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Navigating customer engagement can feel like a rollercoaster ride – one day, people are clicking on your emails and browsing your website, and the next day, they’ve switched to your competitor. It all comes down to the impression they get when interacting with your brand. Did they feel any value or satisfaction? Or are they getting those feelings from elsewhere?
The strategy is simple: providing exceptional customer experiences that keep customers engaged in driving conversions. But your marketing needs to captivate and maintain your consumers’ attention throughout the customer journey. Personalization is vital here, yet businesses still struggle to achieve this consistently. As McKinsey found that 71% of consumers expect personalization, and 76% get frustrated when they don’t find it, it’s important to ensure they never experience that frustration with your brand.
You may even be thinking, “My customers are already engaging with my content; I’m not sure what we could change?” But here’s where you ask yourself: are you truly doing enough? You may have complex multi-step automated campaigns triggered based on your customers’ behavior, but are these actually effective, or could you be doing more?
As businesses are working at a fast pace, many are unaware of how many campaigns they are setting live and forgetting over time. As these exist in the background without a tweak or replacement, the high likelihood of a poor CX can be costly. Instead, building your marketing model around customer insights ensures you extract the most value and longest shelf-life out of your campaigns. And it all starts with analyzing customer interactions across channels, identifying key optimization opportunities, and creating campaigns that stay relevant in the long run.
Here’s What Forrester’s TEI Study Found
We commissioned Forrester to conduct a Total Economic Impact (TEI) study on Mapp Cloud. Based on a composite organization, it found a 540% ROI over three years. With additional benefits:
Messaging engagement improves by 25%: With Mapp Cloud, marketers enhance engagement through better customer segmentation and performance analysis, leading to optimized response rates. Year 1 sees nearly $6 million in additional revenue or $354,000 in risk-adjusted operating profit, and these results nearly double by Year 3.
Conversions on marketing messaging increase by 20%: Mapp Cloud empowers marketers to achieve more customer conversions by helping them grow engagement with more personalized messaging. Frequent RFM testing and analysis drive continuous improvement, resulting in almost $24 million in additional revenue over three years and $1.1 million in risk-adjusted operating profit.
Throughout the study, Mapp Cloud’s customer insights were highlighted as playing a key role in boosting overall business performance.
After interviewing four of our customers in the study, Forrester stated:
“Returns on customer insights can be significant. According to Forrester Research, data and analytics decision-makers who claim that their organizations have advanced insights-driven business capabilities are 8.5 times more likely than those still at the beginner stage to report annual revenue growth of 20% or more. […] Marketers viewed insights from analysis as starting blocks for understanding customers and critical for constructing personalized web experiences beyond emails and texts.”
But What Are Customer Insights?
Customer insights (consumer insights) are found when you investigate an individual’s data, engagement, and behavior to draw conclusions about what motivates them. These insights are commonly used to understand how to interact best or communicate with your customers.
Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) play a key role in unifying, enriching, and structuring customer data from various sources to enable real-time insights. It’s often important to put this at the core of your MarTech stack.
Customer Insights are the Blueprint for Keeping Customers Engaged
Imagine having a casual first-time shopper who gradually becomes more engaged with your content. Eventually, he or she converts into a repeat customer while promoting your brand enthusiastically.
With actionable customer insights, you can achieve this at scale. An insight-led marketing solution can be all the difference in making your customer insights easy to understand. You’ll identify the most impactful customer journey improvement opportunities and increase the precision of your targeting. This razor-sharp vision strategically focuses on revenue-driving opportunities to optimize the end-to-end customer experience in your campaigns. Some examples can be:
Personalized Recommendations: By analyzing customer behavior and preferences, you can provide personalized product recommendations that align with their interests and past purchases. This targeted approach can significantly increase the likelihood of conversion and drive higher sales.
Optimized Customer Journey: By mapping out the customer journey and identifying pain points or bottlenecks, you can optimize the user experience and streamline the path to conversion. This could involve simplifying the checkout process, reducing friction points, or enhancing navigation to ensure a seamless and frictionless journey.
Segmented Marketing Campaigns: By segmenting your customer base based on relevant criteria such as demographics, interests, or past interactions, you can deliver more targeted and tailored marketing campaigns. This enables you to send the right message to the right audience at the right time, increasing engagement and conversion rates.
Optimal Customer Reach: Use your customer insights to select the most engaging channels (website, email, SMS, and more) to send messages while learning about the best time and frequency to interact. This adds to an exceptional customer experience.
