When marketing strategies become old and outdated, bringing innovation into processes becomes a dire necessity to compete with the competition. Digital technology is transforming the marketing landscape, enabling agencies to adapt quickly to the digital world and respond to new trends and challenges.
Conventionally, marketing agencies relied on written or printed documents containing customer data, which made access to information much more difficult. However, the shift from printed documents to digital is largely driven by evolving customer expectations in the digital world. Tech-savvy customers, in particular, expect seamless, omnichannel experiences across multiple digital touchpoints, making it essential for agencies to innovate and personalize their engagement strategies.
Now, with advancements in SaaS solutions and technologies like Optical Character Recognition (OCR), agencies can digitize crucial files easily and add, update, and edit customer data as they see fit.
This means quick, smart decisions for marketing agencies that can elevate productivity and functionality to the next level.
What is customer data?
Customer data is the information gathered by the business through customer interaction.
This includes their names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, etc. It can also contain their purchase history, order details, or insights about their online activity, such as how much time they spend on social platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram, etc.
Agencies collect valuable data from various digital touchpoints, including digital platforms such as social media platforms and mobile apps, to better understand customer preferences and tailor experiences accordingly. Collecting qualitative data, such as in-depth customer feedback, is essential for gaining deeper insights into customer motivations and preferences, supplementing quantitative metrics for a more comprehensive understanding.
Leveraging such data, marketing agencies can create user personas, buyer personas, or customer profiles, allowing them to target users precisely.
Why digitize customer data?
There is a dire need to digitize and store customer data in one place so that everyone in a marketing agency can easily access the required information for a buyer when needed.
This approach helps close more deals and aligns the entire marketing agency, smoothing workflows for each department. Digitizing customer experience not only streamlines processes but also drives revenue growth and operational efficiency by enabling better use of data analytics and enhancing customer engagement throughout the customer journey.
Digitization enables agencies to deliver a seamless personalized experience across every digital touchpoint, supporting digital customer experiences that meet evolving customer expectations. By leveraging digitized data, agencies can enhance customer experience and increase customer loyalty through targeted loyalty programs and a strong omnichannel customer service strategy. The CDP market is expected to grow from USD 2.4 billion in 2020 to USD 10.3 billion by 2025, highlighting its rising importance in marketing strategies.
Image Source: AlgonomyWith data already in a digital format, marketing teams can analyze and act on insights faster. This allows them to make data-driven decisions easily, improving ROIs and making it easy for everyone to meet KPIs. Digitization helps meet customer expectations and supports automated marketing strategies across multiple channels, ensuring that marketing efforts are both efficient and effective.
2. Better customer insights and personalization
Personalization is a necessity of the modern marketing industry. Digitizing customer experience can create more precise customer profiles. From behavioral trends to demographic insights, agencies can effectively tailor campaigns directly to target audiences, delivering personalized experiences and supporting new automated marketing strategies that foster long-term relationships.
Once digitized, customer data can seamlessly integrate with various marketing tools, such as email marketing platforms, CRM systems, analytics software, and mobile apps, as a key digital touchpoint. This integration enables marketing teams to activate campaigns faster, monitor performance in real-time, and glean deeper insights into customer behavior, ultimately enhancing overall marketing effectiveness and contributing to superior digital customer experiences.
When digitizing customer experience, it’s crucial to know privacy laws such as GDPR and CCPA. Compliance with these regulations protects customer information and builds client trust and credibility. Marketing agencies should implement practices that ensure customer consent for data collection and provide transparency about how the data will be used. Additionally, loyalty programs and a strong omnichannel customer service strategy can help increase customer loyalty and foster trust.
The customer journey involves multiple stages beyond just sales and support, including marketing, onboarding, and ongoing engagement. Digitization supports a holistic digital customer journey and digital customer experience journey, ensuring that every stage and customer interaction is optimized for satisfaction and retention. Integration of tools and platforms also allows agencies to implement self-service capabilities and new automated marketing strategies, improving customer interactions and engagement across digital channels.
Finally, as customers engage and interact with brands through digital touchpoints and digital experiences, agencies can use these insights to optimize the entire customer journey, ensuring a seamless, personalized, and effective approach to customer engagement and loyalty.
Tips for effective customer data digitization
Now, on to the main part. How does a marketing agency quickly digitize customer data without falling into common pitfalls? Find the answer to this question and more in this section.
1. Develop a clear strategy
Know what you want to achieve by digitizing customer experience. Are you aiming to streamline campaign creation, improve response times, or enter a new market?
A clear, actionable goal can be truly helpful in establishing a solid data digitization strategy. This goal can clarify how all marketing agency departments should digitize customer data.
When setting goals for digitizing customer experience, consider the scalability of the solutions you choose. Select technologies that can grow with your agency’s needs, allowing for increased data volume and expanding functionalities as your client base expands.
