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Optimizing your marketing reach can make every bit of difference to your campaign metrics. Your tools, insights, and methodology should work together to help you strategically communicate to new or existing customers on their preferred channels. But businesses are struggling to achieve optimal customer reach, or worse – they’re not measuring their potential reach at all.
We commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study on Mapp Cloud. After interviewing our customers, it highlighted one of many common challenges these businesses struggled with before using our solution: limited capabilities to reach and engage customers. Let’s dig a little deeper to understand what that really means.
“The Forrester study found that these businesses were using individual tools with siloed customer data to execute marketing messages on individual channels. What does that give you? Fragmented marketing. And with these fractured insights, marketing teams had no clear oversight of messages other team members were sending across their multiple tools. They were over-messaging shoppers, lacked tracking, and ultimately achieved poor customer reach,” explains Ricardas Montvila, VP of Global Strategy at Mapp.
If that seems all too familiar, we’re here to tell you there’s a better way. Integrating real-time customer insights into your campaigns unlocks the holy grail of CX marketing: insight-led customer experiences. By maximizing customer identification with a Customer Data Platform (CDP), it helps you put customer insights at the core of your cross-channel marketing strategy and activate these to enhance your reach.
But that’s only part of the overall marketing picture. For a business to truly create customer-centric experiences, it needs to create personalized experiences with relevant content, that reaches customers at the right time. Keep reading to learn more about how to optimize your customer reach in 5 steps!
Table of Contents
What is customer reach? Why optimal customer reach is important? Why are marketers struggling? 5 Steps to maximize your customer reach
WHAT IS “CUSTOMER REACH?”
“Customer reach” is the total number of individuals that you can reach with your marketing message, such as paid media, email, or SMS. This metric can be measured using data, such as ad impressions from advertising platforms that’s combined with the data of customers who organically came to your website. This is often collected by your analytics tool.
But beware: this number doesn’t always paint the real picture. Browsers blocking and restricting third party cookies may lead to the “unique visitors” metric being higher than it is. In fact, the same person could see your ad twice on two different devices, meaning it could be counted twice. Part of your web traffic could also not be human, as bots could be impersonating real people.
It’s partly why many marketers nowadays see higher acquisition costs per customer and lower conversion rates without apparent reason. To solve this, it’s important to stop focusing on the wrong metrics and trying to maximize inbound traffic. Working with the traffic you already have and focusing on your customer identification rate, opt-in rate, deliverability and more, can help achieve optimal customer reach.
WHY IS “OPTIMAL” CUSTOMER REACH IMPORTANT?
A higher customer reach means marketing to more people – but this doesn’t always yield proportionally better results. It’s why we’re talking about “optimal customer reach”; not just maximizing the number of people but maximizing the number of channels to contact each relevant recipient.
Think of it as satnav. When you’re driving to your destination and there’s potential problems that can delay or stop you from getting there. It recalculates and offers you multiple options to help you get there on time. With a CDP, your customer data can be the satnav in your cross-channel communications strategy to reach shoppers effectively.
But what is its impact in terms of numbers? Optimal customer reach impacts your customer acquisition and reactivation costs. Being selective of the marketing channel on a per-customer basis helps control your marketing budget. It clearly identifies cost-effective channels with a high return to utilize. But in some instances, if you have no other cheaper and effective option to reach customers, you can use expensive paid media channels for these “hard to reach” audiences.
HERE’S WHY MARKETERS STRUGGLE WITH THEIR CUSTOMER REACH
Low customer identification rates
If you don’t know who your customers are, you’re relying on generic messaging and using expensive paid media channels to retarget them. This makes it even more difficult for you to break through the noise. In fact, you’re just adding noise and achieving a low ROI.
Identifying customers helps you save costs and send more relevant, personalized, and converting emails, like cart recovery, price drops, and even back-in-stock emails. Most marketers rely on their e-commerce platform to execute such campaigns. However, only a fraction of visitors will log into their personal account on your e-commerce website which ultimately limits having a 360-degree customer view. But what if they gave you their address using a newsletter subscription form? What if they use different devices to browse your website?
Without a streamlined and unified marketing technology stack, you’re likely to identify less customers than you could. In fact, less than 1/3 of eCommerce businesses can identify over 21% of visitors on their website. Customer Data Platforms are essential here, as they help you identify and get to know your customers. Using web analytics tools like Mapp Intelligence will also help you recognize visitors across different devices, making your data even more accurate.
Poor Deliverability
Email deliverability is complex topic as it goes beyond simple delivery rate metric. Even with a perfect delivery rate, some ISPs may be placing your emails inadequately. You have no way to know for sure, as every ISP has their own rules and specifics, which are constantly changing. It’s important to have a deliverability specialist available for you to help identify and solve any problems.
