gets you so far. What matters is what you make with it.
Katie Witkowski is the Product Marketing Lead at Intuit Mailchimp.
Image: Supplied
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