Align your digitization efforts with a comprehensive customer experience strategy as part of your agency’s digital transformation. This ensures that your approach integrates data analysis, omnichannel engagement, and continuous adaptation to evolving customer needs. As you develop your strategy, prioritize digitizing the customer experience to transform customer touchpoints through digital tools, AI, and analytics for more personalized and efficient engagement.
Pro tip: Utilize the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant, Time-bound) framework to make data digitization goals easy. This will allow your agency to cater to customer needs and achieve hyper-personalization
2. Train your team
The second tip is to train your team in data digitization processes so that they can achieve the goals you want them to.
Involve your front-line workers in workshops and training seminars/webinars. Teach them how to use complex digitization software (CX and CRM), data cleansing tools, etc., so they are not completely clueless when faced with dynamic working conditions.
If needed, industry professionals should be involved to help guide workers to success. This may take some time, so you must be patient.
Adopting a digitized approach requires a cultural shift within the agency. Foster ongoing training and support for your team to encourage a mindset that embraces data-driven decision-making. Highlight the value of data in achieving business objectives to inspire engagement and commitment.
3. Establish data quality standards
Digitization without standards can quickly cause chaos. To keep everything consistent and reliable, set guidelines for data formats, naming conventions, and input protocols.
Furthermore, you can automate data validation using programs running on Python Scripts or otherwise. If that’s your work style, hire relevant professionals or train existing ones. This will ensure fewer errors when digitizing customer experience and that the workflow remains smooth and fluid.
Leverage data-driven insights and artificial intelligence to improve data accuracy and deliver more personalized customer experiences. AI-powered tools can help identify inconsistencies and optimize data management processes. AI solutions empower companies to implement new self-service capabilities, such as intelligent chatbots, and improve the contact center environment by automating processes and enhancing operational efficiency.
A critical aspect of digitizing customer experience is ensuring the system is user-friendly. A well-designed interface enhances team adoption and facilitates efficient data retrieval and usage. Gather team feedback during development to create an intuitive solution that meets the needs of your marketing staff.
4. Conduct regular check-ins
Regularly check for errors in the digitization of customer data. Audit your databases to minimize missing links in information. Try to keep everything fresh and remove outdated records.
Example Scenario:
“Customer B talked to the front desk operative on the phone 6 months back. They registered their home address as House 23, Marina Drive, California.”
As we can see in this situation, six months is a long time for a person to live in the same place. They might have entirely switched houses in the same area or the city/country.
You need to contact customer B to get their updated address so that deliveries or correspondence (if any) can be made to them smoothly and efficiently.
To maintain the accuracy and relevance of customer data, establish best practices for regular maintenance. Schedule routine audits of your database, update records promptly, and implement data cleansing tools to remove duplicates and correct errors. Consistent data upkeep ensures that marketing decisions are based on current and reliable information.
Establishing feedback mechanisms is essential for continuous improvement. Encourage team members to provide input on the digitization process and report any challenges. This collaborative approach fosters an adaptive environment capable of refining practices based on real experiences. Additionally, collect qualitative feedback and customer feedback through various channels to gain deeper insights and continuously refine your digitization process. Gathering in-depth feedback from both customers and team members is crucial for identifying key drivers of loyalty and refining digitizing customer experience processes.
5. Strengthen data security
Digitizing customer experience is one thing, and securing that data is another. Your digitization efforts will be wasted if you don’t learn how to implement strong data protection protocols in your marketing agency’s frameworks.
To safeguard data integrity, use encryption, role-based access controls, and regular security audits. If storing data on physical drives becomes necessary, safeguard the data with encryption techniques like BitLocker, etc. Organizations that extensively use security AI and automation have seen an average cost savings of USD 2.22 million compared to those that don’t, proving that proactive security measures can make a significant financial difference.
Maintain ethical and compliant practices when handling customer data to ensure your agency meets industry standards and regulatory requirements while innovating.
Develop an incident response plan in case things go wrong, and conduct regular security audits to further improve data security.
6. Plan for scalability and sustainability
Sure, your current digitization plan and strategies are working. But will all this remain functional, secure, and viable in the future?
For a marketing agency competing in the 21st century, it becomes essential to consider digitization practices in terms of scalability and sustainability. When the business grows, so should your online infrastructure to hold that data.
Adopt digital solutions, such as chatbots and self-service portals, that can scale with your agency’s growth and enhance customer engagement as part of your digital transformation efforts.
Platforms such as AWS or Google Cloud can help you scale and sustain your agency’s requirements.
