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Epsilon PeopleCloud Discovery is an ID-based insights platform for planning your growth strategy and optimizing media.

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ID-based insights platform for marketers | Epsilon

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Epsilon PeopleCloud Discovery is an ID-based insights platform for planning your growth strategy and optimizing media

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What is cross device tracking? We'll help you with DoubleClick cross device tracking to understand the true performance of your ads. ✓ View here!

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What Is Cross Device Tracking? | Epsilon

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What is cross device tracking? We’ll help you with DoubleClick cross device tracking to understand the true performance of your ads. ✓ View here!

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Want to create a customer loyalty program? We'll help you start a consumer or brand loyalty program to seamlessly integrate loyalty marketing. ✓ View here!

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Create a customer loyalty program | Epsilon

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Want to create a customer loyalty program? We'll help you start a consumer or brand loyalty program to seamlessly integrate loyalty marketing. ✓ View here!

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Customer insights are crucial for acquiring new customers and retaining existing ones. Learn more about how media monitoring can help you discover new insights.

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Since acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing customer, most businesses today understand the importance of delivering the best possible customer experience.

By doing so, they want to ensure that their customers are satisfied with the brand and the churn rate (the rate at which customers stop doing business with an entity) remains at its minimum.

Moreover, it helps to keep your customers satisfied because customer retention helps not just in maintaining a steady revenue stream but also in driving profits. Statistics reveal, for instance, that the success rate of selling to an existing customer is 60-70% , while the success rate of selling to a new customer is 5-20%.

This brings us to the question of what can businesses do to improve their customer experience. In order to deliver a good, personalized customer experience businesses need to understand their customers in as much detail as possible. So, how should businesses do that? This is where customer insights come into the picture.

What are customer insights?

Customer insights are essentially the interpretations that businesses use to understand how their customers behave, how they perceive the brand, and what do they feel about their interactions with the brand.

These insights are arrived at by analyzing customer behavior in conjunction with different types of data, and they ultimately help the businesses understand what their customers want (or need) and what would motivate them to engage in a mutually profitable relationship with the business.

Apart from improving customer experience, it is also common for brands to leverage these customer insights for driving successful marketing campaigns. For example, analyzed their own user data to derive an insight that 81% of Hinge users have never found a long-term relationship on any swiping app.

Then, they used this insight along with others to create a page called "The Dating Apocalypse" and created a campaign with the tagline, "Let's be real", to challenge the existing perception of online dating.

The insight-driven campaign was used to execute Hinge's vision of presenting an honest view of its users, far from the polished, idealized images portrayed by most dating apps.

How to collect customer insights?

The idea of collecting customer insights is not new among marketers and business owners. Traditionally, businesses collected insights through sources like surveys, focus groups, and questionnaires, however, there are some intrinsic challenges associated with these methods.

For example, all of these techniques require active customer participation, something that is difficult to achieve that in today's fast-paced world, and observer bias is common when straightforward questions are posed to the customers.

Moreover, due to the logistics involved in traditional ways of collecting insights, they focus on the customer's past experience and run the risk of using outdated data that does not reflect updates/changes to the product or customer experience.

As data collection and analysis technologies have become more and more sophisticated over the years, these traditional sources of customer insights have been augmented with digital sources.

A few common examples of these digital sources are website behavior, web search patterns, CRMs and databases, social media conversations, forums, blogs, and online reviews. Compared to traditional sources, these are quicker, cheaper, and less biased.

How to do media monitoring for gathering insights?

Media monitoring refers to the act of monitoring digital media platforms (for example, product forums, chatrooms, social media sites, etc.) to keep an eye on what is being said about your brand, your customer experience, your industry, and your competitors.

It is also, of course, an indispensable part of the strategy you will need to gather useful consumer insights.

Let's look at some steps you can take to perform effective media monitoring for gathering relevant insights:

Get the right media listening and analytics tool

If you are going to handle the media monitoring and the ensuing consumer insights analysis with an in-house team, you will need to invest in a sophisticated listening and analytics tool. This tool must fulfill the following conditions:

It should fit the unique requirements of your business.

It should cover all the platforms that are relevant to your brand.

It should allow you a good degree of flexibility with filters that allow you to narrow down specific reports.

The cost of getting your team trained and onboarded for using the tool should be financially viable for the business.

Businesses that do not want to get sidetracked from their primary goals often take the help of industry leaders like to make sure that the customer insights they gather are precise and actionable.

