Thinking about implementing a new marketing solution to better engage your customers? Digital marketing solutions can help you target and engage your customers when implemented properly. However, just like a brand new car, your solution isn’t meant to be kept in the garage, it is meant to be driven.
When choosing the right customer engagement tech for your needs, it’s important to evaluate the capabilities you’re planning to take out on the road. For the biggest impact, here are four key questions that you should ask yourself when selecting marketing tech for your company.
What will help you know your customers?
While focusing on ways to engage their customers, marketers don’t always spend sufficient time and effort thinking about how to identify who those customers are. Knowing your audience is key.
If you can’t identify who you’re talking to, you can’t effectively personalize to build truly valuable relationships.
The right marketing tech will provide capabilities that help you identify and understand your audience, such as a data management platform (DMP), a customer data platform (CDP), and omni-channel loyalty management. These solutions will help you implement customer programs that drive deeper customer insights, so you can tailor future interactions.
For example, ASICS has found success through its Foot ID program, which invites customers to come into any of their stores for a personal assessment of their running form to determine the best shoes for them. Customers each receive a unique Foot ID, and from then on every time they go to the store or website, and identify themselves with their ID, they’ll be served shoes that are most relevant and best suited for them.
ASICS is able to collect data about which shoes you buy, how much you spend, how frequently you’re buying and where you are shopping (geographically or by channel). So when they know your shoes are probably wearing out and you are going to be coming back soon, they can send you a personalized promotion (e.g., “The shoes you bought in January are probably ready to be retired! Here’s 5% off your replacement pair!”).
Identifying customers enables brands to capture rich data so they can better engage customers with relevant content at the right time.
What will let you act in real-time?
As consumers, when we’re in the market to buy something, we expect to find the answers to our questions almost instantly. If you, the brand, are late in identifying and responding to these opportunity, you’re going to miss out. In most cases you need the ability to respond in minutes and seconds, not hours or days; the closer to real-time, the better.
What does that mean from a tech-perspective? Your solution must be able to go through large amounts of data very quickly, and analyze it so you can identify the right opportunities and react to situations on the spot.
The NHL recently worked to consolidate all their fan data from their various channels – their website, merchandise shops, ticket vendors, even data from the Yahoo fantasy leagues – to help them to build a comprehensive, consolidated view of their fans so they can predict and react to their fan’s desires. If they notice that your favorite team is playing and you don’t have tickets yet, they can send you an email notification with stats and predictions for the game, and give you the chance to purchase last-minute tickets. Or, say your favorite player (which they would know from your profile) scores the winning goal. As you’re leaving the stadium, they could send you an SMS message with a special offer – “Congratulations on the win! Stop by the merchandising store for 10% your player’s jersey!”
Being able to identify not only the right content, but the right moment to engage with customers while they’re most open to being engaged is the holy grail in personalized marketing
What will help you deliver a seamless customer experience?
We know that the customer engagement doesn’t happen on just one or two channels. Customers’ journeys may span multiple channels: Google searches, your company’s site, in-store browsing and mobile engagement. Omnichannel experiences are the new norm, but still different channels are often run by different departments, which can disjoint the overall experience.
The customer experience is only good as your weakest integrated channel. It’s imperative that no matter what part of the company the customer interacts with, they receive the same information, service, and experience – even when they jump between channels and departments, or even different sub-brands.
Luxottica owns several major eyewear brands, including LensCrafters, Sunglass Hut, Ray-Ban, and Pearle Vision. Their integrated customer engagement platform lets them orchestrate customer engagement across multiple channels and across all their brands and departments. So if you go into a Pearle Vision for an eye exam, but don’t find sunglass frames you like there, you can check out the selection at Sunglass Hut or any other retail store in the Luxottica family.
Each store will have access to your prescription, preferences, and past purchases from the same system, making your experience easy and seamless.
Who will help you run the program?
We’ve touched on three items you should consider when choosing your marketing tech, items that should serve as the backbone of your marketing strategy. But technology is just a tool. The final consideration is about the people.
To successfully launch a new marketing tech project, to integrate different departments for more transparent and consistent experiences, you must have buy-in from company leadership and department managers. Since different departments often have different business objectives and are measured by different (sometimes competing) KPIs, each group needs to understand and align on how this new initiative will positively impact their work.
You need the right people to be able to properly use the technology – people who have technological aptitude to understand how the solution works, and business understanding to be able to see underlying objectives.
For example, machine learning is a tool that can automatically predict customer behaviors to drive product and service recommendations and other personalization opportunities. To seize this trending opportunity, marketers need at least a basic understanding of predictive model scoring and how machine learning works to be able to leverage it properly. Machine learning is a tool, but success depends on the people who will drive it.
Plot your path to address changing customer needs
As you seek out new marketing technology to help your company meet changing customer needs?
Be sure to go through each of these considerations:
- What will help you know your customers?
- What will let you act in real-time?
- What will help you deliver a seamless customer experience?
- Who will help you run the program?
ASICS, the NHL and Luxottica have all implemented successful programs with SAP Marketing Cloud, and have benefited from putting in the due diligence to set things up properly.
