What is a 360-Degree Customer View?

A 360-degree customer view refers to the process of collecting and storing all of your customer data in one centralized data platform. This helps you gain a comprehensive picture of each customer to better understand their pain points, preferences and behaviors, so that you can more strategically plan how to engage with them during the marketing, purchase and post-purchase phases.

What Goes Into a 360-degree Customer View?

Today, most brands use a customer relationship management (CRM) platform to track customer interactions and sales. But a CRM only covers a small fraction of the interactions that a customer will have with your brand during the entire customer lifecycle. 

In order to gain a 360-degree perspective, you should be able to track engagement and brand interactions across every channel—both digital and offline. These channels include:

• Email marketing
• Mobile marketing (SMS, push, in-app, mobile inbox)
• Website visits
• Social media engagement
• Mobile app engagement
• Digital ads
• Print ads and direct mail 
• Customer support interactions
• Ecommerce activity (purchases, returns, etc.)
• In-store activity
• Online reviews (either on your site, or on online reviews platforms)

In addition to tracking brand interactions, you should be able to consolidate and integrate customer attributes such as contact information, location, job, income and household size. You can also prompt them to share additional shopping preferences, such as clothing size and preferred brands, with your company or track these attributes based on purchase history.

In order to develop a true 360-degree customer view, your brand should have the capacity to integrate demographics data, past behavioral and purchase data and real-time event data. You should be able to understand trends in each customer’s behavior that will help you optimize your marketing strategy.

The Benefits of a 360-degree Customer View

By accumulating and consolidating data on every facet of your customer’s background, preferences, brand interactions and sentiment, your brand will be well-poised to deliver the right communications at the right time. 

For example, when you have comprehensive user profiles set up in your cross-channel marketing platform, you’ll be able to develop detailed segments for your marketing efforts, and identify events to trigger messaging for those segments when they’re most likely to engage.

A 360-degree customer view also makes it easy to understand the right times to reach out and channels to use based on the customer’s previous interactions with your brand. If a customer clicks on one of your product pages but doesn’t make a purchase, and you have data showing they frequently engage with content on your mobile app, you can send a mobile push notification offering a discount with a link to that product and similar product recommendations. You can even automatically customize the content in the message based on known data such as the customer’s size and favorite color. If the customer doesn’t open the notification within a set period of time, you can trigger a follow-up message through another channel, such as email or SMS.

A 360-degree customer view can also help you predict future behavior, and determine the right cross-selling, up-selling and retention strategies to maintain customer loyalty. For example, if a customer typically orders beauty products every two months, you can create sequenced promotional offers, timed with their buying cycle, to encourage them to try out new products that are similar to those they’ve enjoyed in the past. If a customer goes a certain amount of time without making a purchase, you can activate a more generous promotional offer to entice them to return, leveraging multiple marketing channels.

Beyond the individual customer level, you’ll be able to analyze broader trends in customer interests and behavior, which you can use to determine when to increase your inventory or manufacture more of a certain product. You can even use customer preferences to help you shape plans for new product lines, and will be able to market directly to the segment of customers who are likely to be interested in the products.

How to Build a 360-degree View

To create 360-degree views of your customer base, and use that data to intelligently segment and personalize your customer interactions across every channel, consider using a cross-channel marketing platform like Iterable.

Iterable can centralize data from all of your data sources to build comprehensive, in-depth user profiles for each user. You can use these profiles to develop highly personalized communications that are designed to reach each customer with relevant content on the channels they prefer to engage with, at the right time, based on either immediate triggers or past behavioral trends. 

Using detailed user data to shape your customer interactions means that you can identify key triggers for reaching out, based on personal data (like their birthday), ecommerce activity (buying a product within a certain time window) and event data (interaction with your social feeds, website, app or other channels). This can help you to heighten engagement with new customers, maximize customer lifetime value from existing customers and re-engage lapsed or inactive customers. 

By not only developing customized content based on your customers’ preferences and habits, but sharing it across multiple channels based on those they engage with most, you can optimize customer engagement and conversion rates. With a world of customer data at your fingertips, you can deploy campaigns that reach your audience and generate positive results.