Over the last 10+ years, I had the privilege of working with digital leaders across very well known brands who had spearheaded initiatives in building infinite-customer loyalty . This blog post is to provide the workflow for multitude of interactions, meetings & analysis to build customer-centric initiatives , that can be easily adopted in your digital practice. Good luck and god speed!
1. Hypothesis to Configure
A marketing campaign or experience hypothesis should answer 3 simple questions – who, what & when? Having defined or essentially answered the questions, you and your team should set the stage for the best customer experience within your marketing technology stack
Who ? : It always starts with the customer! The first step of being customer-centric is to define common characteristics or attributes that define your customer. They can be made of the whole gamut of actions to demographic factors that are relevant to your product. These customer attributes would be available within your existing CRM systems or data lake or you would need help of a third-party provider. Followed by machine learning algorithms who would help find more people who might share the same attributes & potentially buy your product/service
What ? : Given a window to your brand, what should your customer’s see? Lets assume a banner with beautiful city silhouette is displayed based on the user location. Lets denote each banner or city silhouette as Experience ‘E’
When ? : Knock knock, ding dong , click click .. Customers interact differently based on the platform and current stage in their purchase journey. Identifying and recognizing these actions would help drive them towards the final outcome of purchase. Before your start here, ensure that you have a complete customer journey from acquisition to purchase and post-purchase
Your experience or experiences are configured & ready to be deployed for your customers.
2. Reach
There’s a thin line between increasing your reach and overwhelming your customers by following them everywhere. Leading to negative brand impression and adding to the mental list of digital scams. In the best interest of the customer, digital leaders approach reach as native reach & non-native reach, as detailed below
- Native Reach : The cost of converting an existing customer is far less than acquiring a new one, so its best not to loose them. Your native reach strategy using PII should ensure that existing customers can be reached based on their preferred means of communication or opt-in such as email, text, notifications etc. Any opt-outs should be respected with special messaging/experiences to ensure conversion. With more performance data your systems would be able to build attributes such as best time to reach, optimized titles etc.
- Non-Native Reach : When you’re not using PII, you can reach out to customers based on cookie info, location, last action, abandonment etc. Additionally, there are second and third party data providers who can help you reach devices based on additional psychographic & demographic attributes
With this step you have reached to your audience and have created multiple windows of opportunity for customers to experience your brand
3. Personalize
Your prospective customer with purchase intent liked what they saw and clicked on the ad banner to reach your website. Next objective is to present a connected experience so that your user might not feel lost in the matrix, using the following :
a. Source & Audience Profile : Traffic source provides details about how did the user reach the website & the device/platform used. The information may include but not limited to referrer, referrer types, OS, device type,location etc. Using these details an audience profile is build which can include details like new/existing visitor, visitor type, demographic , psychograhic etc.
b. Template & Content : Watching an artist paint is nothing less than watching magic. It starts out as a blank sheet of paper, then a frame or sketch is built and finally colors are added. When users reach a website, browsers interact with CMS in a similar way to present the experience. Starts out as a blank window, followed by the template and then experience is painted on the screen.
Important note that the experience painted is specific to the audience profile that includes the user. The decision on which experience has to be presented is based on the configuration in Step 1. Hope you were able to connect the dots.
4. Learn
After the views, clicks & probably purchases, its time for the team to look into the data and gather learnings before proceeding to the next campaign. Today, every team consists of experienced humans & machines. Yes! machines using algorithms to gather insights on data and use them towards their native functionality.
For example : Adobe Sensei learns about how other users have successfully converted on your website and uses them for Adobe Target capabilities like automated personalization & Auto-Target
Additionally, you would have your own enterprise AI & ML capabilities that use data to predict outcomes, provide multi-touch attribution , cluster audiences into look-a-likes and visualize insights for leadership to action. I would cover them in detail on a later blog post.
Now lets complete our journey here. In the beginning we had configured our systems to define who , where & what. To measure how these configurations have performed I am recommending the following essentials for the team to monitor regularly :
- Audience Behavior : Different users behave differently under different scenarios & platforms. The objective of this dashboard and later analysis is to understand how various user types are reaching your digital property , types of interactions & final route to conversion. It would help detect change in customer behavior at various stages of purchase cycle and make the required changes.
- Content Insights : Earlier we had configured various experiences in line with audience segments & platforms. These dashboards & deep dive would be geared towards understanding how content attributes influence user journey towards final purchase. Additionally any consistent winning experience should be passed to the UX/design teams to be included permanently into the digital properties.
- Customer Journey Insights : In today’s world of multiple devices, every purchase is backed by constant research across devices & platforms. The intent of these dashboards would help drive hypothesis on how users make purchase followed by data-driven decisions on the best investments & ideas for omnichannel campaigns.