Take out the time to do primary audience analysis

Your primary audiences are the people who directly receive your brand communications. In most cases, therefore, primary audience analysis is aimed at your existing customers and it provides you with a clear idea of how your brand identity is currently perceived by them.

Combing through relevant media channels with search queries focussed on your brand name and specific products will give you a large sample set of people who do business with you.

Once you have collected a large enough sample set of these mentions, you can begin to analyze the people who are talking about your brand and what is it that they are saying. Investing some resources in primary audience analysis at the beginning itself will surely go a long way towards getting accurate consumer insights for your business.

Try to discover the context in which your brand is often mentioned

It is no longer enough to do basic sentiment analysis for evaluating brand perception because the ways in which people interact on the Internet have become increasingly complex.

Sentiment analysis with anything less than state-of-the-art AI capabilities is also not able to take into account the constantly evolving Internet slang that is often specific to each media platform, and it struggles with human expressions like sarcasm.

Therefore, to gather truly useful customer insights with media monitoring, you will need to understand the main topics around which your brand is often mentioned. When you have a large enough data set, you can analyze it to detect patterns of repetition, and this way you will soon enough understand the context in which people are mentioning your brand.

Sometimes, this method of gathering insights may reveal surprising results, for example, according to Linkfluence , a significant number of users bring up the brand "Nike" while discussing Asia Pacific politics. Moreover, the bulk of these users are between ages 18-24, live in the USA, and mostly talk about the brand on Instagram.

Such unique and unexpected insights can be the fuel of some truly creative and original marketing campaigns that will set your business apart from the competition. That brings us to our next point of discussion.

Derive customer insights from your competitors

When you find out which media platforms are the most relevant for you and your industry, you can also analyze your major competitors to get customer insights.

This will inform you about the brands that have the highest engagement, find the maximum number of mentions from customers, and score high on positive sentiments. Then, you can look at what they are doing right and you can modify your marketing strategy accordingly.

Also, by looking at the bigger picture of your industry as a whole, you can understand an average customer in greater detail. It will give you more context and will help you understand if the behavior of your customers is in line with the customers of other brands.

Since the whole point of these exercises is to gain actionable insights, it is always good news to find something surprising because then you can use it to improve your branding and products.

While you invest precious resources in discovering consumer insights with media monitoring, it is important that you keep a track of your progress with relevant metrics and KPIs.

It will help you understand the exact difference that customer insights are making to your business and you will be able to make future decisions while taking the ROI into consideration.

However, by leveraging your business experience with these suggestions, you will surely end up with some exciting, actionable customer insights that prove transformative for your brand.

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How to discover consumer insights using media monitoring? - Epsilon

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Since acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing customer, most businesses today understand the importance of delivering the best possible customer experience. By doing so, they want to ensure that their customers are satisfied with the brand and the churn rate (the rate at which customers stop doing business with an entity) remains at its minimum.

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For businesses to deliver a good customer experience, they need to understand the customers, they need to consider things from the customers’ point of view.

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By: Epsilon Marketing | December 1, 2021

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A Customer Insight Strategy—Why You Need it and How Can You Develop It

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For businesses to deliver a good customer experience, they need to understand the customers, they need to consider things from the customers’ point of view.

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A definitive guide to Customer Data Platforms which will tell you what they are, what are their benefits, and whether you need one.

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By: Epsilon Marketing | November 29, 2021

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What is a Customer Data Platform, and Why You Need It?

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A definitive guide to Customer Data Platforms which will tell you what they are, what are their benefits, and whether you need one.

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As cookies fall out of favor, businesses will need to focus on cross-device tracking strategies that provide a 360-degree view of the customers.

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Imagine this scenario: a person first comes across a brand through a TV advertisement, then looks at a related Facebook Ad while browsing the Internet on his laptop, opens up Amazon on his smartphone the next day to put one of the brand's products into his cart, and finally makes the transaction from his personal laptop at home.

This is a quite common scenario for us today- in 2015, Gartner estimated that 20.8 billion connected things would be in use worldwide by 2020 , and current market research shows that this estimate may have been exceeded in 2021.

As the level of synchronization between different devices keeps getting better every day, people are increasingly losing a sense of distinction between their behavior on these devices. For example, by signing in to Chrome with the same Google account you can easily access the same bookmarks, saved passwords, etc. on your phone as well as your laptop.

Brands have also taken note of this growing confluence between devices in recent years and this is reflected in the increased focus on delivering a seamless omnichannel experience. Now, new devices like smartwatches, smart TVs, and smart home assistants like Amazon's Alexa or Apple's HomePod have also started figuring as a part of the customer journey.

