When’s a customer a customer?

Customers. We’ve all got ‘em. But how do you use customer data to know who they really are, what makes them tick and how to talk to them in a way that makes them choose you over the competition?

After all, it’s perfectly possible to have tons of information without really understanding them. You might know what they’ve bought. You might have a load of really useful dashboards delivering great analytics. You might even have a fair idea of how often they engage with your content. Yet somehow you don’t quite know what their buying behaviours are likely to be. What’s the missing clue buried deep in the data that could give you the edge?

Dig out the data gems

The problem is there’s a lot of haystack for that particular needle to be hiding in. Sprinkled within the giant list of names and numbers are customers who can’t get enough of your product and customers who are at risk of unsubscribing for good. Customers who are actively wanting a particular gap in your product portfolio to be filled and customers who are just passively browsing.

But which business has the time and resources to trawl through all this data and come up with the perfect way of grouping these different customers? What if you accidentally compromised your search by setting the wrong parameters in the first place?

Perpetually analysing customer data

This is where A.I. comes in. It tirelessly sifts and sorts, forming your customers into intuitive clusters so that you can tailor your product, content and marketing strategies more effectively. Clusters that reveal the gold star customers who engage highly and spend freely; the at-risk customers whose enthusiasm has started to wane and; crucially, the customers who, with the right push, could step out of the shadows and become greats.

Forget having to choose your own search attributes or worry that you’ve missed a crucial potential connection; A.I. first trawls through everything you know about your customers and only then suggests appropriate customer groupings. So your search criteria are based on data, not hunches.

Trust A.I. to find new patterns

Using A.I. makes clustering faster and more creative, and ensures that customers are not forever being put in the same old groups using the same old criteria. So as well as logical want-it-now suggestions they can also be served with items they hadn’t even realised they needed. After all, it would be a real shame to target customers so specifically that they feel snooped upon. Or to not give them the chance to buy products that at first glance they would appear to have no interest in.

Effective data-driven strategies

A.I. can appear daunting and tricky to implement but when applied strategically by a partner like distil.ai/ it quickly becomes a key addition to the modern marketer’s toolkit, helping you be even more precise in your customer targeting.