“We are really happy with the deliverability of our emails. Pretty much all of our emails go straight to the inbox and we have really high engagement. If some of our emails suddenly start bouncing, Mapp is really fast to let us know about it.” Email marketing automation specialist, retail [interviewed for Forrester TEI study, 2022]
The rule is that good deliverability drives email engagement through better inbox placement. But it also works the other way around: every ISP looks at how engaged your recipients are with your content. Ensure that you’re targeting engaged recipients who will interact with your message, and that your message is easily recognized and trusted by them. Mapp’s BIMI services can help by placing your company logo directly visible in the customer’s inbox for better engagement.
No Unified View
Siloed data and tools are the perfect recipe for disaster. Your customer data won’t be at hand to contact shoppers when they’re likely to interact. By not unifying your data you’re finding yourself conducting fractured marketing; over-messaging your customers and pressuring customers, resulting in lower engagement rates.
EmailAnalytics had found that the average person received an average of 71.8 emails per day (including spam) in September (excluding weekends). It’s why it’s more important to stand out rather than over message.
Marketing pressure thresholds also tend to vary from person to person. Customer insights are crucial in helping you understand the pressure and frequency of your messaging. Use your interaction history here, as it becomes the base for defining limits on individual level. An alternative can also be offering your customers the option to define their desired message frequency in a preference center.
FIVE SIMPLE STEPS TO MAXIMIZE YOUR MARKETING REACH
1. Identify Your Customers With a Customer Data Platform
A CDP is an essential minimal requirement here, as it unifies your customer data across all media and channels. A good CDP should be able to help you increase the number of customers you identify on your website, create unified customer profiles, and increase your customer intelligence to optimize your customer reach.
2. Build Rich Customer Profiles
Once you have your unified CDP in place, you can start learning as much as you can about them. Through first-party data you can learn with valuable insights for optimizing your customer reach, in a GDPR compliant way. Ask yourself:
What are their preferred channels?
When are they active on these channels?
How often are they active? How often do they purchase?
All this data will help you optimize your reach and improve the ROI of your campaigns.
3. Enrich with Zero-Party Data
Don’t hesitate to ask for information. More consumers nowadays are willing to share their data, if it brings them benefit; in fact, 82% would share personal data for a better CX. So-called zero-party data, which customers explicitly share with you, is even more valuable. Ensure that this data is used to give your customers a benefit, as it will be their expectation:
Ask for their birthday – so you can send them a birthday coupon
Ask for preferred messaging frequency, so you can adjust it for them
Ask for preferences in content and channels, so that you can send them more personalized content over the right medium
4. Personalize in Real-Time with Automation
Once you’ve maximized your identification and have customer data by your side, you have all the tools necessary to send relevant messages to each customer over the right channel, and at the right time. But wouldn’t that require tremendous effort from the marketing teams? That’s where automation comes into play.
Marketers often find themselves using separate tools for this but consolidating tech can make it easy to execute your messages.
Mapp Cloud offers a Send Time Optimization feature, as well as enabling you to choose the preferred channel automatically – without having to deep dive into your data. As for the content, you can integrate your product catalog or CMS into our platform to pull the right content for each customer, while automatically applying your customer insights.
5. Go Cross-Channel
Orchestrating communications on different channels are a must if you want to optimize your customer reach. But each channel has different requirements, specifics, and costs, so it’s important to decide which customers to activate on which channel.
A contact might not be engaging over email, for instance, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re not interested in your brand. Maybe a timely SMS with a tailored promotion will work better for them. Some people even love receiving post cards. Find an optimal medium for your high value customers and use a personalized message to make it count!
THE BOTTOM LINE
Optimizing your customer reach goes beyond just bringing more inbound traffic on your website. By maximizing identification rates, you’ll be able to optimize your communication on each and every one of your channels – if you let customer insights drive them.
Having optimal customer reach lowers your marketing costs by reducing the number of users you need to retarget over paid media. Another benefit of listening to your customers and applying customer insights, is that you’ll drive your campaign engagement. Both aspects will contribute to an ROI increase in your marketing budget. This is illustrated in the TEI Study by Forrester, in which the composite organization, based on interviewed clients, was able to achieve a significant 540% ROI over three years by using Mapp Cloud.
WANT TO KNOW MORE?
The Forrester study found that with the help of Mapp Cloud, the composite organization was able to identify more customers on their website within three years and improve the delivery rate by 1.5%. These helped to optimize both customer engagement and revenue as a result. Get your copy of the study to find out how.
This article was first published by Mapp. Permission to use has been granted by the publisher.