Due to the complex nature of how customers purchase products in today’s digital world (in-store, real-time price comparisons, buying online), customer journey analyses are more complex than traditional marketing analyses. To evaluate a customer journey, it’s important to choose visualization techniques that can showcase customer behavior and track movement over time.

Most companies need significant improvements to their traditional persona-based approach, beginning with leveraging what matters in the digital world; measured behaviors, correlation and causation, and decision motivators.

Targeting and personalization are key components of online marketing. By tailoring your marketing messages for the individual visitors to your website, instead of making them overly-generalized for a broad audience, you can increase the chances that they will become a customer and a repeat customer.

If you envision two major reasons for change (rate vs. mix) in the digital world, you can use data to inform where you should start by limiting your options as opposed to looking at everything simultaneously.

A former manager of mine loved the phrase “what gets measured, gets managed,” and I’ve always intuitively related to that. After all, I’ve developed my career by providing insight and structure to help others manage their business. This year, however, that phrase has a newer, more personal meaning.

Pharma marketing departments are no longer just responsible for bringing in new subscribers. They are now tasked with managing the entire customer experience, starting from the initial interaction to establishing and maintaining a loyal brand relationship.

The actual customer, at times, gets lost in all this data. More and more brands are realizing this and moving back to a customer-centric approach.

Data is the key that unlocks loyalty and paves the way toward true people-based marketing. And yet for all the importance we place on data, many marketers continue to be effective at collecting it and less diligent about putting it to good use.