Marketing in the age of Big Data

One of the marketing concepts that for various reasons is gaining more and more notoriety is Customer Retention, or Customer Retention. The idea is elementary, it consists of placing the customer at the centre of the organisation's marketing with the aim of extending its Life Cycle.
Concepts such as CRM, Lifetime Value, Return on Customer o customer loyaltygravitate around this idea.
 
While it is true that marketers place a great deal of value on the loyalty strategies y customer retentionIt is also true that many of the leading companies in their respective industries lack a strong commitment in this field. And not only that, but a bad design and implementation of the relational strategies produce results that fall short of the expectations placed on those same strategies.
 
Two recent surveys of marketers in the United States have been published on the idea of customer retention.
 
The first of these was conducted in March 2012 by marketing technology and services provider Acxiom and Loyalty 360, an association of relationship marketing professionals in the US.
The main conclusions reached are:
 
 
- Only 49% of the executives surveyed said they knew who their most loyal customers.
- While the vast majority of respondents (84.5%) claimed to carry out marketing strategies to retain their customers, only half considered these strategies to be beneficial to their company.
- The main reasons for poor customer data collection are, for 52%, budget constraints, for 49% lack of IT support, and for 48% lack of adequate tools.
 
The second survey The survey, conducted by Retail Systems Research, asked retail marketers about the level of development of relationship and loyalty strategies in their organisations.
The most significant data emerging from the survey are as follows
- 51% of the respondents considered the customer retention The challenges are becoming increasingly difficult, and will therefore place greater demands on loyalty strategies.
- Only 56% of the respondents believe that their company has identified and knows its employees, and that they are aware of their best customers.
- 60 % of the surveyed professionals from companies with an annual sales growth of more than 5% consider that a better understanding of the user, based on adequate data collection, contributes positively to the company's results. However, this fact is accepted by 44% of respondents from companies with sales growth of less than 5% per year.
 
In two parallel papers, IDC and Mashable predict that the amount of manageable data in the world will double every year.
It seems clear that companies able to collect, house, process, analyse and make decisions based on data will gain a significant competitive advantage over their competitors.
Indicative data on what a user is interested in, which channels of engagement with brands they prefer, when and through which devices they access media, or which advertising formats bring the best customers, are just a small sample of the multiplicity of data available to marketers.
Knowing how to handle, analyse and interpret them in order to better understand the consumer is the great marketing challenge of our time.