Five benefits of data-based decision-making

Yet – as closing stores and empty shop fronts across the world have proven – the majority of these revamps fail to make a fundamental difference. Why? Because they’re not grounded in data science.

Why is data necessary?

The true value of data isn’t in the storage or the amount of data. Rather, the true value lies in an organisation’s ability to generate insights based on the data in their enterprise. Yet, numerous organisations struggle to maximise their data.

For any organisation to embrace data-based decision making, data and analytics needs to sit within the heart of its operations. This means using the right tools and technology to conduct advanced analytics, discover actionable insights, make recommendations and deliver transformation change.

Investing in your data strategy can deliver profitable incremental sales growth through insight driven customer contact strategy and decision making.

Here are five benefits of data-based decision-making.

1. Create a multi-channel approach

Any successful multi-channel marketing strategy has data at its heart. Use big data and analytics to define the customer journey in its current and future state, assess how your customers are shopping across each purchase channel (including in-store and online) and tailor your communications accordingly. By enhancing transaction data with third-party sources, such as geodemographic data, you can also transform your approach to planning site locations, store formats and both macro and micro space allocation.

2. Discover the ideal promotional mix

Data science, properly applied, should be used to inform a full review of your business’s pricing and promotions strategy, to ensure that it’s in line with your customers’ habits and preferences. Understand the products your customers love and why they love them, learn which customers are ‘cherry pickers’ and which are most driven by price and see how your prices and compare with competitors and which shopping missions you fulfil.

3. Transform your CRM strategy

Segmenting your customers by their passions and motivations, as well as their purchasing behaviour, leads to a far more effective CRM strategy. By understanding what makes your customers tick and adopting a test and learn approach to marketing communications, you can spark relevant conversations and engage with both customers and prospects in a more compelling manner.

4. Build a truly modern loyalty programme

Increase your brand relevance to drive long-term loyalty and engagement. Use analytics to understand how loyal your customers currently are, then adapt your CRM strategy accordingly (as above) to boost customer loyalty without sacrificing margin.

5. Improve your Business Operations

Data is just as helpful when engaging those inside of your business as it is when communicating with your customers. Every employee should be empowered to contribute towards your new, customer-first culture and operating model – and that might mean investing in people, training and technology to evolve into a fully data-led business. Ensure you implement best practice and use of technology and processes to remove risk and improve certainty. If you follow the steps above, you’ll soon gain hearts and minds across the business through a series of quick wins.

Starcount relies on our tried and tested DIAL Model (Data, Insight, Action, Loyalty) that delivers both scalable and sustainable market dominance and ensures that the business transformation process is supported by core KPIs, appropriate governance and suitable contingency planning. Learn more about DIAL and how you can put data-based decision making at the heart of your business.