Winning New Customers By Knowing Your Data

It’s not every day you get to speak to a CMO who is in the midst of a whirlwind global tour to meet her customers from all over. Jenn Chase, CMO, SAS Institute, was raring to go, properly caffeinated for the day, and showed no signs of jet lag as we got together in the Singapore office for our catch-up.

Jenn started off with sharing her three key pillars to SAS’ marketing strategy – brand awareness, demand generation, and customer engagement. She emphasized on creating lasting relationships as a critical element in her work, and how trust is the foundation.

Since the pandemic, SAS’ customers have shifted the way the data transformation leader engages with them. It is no surprise that most have gone digital, and that the buyer’s journey is now primarily hands-off, with customers getting further along the sales cycle without any human interaction. This meant that marketing had to be even more conscious of customers’ habits, how they’re wired, and what is to be expected of them.

“As marketers, we have to be more aware and understanding of our customers. So that we can go to them, whenever they are within the customer’s journey.”

Data at the heart of gaining customer trust

Photo by Lukas

When asked if face-to-face events such as SAS’ innovate on tour helps to build customers’ trust, Jenn believed that regardless of physical or digital engagements, trust had to be at the heart of the engagement, and data is the way to gaining customer trust.

“You need to know your customers, and they will honor you with their data and information. So how do you use that data to communicate in a way that’s personalized, and respects their privacy? That’s how you’re going to build trust.”

Jenn shared that gathering data is just the tip of the iceberg. To understand their customers, SAS’ marketing team not only looks at the data, but works to understand the full commercial picture by appending data and information internally and externally to power customer journeys.

One example is Ulta Beauty, a leading health and beauty retailer in the United States, who had to pivot from their brick-and-mortar setup to a fully digital environment to reach customers during the pandemic.

SAS helped Ulta Beauty to bring together storefront data, customer data, and website analytics, and to weave them together as a single narrative for a comprehensive customer experienc e. On top of that, Ulta’s loyalty program is powered by SAS data models to help the beauty retailer reward and engage customers, with a highly successful estimated 95% retention rate.

When asked about their “secret sauce” to such customer success stories, Jenn credited not only the company’s powerful AI analytics, but also the deep domain expertise within the organization.

With decades of experience in nearly every industry, subject matter experts are available to customers, so that solutions can be highly personalized and relevant to their industry needs and long-term growth objectives.

Commanding both the art and science of marketing

Future marketers need to take command of both the art and science of marketing, Jenn added, when asked how marketing has evolved in the past years. New marketing technologies such as generative AI and AI still require the creative touch that marketers bring to breath life into customer experiences.

At SAS Institute, Jenn’s team of marketers puts themselves in the shoes of their customers by being “Customer Zero”. Within the organization, marketing works closely with sales, product development, and solution teams in an iterative process to ensure that AI-driven outputs are customer-ready.

“We’re working with our R&D teams to build (our AI) solution into our platform, so that we can offer it to other marketers. Our technology with SAS Customer Intelligence 360 has a workflow engine built into it, so none of these assets that are developed by generative AI ever goes out without proper governance and control. That goes back to building trust. If you’re sending out content that’s not compelling, you’re not going to build trust. “

Speaking to AI and governance around its application, SAS also developed an internal set of data ethics that looks at ethical, responsible innovation, where their data ethics team come together to provide guidance on how they can explore and be curious, where AI can be used, and what to be cautious about. These learnings are applied internally, and also distilled for their customers.

How to create a winning customer experience

“Marketers have to be constantly curious about their customers, and how they can help their customers.” Bringing the conversation to how marketers needed to stay creative as well as analytical about marketing, Jenn observed that marketers have become more invested in numbers, rather than innovation and creativity.

“With data, we’re all about the bottomline and KPIs. But creativity, this is essential now. When you are trying to explore something new, you need to be experimental.”

By leveraging data and AI, marketers can free themselves from repetitive tasks, and focus on exploration. Marketers can leverage martech to get to market quickly, and bring together more data and insights to build an end-to-end customer experience.

Finally, focusing on the engagement means tapping into cross-functional customer relationships to really understand what the customers need.

“I’m an early adopter of our own solution for customers. And I think that makes the narrative a lot stronger, since we experienced it ourselves.”

We recently undertook work to really go deep into understanding our customers journey across their entire life cycle and map out moments that matter. And we did this as a cross-divisional team. We’ve had every organization that touches the customers involved in this project, and out of it, we identified 44 moments that matter. So what we’re doing right now is making sure with those moments that matter, we’re creating the best possible experience.”