Predictive Marketing

Chapter 3Get to Know Your Customers First: Build Complete Customer Profiles

Before you can leverage customer data to find new growth opportunities or hypertarget your customers, you first need to aggregate, clean, and analyze that data. This is no easy task. If yours is like most companies, customer data is all over the place, full of errors and duplicates and inaccessible to everyday marketers. Fortunately, predictive technology can help clean up your data mess. Your information technology (IT) department and potentially outside vendors can also help.

Bosch understood that its customers were no longer only home improvement retailers like Home Depot and Lowe's. Instead, the rise of online shopping allowed their end customers to go directly to its website and engage with the brand, without ever stepping foot into a big box store. That created a challenge for Bosch, which had limited insight into the end-user data of who was buying their products.

Bosch realized it had to do a better job marketing directly to its end customers, but to do so it needed to get a better handle on its customer data. Like many companies, Bosch did not have an internal data team and was relying on an outside service provider. That meant that for every question about customers, it had to ask the external provider to create a new report. So Bosch decided to bring its customer data in-house by using modern cloud-based software, rather than to rely on an outside consulting firm. Now, the company can aggregate ...