Killer campaigns based on watertight customer data – that’s what marketing is all about, right? Well, not if you’re spending all your time grappling to collate customer information from a myriad of out-of-date technologies that don’t integrate.

This is a daily challenge for many marketing teams, and they face a stark choice: spend a fortune on a lengthy programme to upgrade their old technology or put up with using incomplete data to make decisions.

However, there is another option: put a single solution at the heart of your business that collects all customer data in a single place, giving clear and detailed insights on how customers are behaving.

Boost your Marketing

Imagine if you could know exactly when every customer preferred eating, what their average spend was, or what might attract them to eat at times when you are desperate to increase bookings.

Most catering businesses are just guessing – they push out marketing emails or advertise and hope people turn up. If the restaurant is empty (or full), they don’t necessarily know why.

But what if every time a customer touches the business via a digital channel that information is captured in one place, ready to be analysed and deployed in campaigns?

This would allow you to evaluate your customers through a new lens. You’ll understand how customers behave and build targeted campaigns that speak directly to different subsets of customers.

Event-Stream: Connected Tech, Targeted Campaigns

Event-Stream connects all outbound and inbound channels, no matter how old or clunky they might be and captures all customer actions in one place. This data can be used to understand how customers behave – this insight helps build campaigns that speak directly to customers.

Event-Stream enables users to take this data and build precisely targeted campaigns plans that can be executed through integrations with current providers.

How does it work?

1. By capturing customer actions as events to be analysed rather than data to be shoehorned into a database, Event-Stream opens up considerable new sales and marketing opportunities.
2. Development of middleware between multiple systems and the database allows customer interactions to be stored individually as events.
3. A stream analytics database allows this data to be analysed in real-time and produces a huge range of actionable insights.
4. Integration with multiple systems enables campaigns to be automated.

Single customer view

Every time a customer engages with your business, Event-Stream captures it in one record, enabling you to build a detailed view of their behaviour. We call this the single customer view, and it is at the heart of the system’s ability to connect tech and provide actionable data.

Event-Stream starts by capturing every customer interaction from all digital channels in its middleware. Once the data is collected in its most raw form, it can be assigned to one specific customer.

Assigning data to a customer requires a key so every touchpoint can be matched to a single user – normally an email address.

By capturing three pieces of data for every touchpoint (what happened, when it happened and who instigated the touchpoint), we’re able to gain incredible customer insights. There are a range of benefits, including:

Improve customer experience: When customers interact with the business, they are recognised, so they don’t need to log-in or state new preferences every time. This reduces the friction and makes them more likely to engage with your digital channels.

Build customer understanding: By having more data on customers, you can better understand their preferences and habits. This enables you to utilise more targeted marketing campaigns and content to customers while giving you the data to make broader conclusions about your whole customer cohort.

Highly-targeted campaigns: Understanding your customers on a deeper level provides the opportunity to build out more detailed customer segments. With more granular segments, marketing can be laser-focused to address key customer needs.

Improve compliance: By having one view of a customer, you can easily assess what communication they have opted into and make sure you’re only communicating through these channels.

James is the Managing Director of Methodworx, a highly-specialised development consultancy that helps hospitality businesses use customer behaviour to make better sales and marketing decisions.