Accuracy Needed For Data-Driven Marketing To Work: Analytics Expert
Marketers must do everything they can to nail customer experience from the start, said Lens10’s Naomi Le Get, who is presenting at next month’s Adobe Symposium 2016, in Sydney.
Marketers must do everything they can to nail customer experience from the start. For supermarket giant Coles, two factors have been essential: getting the analytics right to understand what customers do, and making sure the right systems are in place to bend and grow with what customers want.
“You can build once and build great, but you can’t build once and build right,” Le Get said. “What’s ‘right’ is always changing. Build so you can optimise, and, for goodness sake, make sure you allow for it in your project’s budget.”
Le Get was responsible for building the enterprise analytics function at Coles during her two-and-a-half years with the Melbourne, Australia-based chain.
“Grocery is just extreme. With your average website, you buy one thing, and the transaction takes a couple of minutes,” she told CMO.com. “With online grocery shopping, your average cart size is over 50 items, and your shopping time is about 30 minutes. Standard analytics just doesn’t work for that.”
Technical Challenges
The challenge for online grocery analytics is how to make the cart bigger and to understand sequential shopping, Le Get said.
“The order in which you purchase items makes a difference. For example, what are the types of items? What are the types of specials, or what are the best ways to structure a shop?”
While most marketers focus on harvesting their rich bank of customer data, Le Get said she believes the quality of the marketing reflecting this information back to customers is not up to standard.
For example, Le Get said recently she was searching for disability options when travelling. However, in the past month or so, all the online ads served to her have focused on adventure tourism.
For organisations with long-term customer relationships, it is critically important not to make this sort of error. For your organisation to engage in properly guided data-driven marketing, it has to conduct proper analysis of accurate data. Without a solid data foundation, marketing will simply be an exercise in trial and error–and customers won’t stay with brands who miss the mark in the future.
“There’s the potential to do incredible damage to customer relationships, especially if you’re reaching out to your customer base with some sort of targeted communication,” Le Get said. “Those customers feel they know you well, and you should know them. It’s like a partner or friend calling you the wrong name. A lot of companies are going to get that wrong before they understand the full nuances of getting it right.”