For brands trying to communicate with their customers in a consistent manner and deliver an experience that does not become erratic when the customers switch devices, the landscape is more complicated than ever.

Failing to adapt to the customers' cross-device activity can result in reduced customer loyalty, disconnected experiences, and a loss of ability to evaluate and improve the quality of a brand's marketing efforts.

The way out of all this chaos lies in cross device tracking that enables brands to unify their view of customer activity across all devices and adopt an individual-based view of their customers.

What is cross-device tracking and why do businesses need it?

Cross-device tracking is an alternative to the cookie-based tracking that brands have traditionally used to track their customers' online behavior. It refers to the technology that businesses can use to track their customers across different devices to obtain a unified view of the customer and avoid redundancies.

Third-party cookies used to be the primary tool at the disposal of businesses to keep a track of their customers. In addition to a few other functions, these cookies could capture customer data on a particular device and then use it the next time that customer interacted with the brand.

However, their use is seeing a steep decline ever since data giants like Google and Apple (along with popular browsers like Firefox and Safari) made announcements regarding their intention to stop the use of third-party cookies . Moreover, while cookies found ample use on desktops, they have generally proven to be ineffective within smartphone and tablet browsers because their functionality is restricted in specific apps.

Cross-device tracking with a people-based approach can perform better than cookies because it combines identifiers (hashed email addresses, IP addresses, loyalty membership numbers, account usernames, mobile ad IDs, etc.) across all devices and channels.

By mapping all these identifiers and the engagement data contained in them to individual customers, marketers can better understand their customers and target them with the right communication at the right time.

Following are the major benefits that a people-based approach to cross-device tracking can bring to your business.

A better understanding of the customer journey

According to statistics cited by , smartphone usage is expected to continue to increase in the coming years, breaching seven billion in 2024 before rising further to 7.5 billion by 2026.

This will mean that even more customer-brand interactions will take place on mobile phones in the near future and marketers who continue to depend on cookies will miss out on a whole lot of customer insights.

By leveraging cross-device tracking, however, marketers can discover an individual customer's behavior and needs across screens, which enables them to respond appropriately.

A more precise way of targeting the customers

Suppose that you want to show an ad to a customer at an interval of 2 days for 3 weeks because that specific frequency has proved beneficial for you in the past. But, without being able to recognize this customer as the same person across all his devices, how will you control the number of times your ad is shown to him?

Brands often run the risk of bombarding their customers with the same ads over and over again on different devices, which has an overall negative impact on brand identity. Moreover, since you treat the customer's interaction through different devices as distinct customers, your data will be erroneous and you will not be able to measure the performance of your campaign accurately.

All these problems can be solved by adopting a people-centered cross-device tracking strategy that will allow you to target your customers precisely with messages that actually add value to their experience with the brand. By reducing the amount of resources wasted on refining redundant data you will also be able to focus more on improving your brand's presence in the market.

A seamless customer experience across devices

Customers today have high expectations from brands and are quick to explore alternatives if these expectations are not met. As a business, you cannot afford to frustrate your customers and your aim should be to deliver a customer experience that does not merely satisfy, but delights them.

For instance, a customer who is browsing shoes on Amazon's mobile app will continue to see relevant recommendations for shoes when he accesses Amazon's website from his laptop. Such seamless integration between different devices feels natural to the customers and brands can only deliver it by using cross-device tracking in a way that focuses on the individuals using these devices.

The road to the future

With wearable tech becoming quite common and most of the devices around us turning "smart", it must be quite clear to business owners and marketers that the road to the future will be traversed by focusing on people, rather than types of devices or screen sizes.

By employing deterministic matching to associate personal identifiers such as email addresses, physical addresses, IP addresses, phone numbers, etc. to an individual, brands can create ID graphs to identify customers across devices.

Doing so shifts the focus to a people-based approach and also allows businesses to use capabilities like cross device conversion tracking that go a long way towards saving resources and optimizing performance evaluations.

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Why Your Business Needs a People-Based Approach to Cross-Device Tracking

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Imagine this scenario: a person first comes across a brand through a TV advertisement, then looks at a related Facebook Ad while browsing the Internet on his laptop, opens up Amazon on his smartphone the next day to put one of the brand's products into his cart, and finally makes the transaction from his personal laptop at home.

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We create enriched customer experiences that drive performance at the individual and business level, enabling marketing built on proof, not promises.

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The leader in outcome-based marketing | Epsilon

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We create enriched customer experiences that drive performance at the individual and business level, enabling marketing built on proof, not promises.