Tools for digitizing customer experience
Digitization doesn’t have to be a headache. The key is to equip yourself with the right tools to ensure the process is smooth and successful. Leveraging digital technologies and a robust digital customer service strategy is essential to streamline data digitization and improve customer engagement. By utilizing the right tools across various digital channels, such as social media, mobile apps, and websites, you can support a seamless digital customer journey, ensuring every touchpoint is optimized for engagement and personalization.
1. OCR technology
OCR (Optical Character Recognition) tools are perfect for converting physical documents, images, or handwritten notes into editable text.
OCR tools are perfect for digitizing customer experience if your agency handles client contracts, brainstorming notes, or scanned surveys.
There are many options; however, none are worthwhile for businesses, especially due to their paywall restrictions.
We found some tools on the Internet, including jpgtotext.com, imagetotext.io, and OCR.best. These can be used without registration or signups.
That said, many other online platforms can also perform such tasks. So, don’t let us limit you—explore alternatives and select the best OCR solution for your agency.
2. CRM systems
CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems are vital for centralizing and managing digitized customer data. These comprehensive solutions may be more costly than other tools and resources. But the rewards they help you reap are immense.
Platforms like Salesforce and HubSpot allow agencies to integrate leads, existing client profiles, and campaign data into one accessible ecosystem. This data centralization ensures better organizational collaboration and communication, streamlining workflow.
Integrating self-service portals and mobile apps with CRM systems can further enhance your digital customer experience strategy by enabling customers to access support, perform basic tasks, and interact with your agency anytime, anywhere. This integration across digital channels is key to mapping and optimizing the digital customer journey, helping you monitor each step customers take and adapt your strategies to meet their evolving expectations.
CRMs are also crucial in employee onboarding, allowing digital marketers to start working as soon as they sign that offer letter.
3. Data cleansing and monitoring tools
Converting data to digital form is only the beginning. Cleaning and validating that data is also crucial to using the information in key processes quickly and efficiently.
Tools like OpenRefine can help repair inaccuracies, eliminate duplicates, and ensure consistency across datasets.
Moreover, tools like Two Minute Reports can ensure you get updates about every user activity. This can help track their usage patterns for different platforms.
Overcoming common digital transformation challenges
Although online tools and resources have made digitizing data quite easy, you should be aware of the many challenges in this process.
1. Dealing with unstructured data
Unstructured data includes sources like customer surveys, data from IoT sensors, email correspondences, etc. It doesn’t have a proper, predefined structure or format, making it very hard to understand and handle.
Identifying pain points in the digitization process is crucial, as these can hinder progress and impact customer satisfaction. Digital solutions such as OCR and data cleaners can help address these pain points, allowing you to keep your productivity up without compromising data quality.
2. Ensuring data security and compliance
Digitized data must be protected. If that’s not the case, you can land in compliance issues and get penalized under standards like GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, etc.
So, ensure that the software or methods you use to encrypt data are always up-to-date and functional. Complying with industry standards also boosts your credibility as an agency.
3. Dealing with legacy systems
Many agencies face integration issues between new digital tools and old systems. This is a common problem, especially for those who entered the digitization scene much later than others.
Digital transformation efforts are essential to digitize customer experience and provide a seamless digital experience across the entire customer experience. To combat this, we recommend using middleware solutions like Zapier or custom APIs to bridge the gap between legacy and new systems. This ensures a smooth transition from paper to digital form without losing valuable information.
Digitization case studies
Today, many marketing agencies have digitized their customer data and are reaping great rewards. By digitizing customer experiences, these agencies have achieved significant customer success and increased customer loyalty through seamless digital interactions and personalized service. This digital transformation has enabled agencies to deliver exceptional customer experience by leveraging data-driven segmentation, tailored content, and region-specific customization. Additionally, agencies are now able to implement personalized self service experiences for their clients, utilizing evolving service channels like live chat, AI chatbots, SMS, social media, and video to enhance customer engagement and problem-solving efficiency. Let’s learn more about them in this section.
Case study 1: Digital Diagnosis Marketing
Founded in early 2017, the Digital Diagnosis Marketing agency found its footing in the industry because of its highly efficient customer digitization methodologies. They’ve helped big businesses like Carvana drive great success by implementing their innovative techniques.
Case study 2: Agency Jet
Agency Jet is yet another resilient company that leverages data as its friend to propel businesses to success. According to their claim, clients stick with them 4x longer than the industry average, highlighting their ability to provide greater ROIs with cutting-edge digitization and customer acquisition techniques.
Final words
Digitizing customer experience is essential for marketing agencies aiming to enhance efficiency, improve customer insights, and facilitate data-driven decision-making.
Agencies can successfully navigate the digitization process by using the discussed tips and tricks, such as developing clear goals, training teams, establishing data quality standards, and prioritizing security.
Using tools and technologies like OCR and CRMs in this journey can further streamline this effort. However, digitizing customer experience for marketing agencies running legacy systems can be gruesome and time-consuming.
