Customer experience is becoming the biggest differentiator for brands as omnichannel marketing provides consumers with even more opportunities to interact with businesses. Gartner predicted that in 2019, more than 50% of organizations will redirect their investments to customer experience innovations. Customer experience, the perception of how you treat individual consumers, affects your company’s reputation and revenue. While many factors contribute to positive or negative customer experiences, the marketing department shoulders a big part of the responsibility as the communication arm of your business.
The Perils of Over-Engagement: How “Spray and Pray” Marketing Erodes Brand Equity
Brands use many channels to communicate with customers and email and digital marketing are often the most persistent forms of interaction. Over-engaging, the messaging approach of bombarding everyone with ads and emails, from brands is being felt more and more by consumers. Email fatigue leads to unsubscribes. Intrusive ad placement leads to ad blockers. With the introduction of new internet browsers that promise to be ad-free, the message to brands is clear: relevant messaging matters.
Then why is it so often that these examples of over-engagement continue to happen? Consumers are bombarded with spray and pray marketing practices across numerous channels in hopes that one of those interactions will result in a sale. Companies might email their database up to three different times a day, possibly to hit a metric that leans more toward quality than quantity. You know, because sending more emails results in more clicks that result in more traffic to the site. While that marketing team may be hitting these vanity metrics, they are putting their relationship with their customers at risk. The influx of offers (sometimes for a discount on an item already purchased!) can be off-putting to your customers and alienating to those that want to continue patronizing your business.
The Relevance Imperative: Why 91% of Consumers Demand Personalized Recognition
But some brands are taking a more thoughtful approach by sending emails informed with accurate consumer insights like purchase history, lifestyle and demographic data to communicate with consumers on a one-to-one level.
And consumers are definitely taking note. Accenture reported that 91% of consumers said they would be more likely to shop with brands who recognize and provide relevant offers and recommendations, and 83% are willing to share their data to make this work.
So how can you make sure you’re using email and digital marketing to build — not destroy— your brand’s relationships with your customers?
Combining data about individuals within your company can help streamline your segmentation and personalization strategy, further enabling your marketing team’s ability to use relevant offers and make recommendations at the individual level.
3 Strategic Pillars for High-Impact, Person-Level Communications
- Use consumer insights like location, purchase history, and behavioral data to make recommendations. With a complete customer profile that includes all of your first-party data and additional consumer insights, you can create audiences based on many different data sets and interests. Building audiences using thousands of data attributes can give your consumers a feeling of acknowledgment and understanding from your brand which leads to LTV and repeat purchases. In fact, marketers who used segmented campaigns noted as much as a 760% increase in revenue.
- Create an audience of high-value customers and incentivize them to become brand advocates. Identifying commonalities among your customers can help you evangelize those individuals to help tell your story. It’s more effective than brand communications as 92% of individuals trust word-of-mouth recommendations. You can identify potential brand advocates, compile testimonials, and let peer recommendations become a big part of your marketing strategy.
- Find social followers and invite them to an exclusive preview of a new product, feature, or event. Using publicly available social data, location, and affinities can allow you to reach out to individuals that will likely be interested in new offerings from your company. With additional insights into your existing customer file, you can provide offers to those more likely to be receptive to your brand’s outreach. For example, the American Friends Service Committee used social insights to identify socially active individuals with big followings and wider reach. They invited those individuals to participate in a Google Hangout and turned that Google Hangout into 74 different donations from a spur-of-the-moment conversation.
Building Long-Term Customer Lifetime Value Through Contextual Clarity
There are many use cases and scenarios where consumer insights can provide marketing teams with the clarity, context, and confidence to build better strategies and more informed messaging.
