Shift the focus from bragging rights to the campaign battlefield. If that opening sentence has grabbed your attention, great – it was intended to. This blog is a summary of a presentation by Mark Weninger from Weninger Haus and Redpoint CSMO, John Nash, where they discussed tangible ways of connecting customer data to become the next campaign genius.
In your next campaign planning meeting, rather than discussing aloud what the competition is doing and what your reaction to it should be, focus on the customer data you have access to and what you can do with it to deliver truly innovative, memorable and value-creating campaigns. Boil your use cases down to two to three and then determine what data you need to connect to create campaigns that will address those use cases.
Rather than look outward to what your competitors are doing, the answer for how to win is hiding in plain sight: customer data. Customer data is often scattered across dozens of sources. These sources are siloed in systems across virtually every channel. The apparent sheer complexity of integrating the data you have on your customers may well explain a marketer’s penchant for eyeing the competition. Connected customer data, though, reveals insights for marketers to put the customer at the beginning, middle and end of every campaign.
This blog looks at what constitutes ambitious, data-driven marketing campaigns and the steps needed to get there before looking at one company using best practices and innovative technology to solve for real-time personalization, one of the bigger challenges facing marketers today.
Customer-Centricity Delivers Results
Data-driven, ambitious marketers with integrated customer data from every source may be less concerned about the competition than most because, being customer-centric, they know precisely how to create campaigns that are uniquely meaningful to their customers and prospects. Unlocking previously unattainable insight from connected customer data is almost magical in its power to create innovative campaigns that infuse meaning to one customer at one moment of an individual customer journey. When customers see their preferences, behaviors, and values reflected in a campaign, that’s a lift that cannot be duplicated by modeling a campaign after whatever someone else is doing.
Research from Gartner calculates that a customer-centric brand produces a revenue lift of 20 percent or more. The difference between customer-centric and persona-centric, which may produce a 10 percent lift, is that while both use transactional, preference and historical data as the basis for forming a personalized engagement strategy, customer-centric brands go further and also analyze this data across devices, incorporate IoT and sentiment analysis, and analyze device usage and first-party, second-party and third-party data across anonymous to known records.
Familiarity + Authenticity are Keys to Success
Connected data and a customer-centric approach help guide marketers to every campaign decision they make and hew to the principles that most successful campaigns have in common: familiarity and authenticity.
Campaigns that seem to be scripted, stilted, robotic, or controlled are, by definition, impersonal. Their rigidness is exacerbated by today’s dynamic customer journeys that are spontaneous, informal and uncontrolled. The experiences that marketers deliver with customer-centric campaigns must align with the same ease with which customers move between channels and unscripted journeys. With customer behaviors changing rapidly, the need for flexibility becomes even more pronounced.
Authenticity refers to ensuring that personalization is integral to every campaign. In a Harris Poll survey, 63 percent of consumers surveyed said that personalization is now a standard service they expect. They ask the question, whether overtly or subliminally, “Is the experience that is delivered real, to me, as a consumer? Does it align with not only my preferences and behaviors, but also my values?”
Current market conditions heighten the need for authenticity because in addition to changing consumer behaviors, there has also been a shift in how customers extract meaning from an engagement. More attention is paid to what a brand stands for in a socioeconomic realm, and customers will note whether a brand shares its values. Being personal shows the customer that not only does a brand recognize them as an individual, but that it respects their values.
A “Good” Campaign is No Longer Good Enough
Standing at a hypothetical whiteboard to design the makings of a creative, innovative campaign that is both familiar and authentic, marketers must prioritize ethics over aesthetics and be hyper-focused on creating a great campaign vs. a run-of-the-mill or good campaign.
What’s the difference? Whereas a good campaign may respect the customer, a great marketing campaign connects with a customer. It allows customers to easily see themselves in the campaign, which in turn makes the brand meaningful to a customer at the moment of engagement. A good campaign supports a brand, a great campaign energizes it. And while a good campaign may meet expectations, a great campaign challenges assumptions.
A good campaign supports a brand, a great campaign energizes it.
It is difficult for a merely good campaign to gain traction with today’s always-on, connected customer who expects their preferences and values to be reflected in each and every brand engagement. A great campaign that meets this expectation will deliver a remarkable customer experience that produces a more satisfied, more loyal customer. And the secret to delivering a great campaign is leveraging connected customer data.
Optimize Connected Customer Data
Returning to our hypothetical whiteboard, there is a reason some marketers settle for good vs. great, or look for slight improvements in existing campaigns – either their own or a competitor’s – rather than strive for the art of the possible. Because it is hard. Difficult, though, does not mean impossible. The truth is, the tools exist today for marketers to create campaigns and moments that matter, that are responsive to customer needs, and that are driven by data using innovative technology that yield profitable revenue growth.
Creating a great campaign entails four key steps. Crossing all four off a checklist will ensure the optimal use of connected customer data in any campaign. Marketers will have a clear window into customer intent and be able to layer context into every engagement, delivering relevance to the customer through a deep understanding of all that is knowable about a customer in the moment of engagement.