RFM Modelling: Go one step further with Recency, Frequency, and Monetary value. This segmentation technique allows you to identify and prioritize your most valuable customers, understand their purchasing patterns, and tailor your marketing efforts accordingly. By categorizing customers into different segments, you can craft personalized and relevant campaigns that address their specific needs and preferences.
5 Steps to Improve Engagement & Conversions
1. Put Insights at The Core Of Your Strategy
To create truly effective and impactful marketing campaigns, customer insights should be at the heart of your strategy. Rather than relying solely on gut-feeling, make data-driven decisions by prioritizing customer insights when launching a new campaign. While campaigns built on intuition might show some results, leveraging insights can elevate them to a whole new level of success.
Your tools are essential in this process. Access to user-friendly dashboards with customer-centric metrics and actionable insights will empower your team to make informed decisions that resonate with your audience. These insights provide a deeper understanding of your customers’ behaviors, preferences, and needs, guiding you in crafting targeted and relevant campaigns that engage and convert.
When you make insights the foundation of your marketing efforts, you’re not just hoping for success; you’re strategically positioning your campaigns to deliver exceptional results and drive growth for your business.
2. Implement A Customer Insight Methodology
Tracking customer engagement is a good start, but it’s only the first step. To truly leverage the data you collect, you need a well-defined customer insights methodology that goes beyond just gathering information.
It’s crucial to determine what data points are relevant for your business and how you’ll use them. This involves setting clear objectives and defining the metrics you’ll track to measure success. A well-thought-out methodology throughout your company ensures that your data collection and analysis efforts are purposeful and yield valuable insights that drive action.
By implementing a robust customer insights methodology, you’ll have the tools to spot emerging trends and seize new opportunities as they arise. It’s not just about collecting data; it’s about using it strategically to optimize your marketing efforts, improve customer experiences, and stay ahead in a dynamic market.
3. Gain Deeper Customer Understanding
Data can be overwhelming and difficult to grasp. Spending hours sifting through raw data might not lead to meaningful insights and can leave you uncertain about who your customers truly are.
Visual dashboards bring your data to life, making it easier to track engagement across the customer journey and investigate the effectiveness of each campaign. Has their behavior changed? How can you adapt your interactions to combat this change? The clarity that dashboards provide can help you understand your customers better, to discover what can motivate them to convert.
Another scenario is that if a specific channel isn’t yielding results with a customer, try engaging them differently. Using marketing automation and whiteboards strategically, you can mix emails, SMS, mobile push, and web push in a single campaign can optimize spending and boost engagement.
4. Continuous Improvement Through Testing
That campaign you created two years ago and forgot about might not be reaching its full potential. But fear not; there are plenty of small changes to test and explore to help the right improvements be made. Embracing growth hacking can optimize your campaigns and boost your customer engagement and conversions.
You can start with small changes like testing new CTA buttons in an email or go bigger by redesigning the layout to align better with your website. Or perhaps the content needs to be altered to give incentives that drive conversions!
Next, you can experiment with different channels for specific messages to also uncover powerful insights. For example, SMS might be the perfect channel to convert high-value customers considering a big purchase.
The key is to analyze the impact of your changes carefully. Not every modification will yield positive results, so it’s crucial to spot and learn from any setbacks. Likewise, when things go right, understanding how and why can be the key to unlocking even more success.
“Marketers regularly tested placement of click-to-purchase buttons in emails and web pages to assess how to best encourage customers along to the end of purchase funnel. In addition, marketers reviewed shopper behaviour to identify customers that were likely to purchase an item and specifically target them to make a purchase.” [Forrester TEI Study on Mapp Cloud]
5. Don’t Forget Your Best Campaigns
Last but not least, never overlook your best campaigns! It’s tempting to think, “Why fix something that’s already working perfectly?” But what if there’s an opportunity to take them to even greater heights?
Analyze everything, and don’t skip dissecting your star performers. Dive into the nitty-gritty of what makes them so successful and extract valuable micro-learnings. These insights will be your secret sauce to supercharge and elevate your other campaigns.
Remember, continuous improvement is the name of the game. Embrace a growth mindset and let your best campaigns inspire innovation and excellence across your marketing efforts.
Key Takeaway: Don’t Set & Forget!
Beyond customer experiences lies the essence of forging stronger relationships between brand and customers. The key takeaway is that having actionable insights at the core of your marketing enables data-driven decision-making that grows engagement, customer connections, and conversions for the long term. And remember: don’t set and forget! Instead, continuous optimization and learning of new and existing campaigns can help maximize the performance of your marketing efforts for the long-term.
This article was first published by Mapp. Permission to use has been granted by the publisher.