How to get a 360-degree customer view & scale personalization

Today, the number of digital touchpoints customers have with brands is only increasing. And, with customer information locked away in many different systems (e.g., email marketing software, analytics platforms, CRMs, customer survey tools, and so on), it’s often difficult to get a single source of truth and a complete picture of each customer.

You can solve this problem by creating an accurate 360-degree customer view. In this post, we’ll:

• Discuss what a 360-degree customer view is.
• Explore the benefits of having a complete view of all your customers (and anonymous visitors).
• Show how you can create a 360-degree customer view to nurture your customer relationships, create more meaningful relationships, and generate more revenue.

Insider’s customer data platform (CDP) helps mid-size and enterprise companies form 360-degree customer views by gathering customer data from online and offline sources in one place. From there, our personalization and automation tools help brands activate that data across channels like email, SMS, WhatsApp, on-site, and more. 

Click here to get a demo with our team or here to see how Insider works.

What is a 360-degree customer view?

A 360-degree customer view is a collection of all your customer data in one place. It allows organizations to track all customer interactions in one place and form a complete picture of the customer by aggregating all relevant data, like contact information, survey responses, purchase histories, and much more.

For example, the screenshot below shows a 360-degree view of a customer in Insider:

While most brands have access to this customer information already, the various data points are scattered across different systems, such as email and SMS marketing platforms, social listening tools, customer relationship management systems (CRMs), customer support software, and more. 

A 360-degree view gives you all of your customer intelligence in one place, so you don’t have to manually stitch together data from different solutions and constantly jump between them. Enabled by a customer data platform (CDP), a 360-degree customer view lets you easily find and leverage important characteristics, including:

• Basic customer information, such as names, email addresses, phone numbers, and demographic details.
• Behavioral and interaction data, such as website visits, product purchases, visited items, and channel interactions (e.g., on email, social media, SMS, and WhatsApp).
• Attitudinal data, such as survey responses, net promoter scores (NPS), customer effort scores (CES), customer expectations, and preferences.

The benefits of a 360-degree customer view

The 360-degree customer view serves as a foundation for creating personalized, cross-channel experiences. It’s based on all the interactions customers have with your brand, as well as their interests and preferences. It also features both basic information and insights that you can act on through personalization and journey orchestration.

For example, the 360-degree customer view above, built by Insider’s customer data platform (CDP), shows the customer’s reachable channels, contact information, last visited product, last purchased product, total customer value, top visited categories, and other information. 

With these insights readily accessible, marketers can orchestrate personalized cross-channel customer journeys at scale. Below, we’ll explore multiple use cases and show you how the 360-degree customer view supports marketers’ needs. 

We’ll be using Insider’s Actionable CDP, personalization suite, and automation capabilities to demonstrate exactly how unified customer views provide a solid foundation for successful cross-channel marketing. 

1. Understand customer behaviors, characteristics, and preferences

Collecting behavior, demographic, and transactional data in a 360-degree view gives you a single source of truth for understanding customer characteristics, behaviors, and preferences—the foundation for creating and engaging key customer segments.

For example, you can find out which customers are not only interested in watches but also which brands and prices they have an affinity for based on their browsing behaviors. You can then develop a campaign for customers with an affinity for discounts and drive revenue through cross-sells, upsells, and limited-time offers.

Based on information about NPS scores, you can push user data to your company’s customer service platforms to address grievances with those customers or put them on campaign suppression lists to prevent contact fatigue and churn.

Insider’s enriched 360-degree customer views offer over 120 attributes to help you deliver personalized customer experiences at scale. They include:

• Standard characteristics: Demographics, devices, platforms, behaviors, etc.
• Predefined audiences: Insider automatically creates predefined audiences, including cart abandoners, product page abandoners, people who’ve interacted with your brand on a specific channel, and much more.
• AI-powered predictive audiences: Insider’s AI also analyzes your customer data to come up with predictions around discount affinity, likelihood to purchase, likelihood to churn, and other dimensions automatically.

You can combine standard, predefined, and AI-powered predictive audiences to create highly targeted segments for your campaigns. For example, airBaltic harnessed the power of Insider’s AI-powered user segmentation to personalize its home page for different audience segments. By personalizing the on-site experience for different customer segments, the company boosted conversions on its home page by 5.8%.

2. Get smarter predictions with AI-powered marketing segments

A 360-degree customer view provides a foundation of data that allows predictive AI capabilities to help you understand where each user is in their customer journey and how they will likely behave.

For example, Insider can predict a customer’s likelihood to purchase or churn, discount affinity, and projected lifetime value based on their previous behaviors and real-time actions. 

Our platform can then help you create campaigns across various channels (e.g., email, SMS, push notifications, online ads, and so on) to reach and convert these customers in a cost-effective way.

Many companies use Insider’s AI-powered predictive segments to focus their ad spend, increase conversion rates, and lower customer acquisition costs (CAC). U.S. Polo Assn. used this strategy to increase its conversion rate by 311% and decrease CAC by 58%. Targeting only users with the highest purchase intent ensured that U.S. Polo Assn. spent its budget only in areas where it would have the greatest impact.

3. Power your personalization strategy with reliable data 

By helping you better understand your audience, the 360-degree customer view allows you to confidently create and launch personalization strategies across channels.

It gives you a reliable set of data — including contact details, purchase history, browsing history, and other interactions — so you can leverage the predictive analysis capabilities of platforms like Insider and personalize every step of the customer journey.

