Put Data at the Center of Your Customer Engagement Strategy
By Carrie Parker, SVP of Marketing at Cordial
The customer journey now spans more channels than ever, with buying decisions rarely made in one place at one time. Customers explore and discover across many channels before they make a purchase, building their perception of your brand along the way.
Marketers need to meet customers at every stage with one goal: offering the right message on the right channel at the right time to best cultivate relationships with potential customers. Companies with strong cross-channel customer engagement see 89% of customers return for more; that’s nearly triple the results of companies with weak engagement. A strong customer engagement approach allows marketers to build a flow of consistent, personalized messaging, establishing trust and promoting conversion and retention. Data must serve as the foundation of that strategy.
Start with the data
By using real-time data to fuel customer engagement campaigns that span channels – email, SMS, mobile app – teams can successfully connect with customers wherever they are in their journey. McKinsey’s “Next in Personalization 2021 Report” found 70% of customers expect a business to offer personalized interactions, and a new Cordial study, “The New Era of Customer Engagement,” found that 78% of consumers get frustrated when brands send them generic emails and text messages . Personalization generally drives a 10-15% increase in revenue, but McKinsey found companies with first-party data at the heart of their decision-making saw closer to a 25% revenue lift.
Before you can provide personalized messaging across channels, you’ll need data that tells the story of every customer’s journey: who they are, where they came from, what they’re looking for, and when and how they prefer to communicate. And you will need the ability to connect that data to your messaging platform. Connecting up-to-date data to marketing activation is the best way to keep up with ever-changing consumer behavior and deliver personalized value.
Having real-time data on consumer needs and being able to use it makes a difference – 77% of consumers in a recent Cordial study said they like it when a brand’s email or text message helps them find something that they need, exactly when they need it. Relying on disconnected systems and old data – even minutes old – can leave your company acting on outdated insights, leading to subpar experiences for your customers and limited returns for your brand.
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Create a unified approach across the channels you use
After you’ve used your data to identify opportunities, build out a marketing approach, engaging them in unified ways on each channel they use — from email to SMS to mobile app. But remember: Unified doesn’t mean identical. Your customers want to see your company in the channels where they spend their time, but they’ll grow fatigued if they encounter the same words or one-size-fits-all offers plastered across each one. Customers expect messages to be relevant for the channel they are using and for their needs in particular moments. Ensure you create consistency, but let the channel and your knowledge of their needs dictate how you express your brand in each space and what message is right for each person.
Follow your data to the right engagement opportunities
When you have a better understanding of customers’ interactions with your brand, you can build engagement campaigns with precise hooks that offer what they’re looking for — when and where they’re most likely to engage. Those opportunities will look different for different customers, but McKinsey found most customers want messaging that includes relevant product recommendations, targeted promotions and celebration of customer milestones. One way to deliver what consumers want: personalized communication triggered by their behavior.
A messaging platform that pulls in relevant data for marketing, will close the gap between your customers’ behavior and how you reach them best. Triggered messages offer an automated approach to personalization. You can start small with just a few triggers:
- New account welcomes
- Cart abandonment reminders
- Customized promotions and offer codes
- Price drop alerts
As you pull in data from additional sources, your team can add more triggers across channels using both consumer and business data to create customer experiences that transform into relationships.
Measure your success and adapt as needed
Don’t let your data go to waste, siloed from your marketing. Use what you learn from each campaign to power the next one. Real-time customer behavior data letting you personalize messages across channels is the first step to skyrocketing engagement. With every additional data point used for personalization, your marketing campaigns will better deliver for your customers while supporting your revenue goals.
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