Do You Know What’s on Your Customer’s Christmas Wishlist?

On the eighth day of D365mas Santa gave to me…

… a way to enrich my customer data with Customer Insights in order to learn what they are hoping to find under the tree or in their stocking this Christmas.

It’s that time of year again when there’s a good chance you may find yourself wandering up and down the aisles of department stores looking for the perfect gift for each person on your Christmas list. Sometimes it is difficult to know what grandma or your strange nephew from Dubuque would want to find wrapped up under the tree.

Many marketers face a similar challenge when trying to understand what would appeal to their customers and prospects. Fortunately, Microsoft has them covered with the enrichment features of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.

The enrichment feature powerfully combines billions of signals from Microsoft’s proprietary data, analyzes your customer profiles, and uses advanced machine learning to identify which of your customers might have an interest in a specific brand or product category based on people with similar ages, genders or locations.

Let’s take a look at an example based on a company that provides investment products and services.

After using Customer Insights to unify your customer data from across your various data sources – for example, your CRM system, ERP system, e-commerce platform, and web traffic – you can enrich the unified customer profiles to see which brand or product category each of your customers might have an affinity for, and then use that enriched data to create intelligent segments for your marketing efforts.

In this example, we are going to configure Customer Insights to look at all of our customers by age, gender, and zip code, and then specify some competing brands and product categories to see which of our customers might also like those brands. Customer Insights will perform this analysis and enrichment using Microsoft’s predictive profiles from millions of other real people and compare them to your customers with similar profiles.

As you type, Microsoft lets you see what kinds of data they have available for enrichment. You can choose leading brands that have offerings similar to your company’s, as well as general categories of products or services.

Tip: If there is no data available for a brand, you can follow a link to suggest that Microsoft add this brand to their proprietary dataset. Clicking the “Suggest this brand” link will automatically send it to Microsoft to consider.

Once you have selected up to five of the brands and categories, you simply save your settings and click the Run button to see the results.

When it completes, Customer Insights will tell you how many customer profiles have been enriched. You can view this information directly on individual customer profiles:

You can also get a high-level view of how many of your customers have affinities for these categories and brands on the home page:

Lastly, you can make your customer Christmas list by creating a segment of your customers who have affinities for one of the product categories or brands you selected. Here’s a simple example of defining a segment based on customers who are likely to be interested in “Retirement Planning”, and they have an email address so we can deliver a very targeted email campaign to them:

The result is our segment which means we now have a great idea about what might be on our customers’ Christmas Wish List and our marketers can stop wandering up and down the aisles looking for the perfect strategy and content to reach them!

Let’s give our marketers a Christmas present too, and push this segment directly into their Dynamics 365 Marketing instance! To do this, all we need to do is add the Dynamics Marketing address as an export destination:

Customer Insights will not only help you make your Christmas Wish List, but it will also be Santa’s helper for your marketing team so they can finish their holiday marketing early and get to that ugly sweater party on time!

Ready to talk about what Customer Insights can do for your organization? Contact the Elves at Hitachi Solutions today!