- Connect All the Data
The Gartner definition of the difference between persona-centric and customer-centric campaigns underscores the importance of data collection. Stopping at transactional, historical, and behavioral data may have sufficed for a traditional, linear customer journey. But with an explosion of channels, dynamic customer journeys, and a transition to digital-first experiences, to know everything there is to know about a customer requires having social data, sensor data and anything else that contributes to a unified profile. Social data analysis, for instance, opens a window into a customer’s values – vital information to learn how a customer attaches meaning to an experience with a brand.
- Forge the Golden Record
A key element in impactful customer experiences is the creation of golden record. The golden record provides context to a single customer view by combining customer data of every type and from every source with every customer identifier – addresses, emails, devices, phone numbers, etc. Built on advanced identity resolution capabilities, a golden record is persistently updated in real time, which means that it delivers context beyond an understanding of each discrete interaction in a customer’s journey. Rather, it analytically derives an understanding of the relationship between various interactions and decision points.
Real-time aggregations such as time since last purchase, average purchase, lifetime value, etc. combine with a full identity graph to provide a 360 degree of a customer – as the customer is moving through an omnichannel journey.
- Analytics
The insight afforded by a golden record enables marketers to deliver a next-best action for a customer optimized for a precise moment in the customer journey, on any channel. A next-best action is an offer, a message, content, education – any interaction that is hyper-relevant to the customer’s current situation, optimized for a singular moment during a journey. A next-best action will, by definition, have the best chance of resonating with a customer and guiding a journey to the desired conclusion.
A next-best action, derived from the golden record, is made possible with analytics. Code-free, AI or self-training models that are deployed in-line put the power of machine learning in the hands of the everyday, operational marketer – not data scientists. Algorithmic optimization ensures that whatever the metric, a winning model will be the one most likely to succeed at the exact moment the action is rendered.
Applying AI-powered analytics to a golden record to deliver a next-best action unlocks insight – at the exact moment it will be most effective for an individual customer.
- Intelligent Orchestration
Intelligent orchestration is the design of a customer journey that links every last mile to the customer (digital, physical, call center, etc.), leveraging the next-best action optimization approach for each last mile – and across last miles. It is the guiding mechanism that keeps a customer on the right path, while also ensuring that marketers are tuned to the cadence of the customer.
Whether a customer is inbound, outbound, or engaging with a brand through a combination of both, an intelligent orchestration hub coordinates optimization by taking the insights and action from one channel to trigger personalized engagement and experiences on every other channel.
Intelligent orchestration is the secret sauce that makes a customer feel like a brand recognizes them as an individual. A trusted friend, if you will, holding their hand as they navigate the winding path of a dynamic customer journey.
Deliver Compelling, Remarkable Marketing Moments
The four capabilities outlined above provide marketers with a single point of control over data, decisions, and interactions that is essential for bringing remarkable campaigns to life with highly personalized omnichannel experiences to individual customers, in real time.
The Redpoint rg1 customer experience platform delivers the capabilities that bring remarkable campaigns to life with highly personalized experiences – delivered to individual customers – in real time and in an omnichannel environment. The single point of control ensures frictionless experiences exactly as a brand intends, and as perfect as customers expect them to be.
With rg1, brands close the customer experience gap – matching personalized experiences precisely to the expectations of the digital-first, always-on consumer.
rg1 in Action – Competing on CX
Returning to our whiteboard one last time, one of the big challenges for marketers who try to compete on the basis of customer experience with innovative, data-driven campaigns is real-time personalization.
Even for brands who have taken steps toward consolidating their customer data and transitioning from a channel-centric approach, real-time personalization is often a stumbling block. For an industry leading do-it-yourself retailer, rg1 solved the real-time challenge to enable the company to create a best-in-class buy-online, pick-up in-store (BOPIS) service, also known as click-and-collect.
The art of the possible, for this retailer, was a five-minute service level window to be able to synchronize an order from any device to a physical retail outlet. This had not been possible before because some data they needed to rely on had lagged by days. Abandoned shopping cart data, for instance, was not integrated with POS data, and a pilot BOPIS program was beset by irrelevant offers.
But with rg1 providing identity resolution at an individual level, a golden record for real-time contextual insight, analytics to determine a next-best offer and intelligent orchestration to ensure delivery at an appropriate touchpoint (channel and device), the retailer was able to create a remarkable, frictionless and hyper-personalized experience in the cadence and the context of a customer’s journey. Ultimately, the retailer achieved a 99 percent compression cycle from data to insight to action – satisfying all requirements for what it considered the art of the possible.
Make the Art of the Possible a New Reality
rg1 demonstrates that data and technology capabilities support the creation of innovative campaigns that market to an audience of one. rg1 enables moving from broad to individual segments, from batch to real-time, from channel-centric to omnichannel, from persona-centric to customer-centric, and from linear to dynamic customer journeys.
rg1 customers are on record saying that not only does the platform significantly narrow the customer experience gap, but that it also in many cases it is the organization’s top revenue-producing platform. rg1 turns data into revenue for ambitious marketers who turn the art of the possible into reality.
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Beyond Customer Engagement: Marketing As a Revenue Driver
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