The unified customer profile guarantees you’re working with reliable data instead of missing valuable customer insights or interactions that would otherwise be stored and isolated in another system.

Insider lets you tailor every element of the customer journey to users’ behaviors, interests, and preferences. Our platform creates unified profiles for your customers and lets you scale personalization across 12+ natively-supported channels.

Instead of merely personalizing across email and SMS (like simpler personalization tools), Insider’s on-site personalization lets you personalize the banners, categories, and product recommendations that customers see. This ensures you improve conversions, generate more revenue, and maximize your marketing spend.

Retail chain Dover Saddlery used the 360-degree customer view that Insider’s customer data platform (CDP) provides and delivered personalized experiences across their desktop and mobile sites, improving conversions by 5%, driving $2M in incremental revenue, and achieving an ROI of 29x.

4. Orchestrate customer journeys across relevant channels

The 360-degree customer view helps you orchestrate consistent customer journeys across channels.

For example, Insider’s customer journey builder, Architect, lets you create and automate personalized journeys based on your customer data across 12+ channels, including web push, app push, email, SMS, on-site, and more. Its built-in AI capabilities and personalization features help you create connected experiences at scale. These features include:

• Send-time optimization (STO), which analyzes engagement data and automatically sends each message at the time a customer will most likely engage.
• Next-best channel predictions, which analyze your customers’ past behaviors and automatically use the channel they’re most likely to engage on.
• A/B testing winner auto-selection, which automatically directs users to the winning path in your A/B tests based on a winning metric that you select (e.g., open rate) and the calculation duration (e.g., 30 days).

British sports equipment brand Slazenger used Insider’s wide range of supported channels and AI-powered journey orchestration capabilities to create contextual messages across multiple channels. In doing so, the company recovered 40% of potentially lost revenue and increased its customer acquisition by 700% in as little as eight weeks.

“We couldn’t believe how quick the cart abandonment campaign was to set up and the results have been incredible. Architect helped us tap back into engaged shoppers and convince them to complete their purchases — a simple but incredibly effective tactic for increasing revenue. We’ve seen a phenomenal return on investment already!” – eCommerce Director at Slazenger

5. Maximize your marketing efforts and retain customers

360-degree customer views provide the foundation for strengthening customer loyalty, increasing retention rates, and building long-standing customer satisfaction. They ensure you’re always basing your efforts on reliable customer data and making the most of your time and marketing budget.

As a result, your teams won’t need to jump between multiple platforms to identify basic customer insights or interactions. They also won’t have to spend tons of engineering hours stitching together disparate systems. By having all your customer data in one place, your teams can focus on improving customer retention, average order value (AOV), customer lifetime value (CLV), and return on ad spend (ROAS).

For example, fashion brand NA-KD increased customer lifetime value by 25% and achieved 72x ROI in 12 months using Insider’s data aggregation and personalization features. 

To see how other brands have used Insider’s capabilities to improve their conversion rates, AOV, CLV, and ROAS, check out our library of case studies.

Building a 360-degree view of the customer with a customer data platform (CDP)

In the early days of digital marketing, 360-degree customer views were often unattainable. Companies had to find, clean, transform, and enrich their existing data across tens of software applications and potentially thousands of interactions per customer. They also had to aggregate that data into a single source of truth, which required vast technical skills and lots of engineering hours.

With the rise of customer data platforms (CDPs), companies can now easily aggregate data from all these sources, including CRMs, CMSs, point-of-sale systems, APIs, analytics tools, and more, and develop a 360-degree customer view. This helps marketers understand customer needs without having to navigate different systems and constantly overcome data silos.

A CDP with built-in personalization and automation tools for various channels, such as Insider, allows you to activate your customer data and create highly personalized customer touchpoints across channels.

With Insider’s Actionable CDP and 360-degree customer view, you can:

• Connect relevant online and offline data. Insider’s CDP can connect to 100+ online and offline data sources, unifying purchases at offline locations, email marketing data, website interactions, and much more into one accurate profile.
• Predict and optimize with ease. Insider’s AI-powered intent engine can use customer data and predictive analytics to highlight a customer’s preferred channels, recommend optimal communication times, indicate customer likelihood to purchase, and more.
• Create personalized journeys across 12+ digital channels. Insider provides native support for web push, app push, email, SMS, WhatsApp, on-site, and more, so you can orchestrate omnichannel marketing campaigns without transferring customer data to other platforms.
• Create profiles for anonymous visitors. In addition to known customers, Insider automatically creates profiles for anonymous users, which can help you personalize their experience in real-time (e.g., through on-site personalization). This feature helps brands lower customer acquisition costs and build even more detailed profiles once customers start sharing their contact information.

Get a 360-degree view of your customers with Insider’s CDP

Insider’s customer data platform can help you easily develop a 360-degree customer view. Our platform tops G2’s Fall 2023 reports as the #1 leader in seven categories, including customer data platforms, with unbeatable support and a 100/100 user satisfaction score. It’s also a leader based on surveys by Gartner, Forrester, and IDC.

Our platform is ideal for mid-size and enterprise companies looking to form 360-degree customer views and develop individualized, cross-channel customer experiences. Insider’s support team will help you quickly get the right data into the system so you can focus on segmenting your audience, uncovering valuable insights, and driving revenue.

With your data in one place, Insider’s CDP can be your single source of truth. It can help you connect what’s disconnected to predict customer behavior, personalize your brand campaigns, and grow your business.Click here to book a demo with our team and learn how Insider’s 360-degree customer view can help you reach your revenue goals today.