Acoustic has announced the results of a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Acoustic, which finds there are significant gaps in brands’ customer data strategies amid the turbulent privacy landscape.
The study, Strengthen Customer Retention And Engagement With Behavioral Data, explores how over 1,200 marketing decision-makers collect customer behavioral signals and apply the data to their brands’ customer engagement and retention strategies.
As brands look to gain visibility into customer engagement and grow customer lifetime value, being able to collect behavioral data and derive insights from it is critical to optimizing the customer journey. Yet the study found that marketers struggle to leverage this data at all stages of the customer journey, limiting the personalization they can provide.
Forrester’s key findings include:
- Three-quarters of respondents (75%) say collecting real-time experience data is critical to the business, but less than half (47%) are currently collecting this data.
By understanding customer behaviors in the moment, marketers can better meet their needs at the right time in their purchase journey. - Only 45% of respondents are doing any kind of journey orchestration using customer behavioral signals. With marketers mostly focusing on the early stages of the customer journey, this leaves a substantial gap in creating data-driven experiences at each touchpoint with a brand.
- Personalizing customer outreach (67%) and analyzing customer data and signals (66%) are among the top challenges facing marketers today.
Notably, respondents are also concerned with marketing automation (73%) and audience management and segmentation (69%). This indicates that marketers lack the necessary tools to create personalized customer experiences based on consumers’ behaviors.
“As brands attempt to navigate the changing privacy landscape, investing in first-party data strategies that enable privacy-compliant personalization is critical. Yet Forrester’s findings demonstrate that marketers continue to struggle with collecting and leveraging customer behavioral signals throughout the customer journey,” said Mark Cattini, CEO of Acoustic.
“Without the right technology and strategy in place, this gap will only grow as third-party cookies deprecate and marketers lose visibility into customer engagement.”