Validate and Enrich your Customer Profiles with Declared Data

Think of the last time you had a conversation with a close friend. Compared to talking with a stranger, wasn’t speaking with your friend easier and more enjoyable – simply because you knew them so well?

The same is true with your customers. When you know your customers, you’re in a much better position to decide what to say to them, when, and how.

The key to maximizing your relationships with customers relies on great customer profiles. Companies that know what their clients want and expect can personalize customer experiences, creating loyalty and repeat business.

While two-thirds of consumers are demanding personalized experiences, in order to deliver, brands need to fully understand who their customers are. They need robust customer profiles.

But building and sustaining these profiles is tricky.

Out-of-date, inaccurate, or insufficient data can dramatically impact the quality of your profiles and the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. Even if you get everything right, your marketing is only as good as the data behind it..

In order to offer great experiences and increase marketing effectiveness, you have to ensure your profiles are up-to-date and comprehensive.

How do you begin?

Enhance Your Customer Profiles with Declared Data

The best way to ensure your customer profiles are accurate and up-to-date is by validating and enriching your existing customer data with declared data.

By now you’re likely aware of declared data (click here if you need a refresher). Declared data is a type of first-party data that has been willingly and explicitly shared by an individual consumer, often about their motivations, intentions, interests, and preferences.

While first-party data is difficult to capture at scale, declared data is different. Declared data helps you keep your data accurate, relevant, and up-to-date, because it’s coming directly from your audience.

Data Validation

Bad data often gets in the way of great marketing.

In our new report, Overcoming the Privacy vs. Personalization Paradox, we found that data bought and sold by third-party data vendors is only 34% accurate.

A study by Digiday found that 82% of marketers don’t believe that third-party data is reliable, largely due to its inaccuracies. Meanwhile, brands are spending upwards of $20 billion a year on this unreliable merchandise.

Why is a problem? Because making indirect inferences about consumers opens the door for false assumptions. Just because someone looked at a page for golf clubs doesn’t mean they like golf.

Blindly trusting data can lead to major mishaps. In fact, poor quality data costs brands $3.1 trillion a year in the US alone.

Validating Profiles with Declared Data

How can you avoid these expensive mishaps? Validate your data.

As a marketer, you likely already know the top three customer data points you’d like to have always up-to-date and accurate. Keeping them that way, however, poses a challenge.

Just like in real life, customer profiles can change. Motivations, intentions and interests are not set in stone.

Capturing and activating declared data empowers you to create and sustain digital conversations at scale with all your customers, boosting their lifetime value and brand affinity as you learn from them. Because declared data comes directly from your audience, it is more reliable, timely, and accurate.

Example: Data Validation in Action

An airline continually captures declared data on its top three most valuable customer data points: How far in advance fiers book, who they’re traveling with, and if they’d ever upgrade to first class.

By validating these key data points, the airline can make sure that fliers only receive the most relevant marketing emails, app notifications, and offers.

Data Enrichment

Rich customer profiles enable you to talk to customers like you know them and deliver personalized experiences.

These personalized experiences can do wonders for marketing effectiveness. McKinsey research revealed that personalization can deliver five to eight times the ROI on marketing spend and lift sales by 10% or more.

Even so, consumers now expect personalization. Adobe found 67% of consumers think it’s important for brands to automatically adjust content based on their current context and a whopping 42% get annoyed when their content isn’t personalized.

Enriching Profiles with Declared Data

In order to meet customers expectations, marketers should create ongoing, two-way digital dialogues that resemble conversations customers would have in person.

One way to do this is through declared data capture.

Begin by choosing 5-10 things you want to know about your customers that you don’t already know. Then start having digital conversations.

With declared data, you can achieve both quality and quantity, enriching your customer profiles with all information you want to know about your customers.

Example: Data Enrichment in Action

A women’s eCommerce brand launches Jebbit experiences to create and maintain style profiles for its shoppers, always making sure their style preferences are up-to-date. The brand already has shoppers’ emails, zip codes, and transaction histories, but wants to uncover the “why behind the buy.”

Using declared data capture they can dig into the reasons women shop with the brand, when they want to make their next purchase, and what seasonal apparel they need. They enrich shopper profiles with this declared data to power the most relevant, cross-channel marketing.

Get Started

Ready to get started enhancing your customer profiles with declared data?

Jebbit’s approach to declared data empowers you to create and sustain digital conversations at scale with all your customers, boosting their lifetime value and brand affinity as you learn from them. Our platform sustains attention on mobile devices and dynamically has these conversations. Leveraging each moment of consumer attention you get enables you to round out your picture of every customer in your database and acquire more customers while understanding them better from the start.