Today's customers expect brands to make them feel like more than just an anonymous buyer in order to earn their loyalty. Because personalization is one of the biggest factors influencing customers’ decisions today, customer data is a hotter commodity than ever for marketers.

93% of marketers cited integration of disparate marketing applications and gaining a complete view of their customer as a major focus for this year. The question is, why haven't more marketers already integrated their data? After all, a complete customer view is the backbone on which unparallelled customer experiences and engagements are built. Gathering data, and using it to form a successful strategy, can sound like an insurmountable task. The roadmap to an effective marketing strategy isn't as difficult as you may think though. Here’s how to shape your data into a personalized marketing strategy, one step at a time.

Start with the Data You Have Right Now
The data you collect from your customers must be the foundation of your company’s marketing strategy because it reflects their personas and their buying traits. Try to answer these questions with the data housed in your current CRM:

• How many times does someone engage with you, on average, before making a purchase?
• On what channels are customers engaging with your brand?
• What was the last point of engagement before their purchase?
• How did they first engage with you?

Without these answers, you can’t trace your customers’ path backwards from the point of sale, through each interaction with your company. The ability to harvest these insights from your CRM is a key component in mapping the customer journey. This map offers a deeper understanding of what appeals to individual customers and will reveal where the gaps lie in your engagement strategy.

Gather More Data
Appealing to an individual customer with effective marketing personalization is powerful. The more data you have on a customer and on your audience, the more detailed your map of the customer's journey will be. Think about this: who would you rather make a purchase from, someone who tells you how amazing their product is, or someone who knows you have encountered a problem and has a solution to solve it for you?

Collecting the data you need in order to be the second person is step one. Next, you need to integrate your CRM’s data with the functions across your business to give you a 360 degree view of your customers. Integrating Salesforce Sales and Service clouds is an example of how to create this customer data source. By viewing a customer’s marketing engagements, buying habits, communication preferences, and customer service history in one place, you gain a robust understanding of their relationship with your brand and how it extends throughout your business. This data empowers you to market to each customer based on their individual pain points, transforming you into a trusted advisor, rather than a random sales message.

Use the Complete View of Your Customer
With integrated customer data, automating personalized marketing is seamless. If a customer tweets about being hungry, and you offer a food delivery service, a response to that tweet can be automatically sent, encouraging that customer to place an order with you. If a customer reads multiple product reviews without making a purchase, you can send them a personalized recommendation based on their previous purchases. Automating the generation of these interactions simplifies the customization of these messages and ensures customers feel valued and understood by your company. 

Transform your company into the trusted advisor your customers want and expect today. The vision of a brand that provides a consistent experience for customers across devices and platforms doesn’t have to be a thing of the future. Start today with these basic principles. For help understanding your customers’ journeys, speak to one of our marketing experts or download our eBook How Marketers Use Salesforce to Design Data-Driven Customer Experiences.