Whether you’re working from home or you’re back in the office, most of us don’t have the best views from our office. Even if the marketing team gets a window, it’s normally by the bins or the car park.

 
We can’t do much to fix that, but in truth there’s only one view that marketers really need: the all-important Single Customer View.
 
Any effective marketing strategy needs to be built around an understanding of the customer. If you don’t know much about who you’re talking to, your communications are likely to be either irrelevant (bad) or annoying (worse).
 
In fact, if you don’t have a Single Customer View (SCV), even the best marketing strategy will only take you so far. A SCV is crucial for marketers to understand their customers and come up with ways to engage them effectively with personalised communications and a frictionless customer experience.
 
Let’s take a look at what’s so impressive about a SCV, and what it could do for your brand:

1. Accuracy

 
We’re normally all about simplicity, but this is one area where a little complexity pays off.
 
We like to help link a vast amount of sources together such as CRM, store data, channel engagement, mobile device data and website behavioural data.
 
This means you can be confident that you’ve built a complete and accurate picture of your customer – which continues to update with new information.
 
But the combining only takes you so far and RedEye’s unique customer identification technology accurately matches all data points together against individual customers.
 
Compare that to traditional marketing databases which only use a limited number of identifiers, which can only build a rough approximation of a customer.

2. Intent

 
Now you’ve got all your data in one place, you can start to understand your customer – such as what they like and what they dislike.
 
This behavioural data is invaluable because if you also overlay that with AI and machine learning, it’s possible to accurately predict customer next actions and have the perfect campaign ready to encourage that likely action.
 
In practical terms, this means it’s easier to identify customers who have the potential to lapse as an example, so you can bring them back before they drop out your customer lifecycle. It can also help you identify and guide specific customers who are most likely to become loyal VIP customers.

3. Actionable

 
Without a decent SCV, chances are your customer data sits on spreadsheets. Or worse, it sits on multiple spreadsheets from multiple sources.
 
A comprehensive SCV means you’ve got all the data in one place. It’s immediately actionable for use to trigger segments or inform personalised campaigns.
 
For example, if you know a retail customer always chooses the ‘click and collect’ option, they can be sent content geared around making the collection experience completely frictionless by removing non-relevant content for other delivery methods.

4. Personalisation

 
Customers now (quite rightly) expect highly personalised messages from retailers. It’s the most obvious way for a brand to demonstrate in a practical way how much they value their customers.
 
No matter where they are on the lifecycle – personalised comms, triggered by a customer’s behaviour, are vital to encourage repeat purchases. They can even rescue a lapsed customer.
 
What makes all this possible? You guessed it – it’s that Single Customer View. Full personalisation is only possible when you’ve got an up-to-date, 360 degree view of your customer.

5. Engagement

 
Increased engagement is the first signal from your customers that your personalised comms are working.
 
And it’s all thanks to the fact you’re working with accurate and actionable relevant data which allows you to:

• Build personalised comms which drive engagement
• Convert prospects into customers
• Restore lapsed customers
• Build and nurture those worth-their-weight-in-gold customer relationships
• And much more

 
All this is down to your new best friend: the Single Customer View. How did you ever manage without it?