Your Customer Is More Than a Collection of Data. Get a Holistic View!

Holistic approaches are widely known in medicine, and they are spreading to other areas such as education and business. A holistic marketer views the customer as a complete person, not just as a data point coming from a particular platform, and builds an overall view of the customer’s tastes, demographics, and history when providing a unified experience on all channels.

Our report, “The Holistic Picture,” features insights from leading marketing CTOs, CEOs, and Adobe analysts as well as typical use scenarios to help marketers take the steps needed to build the holistic views of their customers that are the foundation of unified experiences.

The Journey Begins

Imagine living in a small town and going to the general store. You are greeted by the manager who points out a special on an item you frequently purchase. Maybe it was selling out quickly, and he even set one aside for you. The manager and staff have established a personal relationship with you based on many casual conversations. You feel good about this store. It is like having a personal agent to find you the best deals and products.

Marketers can create this type of experience across all of their customer bases without hiring a staff of thousands. It starts by realizing the value of integrating data from diverse sources to create a resource that is more than the sum of its parts.

Unified Experience

Marketing should exist for the customer’s sake, not the business’s bottom line. Can your product truly help your customer solve problems? Great. Make sure you know them well enough to understand what those problems might be and offer a truly relevant solution.

The journey toward a holistic approach continues by using the information you have integrated to market from the point of view of the customer. Often, this means creating a unified experience across all platforms as well as ensuring that customers are not peppered with disjointed marketing from isolated departments.

Establishing the Single Customer View in Four Steps

• Be creative in identifying your relevant customer-data sources and in reaching out to providers of third-party data to help you complete the picture.
• Turn your data into the insights that transform your customer from a set of numbers to a complete person.
• Put away your crystal ball. You do not have to guess what will work or what you should put in to A/B testing. Test the options based on insights from the data. Test correlations to see if they lead to causal relationships. Real-time testing can give you results in hours instead of weeks.
• Take action on these insights with automated personalization. Once you have identified the important trends, let an automated system deliver personalized messages as soon as these trends are spotted.

Sailing on: Steady as She Goes

You will build a sustainable journey toward holistic marketing if you start simple and add more as you build skills. Like the storekeeper in that timeless small town, you will learn to recognize the customers and give them the most relevant experiences based on their preferences and needs.

Ready to see more? Get details along with actionable insights and use scenarios in “The Holistic Picture.”