Data-Driven Marketing

Data-driven marketing is a strategy that requires collecting customers’ data, analyzing the history of their interactions with a company, monitoring their behavior on a site, and tracking previous purchases. This allows brands to create targeted and personalized offers, increase sales, and improve user experience.

In this article, you’ll get to know why data-driven marketing is essential, unveil its benefits, and learn how to implement it.

Why is data-driven marketing important?

Promoting and advertising the same product to your entire audience is a thing of the past. People appreciate brands that care about them, know what they like and dislike, and remember their preferences. By putting a customer at the center of your business, you decide to establish long-lasting relationships with your audience.

Implementing data-driven marketing allows you to have a clear picture of your ideal buyer. You’ll discover your top-performing strategies, find out why some leads drop off, and manage to be at the right time and in the right place with the best offer. No more guessing games. Every marketing effort and campaign will be based on your data analysis results.

To recognize the opportunities data-driven marketing provides, let’s uncover its primary advantages.

Benefits of Data-Driven Marketing

To understand the way data influences your marketing efforts’ performance, we’ll compare the process of creating a campaign to cooking. Both processes are a kind of art in a certain way.

To cook a delicious dessert, you need fresh and high-quality ingredients — they make up 50% of your success. The second crucial step is following the ingredient proportion guidelines. With marketing, it means collecting only the data that matters and ensuring its high quality and reliability.

Now that you know the recipe for an effective data-driven campaign, let’s discover which benefits you can reap.

• Allocating your budget more effectively. Marketers who try to use more channels and methods to succeed drain their advertising budget pretty quickly. As a result, they don’t even know which investments perform better. When implementing a data-driven marketing strategy, you will use an analytics tool that can help you keep a record of your expenditures, so you will see which strategies bring you more money and which are not worth your investments. As a result, you will be able to distribute your advertising budget more wisely.
• Understanding your buyers’ journey. Since data-driven marketing requires monitoring user behavior on your site and recording all of their interactions with your brand, you will learn which landing pages and calls to action perform better and where your leads get stuck and leave your site forever. By collecting valuable data, you will discover your clients’ conversion path and act on this data to improve your campaigns.
• Analyzing your target audience. Your customers are so different. They live in different countries or even continents. They use different devices and channels to buy your product and take different steps before they make a purchase. With all this data at hand, you can predict their behavior and create different selling scenarios.
• Crafting relevant offers. With the help of marketing and analytics tools, you can divide all users into segments by various criteria. This way, you’ll be able to create targeted messages for each group. You can take into account users’ previous experiences and design a campaign they will love. Once you create several campaigns this way, you’ll manage to perform this task on autopilot.
• Improving user experience. If you determine why you lose leads and single out the problems they face when using your product, you’ll be able to eliminate all of these issues. As a result, you’ll improve users’ experience with your site.
• Increasing sales. Collecting customer data enables you to create targeted offers for different audience segments. This way, your marketing campaigns will be more relevant, and you’ll manage to sell more products.

Now that you know how to boost your sales with data-driven marketing, we’ll share some tips that will help you get started. You’ll also learn how to implement this approach with SendPulse.

How do you get started with data-driven marketing?

Implementing data-driven marketing requires lots of time and dedication and a data analyst in your team. There is no one-fit-all approach since all companies are different, but there’s a standard algorithm. Check it out below.

1. Set your goals. Developing any strategy calls for defining your objectives first. You should understand what you want to achieve, as your goals predetermine the type of data you will collect. For example, if you aim to increase user engagement, you need to collect behavioral data. Mind that your goals should be SMART — specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
2. Gather data. We can divide this stage into two steps. First, you need to decide which type of data you need and collect it. Everything depends on your goals. If you want to have a clear picture of your customers’ behavioral patterns and create a profile, you need their personal information. You can directly ask clients to share it. If you want to increase sales, you need to get more attribution data and define your data sources. They can include website analytics, social media data, transactional information, customer feedback, etc. You can get this data with the help of Google Analytics, inbuilt social media analytics tools, social media monitoring and listening tools, your contacts’ CRM cards, tracking pixels, customer service software, etc.
3. Process the data. Now that you have some data on hand, you need to manage, organize, store, and analyze it. There are lots of tools that can help you deal with these tasks. Choosing such a tool might be challenging, so decide on your desirable features and pricing beforehand and see whether you need some learning curve to start using the service. Consider Google Data Studio, Google BigQuery, Kissmetrics, and Stitch. It will be great to choose a tool that can both process your data and provide reports. Mind that the more data you collect, the more complex your system will be. Your chances of making mistakes get higher, so hiring a data analyst to implement data-driven marketing correctly is an excellent idea.
4. Use the data. Now that you have collected and processed all the gathered data, it’s time to build a hypothesis and test it. This will require you to test your assumptions regarding a specific parameter. The purpose of this process is to find out if there’s statistical evidence that proves your belief.
5. Evaluate your performance. To evaluate the results, you need to check your dashboards regularly. If your goal is to increase profitability, monitor your conversion rates and ROI. If you aim to increase brand awareness, track brand mentions, discussions, and impressions on social media.

SendPulse allows its users to work effectively using the power of data-driven marketing. No matter which service you work with — email, web push, SMS, or chatbot builder — you can collect customer data and store it in the SendPulse CRM. Each contact card contains data about your client, the history of their interactions with your company, purchase history, and any other information you add. You can access it anytime and use it to move a lead down the sales funnel. Below you can see what SendPulse’s CRM contact cards look like.

You can gather this data automatically via chatbots. Once a user makes an order, gives their phone number, or shares their preferences via a chatbot, this information will be stored in the system. You can also assign tags to segment your customers and provide them with personalized offers.

Congrats, now you know the benefits of data-driven marketing, understand how to get started, and can use this approach with SendPulse. Start increasing user engagement and sales right now!

Last Updated: 22.03.2023