Know Your Customer: How Starbucks Uses Data-Driven Marketing (Episode 75)

Data-driven marketing is becoming a must-have, even for small businesses. Here's a brief case study of the Starbucks Star Rewards Program - and how to apply the lessons to your own business.
The post Know Your Customer: Using Data-Driven Marketing appeared first on Control Mouse Media, LLC.

If you’re a regular listener, you’ve heard me say before: The more you know your customer, the better. The closer your relationship, the better it will be for you and your customer. I’ve devoted an entire series of this podcast to finding and vetting your customers, and then converting them into advocates.

From a content strategy perspective, this has a huge effect on how you speak to your customers. A lot of marketing and advertising amounts to introducing yourself over and over again. But when you know your customers at an individual level, you can start talk to them differently and have deeper conversations with those who are further along the “trust path.”

That’s why I’ve been interested in observing the Starbucks Rewards Program since they made a big change to it back in April. Everything I just described above? Starbucks is doing this, at scale, with data.

It’s an amazing example of data-driven marketing that’s soft-touch, but effective. They are rewarding their best customers, reinforcing established behaviors, and gamifying it to make it seem more “fun.”

This is a great lesson for anyone in marketing today, which is why I thought I’d do a brief case study on the new Starbucks Star Rewards Program and how you can apply it to your own small business.

Because I’ve included some data and a lot of visual examples, I have a blog version of this episode as well, which you can find here: Starbucks Rewards: An Evolution in Data-Driven Marketing.

Listen to the episode here or subscribe in iTunes.

Show Notes

Here are links to the articles I mentioned in the episode, and a couple others of interest.

In case the link above doesn’t work in your podcast app, here’s the blog version of this episode:

Starbucks Rewards: An Evolution in Data-Driven Marketing

On the backlash when the program was first introduced:

Starbucks’ controversial new rewards program launches today here are the major changes you should know about
Starbucks Customers Are Pissed About the New Rewards Program

And some info about Starbucks’ profit structure:

The Economics of a Starbucks Cappuccino Grande
Understanding Starbucks' cost structure and operating expenses

Thanks for listening, and let me know if I missed any!

The post Know Your Customer: Using Data-Driven Marketing appeared first on Control Mouse Media, LLC.