In today’s competitive landscape, a meticulously aligned, customer-centric marketing strategy is no longer a luxury—it’s an absolute imperative. Delivering remarkable communication and a consistently superior customer experience demands significant effort and, crucially, the right technological tools.
What should modern marketers, CMOs, and CTOs demand from a truly capable marketing software platform?
Every Customer Communication Counts
Often, individuals consult friends and colleagues for their opinions on a company before making a purchase. Word-of-mouth recommendations and authentic customer testimonials remain powerful influencers. Marketers intrinsically understand that every interaction throughout a customer’s journey is critical.
A brand that presents misaligned communication risks creating uncertainty and distrust in a customer’s mind. Conflicting messages lead to cognitive dissonance, which can be detrimental to brand perception and loyalty. Therefore, the ability to deliver cohesive, customer-centric communication is paramount.
A dedicated focus on customer-centric communication naturally leads to the implementation of key strategic and technological components:
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software: Essential for capturing, storing, and efficiently sharing vital customer data across internal departments, enabling comprehensive processing and analysis.
- Multichannel Marketing: Empowering consumers to choose their preferred communication channel, content format, and timing. This approach allows brands to craft truly meaningful and personalized customer journey experiences.
- Specialized Marketing Positions: The emergence of roles like ‘Chief Customer Officer’ and ‘Senior Director of Customer Experience’ signifies a clear organizational commitment. Companies are assigning explicit responsibility to employees for optimizing every customer touchpoint, from initial brand awareness through to long-term loyalty.
Real-World Insights: An Auto Dealership Case Study
Observing daily business interactions often provides valuable insights into customer experience. A common scenario that highlights these dynamics comes from a recent experience with an auto dealership, illustrating both exemplary and areas for improvement.
What They Got Right
The dealership demonstrated impressive integration into social media and an assertive strategy for soliciting personal recommendations. They frequently sent requests via direct mail postcards, complete with QR codes for quick online access to various review sites like cars.com, Yahoo!, and Yellow Pages. Additionally, emails included direct links to the dealership’s Google+ page.
Actively encouraging customers to participate in ratings and review sites is an excellent strategy. Research from Nielsen indicates that a significant 68% of consumers trust customer opinions posted online.
Where They Missed the Mark
Conversely, the monthly car loan statement, while informative, lacked personalization. The “Opportunities for You” section often featured offers that were entirely irrelevant to the customer’s specific situation. For instance, a bill might encourage a test drive of the latest roadster model.
From an overarching branding perspective, the emphasis on a national Mazda campaign is understandable. However, for a customer who had recently purchased a seven-passenger crossover SUV, the roadster offer was a clear mismatch, highlighting a missed opportunity for personalization.
Executing a broad, coast-to-coast campaign across every communication channel can be a risky strategy. In the billing statement example, the message served as proof of purchase, and customers expect a higher level of personalization to feel genuinely valued. In contrast, a social follower of the brand would anticipate and gladly accept global news updates posted on platforms such as Facebook, Google+, and Twitter, as these align with broader brand engagement rather than individual purchasing context.
Understanding Customer Experience Management (CXM)
According to Chuck Schaeffer, CEO at Vantive Media, “Customer Experience Management includes both the individual experience in a single transaction as well as the sum of all experiences across all touch points and channels between a customer and a supplier over the duration of their relationship.”
The latest marketing strategy designed to meet customers’ increasingly high expectations is Customer Experience Management (CXM). Effective CXM implementation demands a combination of cross-functional teamwork, shared access to robust data warehouses, and sophisticated digital communication technology that facilitates customer segmentation and multichannel communication delivery.
Navigating the Marketing Software Landscape
While having a single, all-encompassing multichannel marketing platform to manage every channel sounds ideal, the reality is that consumer behaviors and preferences evolve too rapidly for marketing software vendors to consistently keep pace. Some vendors might quickly roll out new channels, but in their haste, they may resort to shortcuts like specialized data structures or acquiring technology outside their core expertise. This often results in an unfamiliar user experience and features that struggle to integrate seamlessly with a brand’s other best-of-breed marketing systems.
A study by Ascend2 (July 2014) revealed that 34% of marketers considered an “all-in-one tool” to be the most critical factor when choosing a marketing automation system.
Key Functions Your Marketing Platform Must Deliver
For marketers, CMOs, and CTOs, selecting the right technology is paramount. While the ideal platform might encompass many features, the focus should be on foundational integration capabilities. Here are two critical functions to demand from an Email Service Provider’s (ESP) technology platform that truly enables a comprehensive CXM strategy:
1. Seamless Marketing Automation and Data Orchestration
A robust CXM strategy requires brands to consider and integrate all their offline and online customer touchpoints. For most, their website serves as the primary hub for information. The customer data and web analytics gathered from this hub must seamlessly link to an Email Marketing Automation platform to power all of the brand’s campaigns, including nurturing, onboarding, upselling, and retention efforts. Campaign results should then be shared with lead scoring systems or CRMs (e.g., Salesforce).
An ESP with strong capabilities to easily hand over customer data to a marketing data warehouse or downstream to a CRM allows companies to enhance and update customer account records in real-time. This freedom to share data across business units empowers marketers to gain a holistic view of each customer’s unique journey and significantly improve the overall customer experience.
Adding an umbrella data warehouse to capture all customer interactions across multiple channels and various departments delivers superior analysis, deeper insights, and more accurate reporting of customer behaviors. Armed with this knowledge, organizations can respond more quickly to changes in consumer preferences. The net result is that marketers can communicate with consistent brand identity in value proposition, vision, and voice.
Data is only valuable if it’s used—and used correctly. This demands careful campaign planning and a focus on the entire customer lifecycle. After defining its customer personas, a marketing team can select suitable contacts, meticulously map out message timing, and assign relevant content to ensure every conversation is pertinent and impactful.
The messaging platform must be capable of customizing customer attributes for advanced campaign segmentation. These attributes can include customer behavior, buying stage, preferences (e.g., products, content, frequency, and channel), transaction history (RFM), and valuable endemic third-party data.
With such capabilities in place, marketers can efficiently drive more prospects through the sales pipeline and accelerate their progression through each stage.
2. Empowering Multichannel Push Marketing
While many organizations opt for best-of-breed solutions over a single integrated platform, there is increasing merit in moving towards more unified systems as companies continuously seek greater operational efficiency.
Marketers understand the five rules of relevancy—channel, content, message, person, and time—that are crucial for success. There are instances when a brand needs to send the same core message to a specific group of customers via their preferred communication channel, be it email, SMS, or mobile app push notifications. Look for an ESP that offers robust choices beyond simply sending email, allowing for true multichannel outreach.
The Future of Customer Engagement
Today’s marketers no longer have the option of operating without quality data, executing sophisticated multichannel communications, and uncovering profound customer insights from real-time analytics. Brands that neglect these areas will quickly lose customers to competitors who expertly anticipate buyer needs and engage in truly personalized conversations.
When evaluating marketing technology platforms, prioritize those that can seamlessly integrate with your existing data warehouses, facilitate the transfer of customer data for limitless segmentation possibilities, and streamline your message production to effectively send communications across more than just email.
Images via Viktor Hanáček (cc)