Just a couple of years ago, customers were finding it a little creepy when a business anticipated from their shopping history what they might want to purchase next and displayed options in a website while they were browsing. Consumers want personalized, contextually relevant – and most importantly – real-time interactions. As long as it is done well, they don’t complain.
The question now becomes not whether to offer real-time interactions with your customers but how best to do it.
The problem is that your customer’s journey with your brand has many channels and touchpoints, some anonymous and some authenticated. A journey might start at home on a desktop and continue in a browser on a smartwatch.
Traditional marketing campaigns are just too linear in their execution to deliver the highly personalized, real-time experiences your customers have come to expect. You may need to reorient your organization around aligning personalized outbound communications with customer-driven inbound interactions. This can be complex as you need to leverage real-time analytics and insights and orchestrate contextually relevant interactions.
We aren’t talking about famous social networking campaigns that shared big brand messages via social networks. Rather, interaction management is about creating an ongoing relationship between customers and your brand.
Always Connected
The first thing to wrap your mind around is that society has pretty much accepted the fact that we are always connected – and we embrace it. Many people will pick one vacation spot over another because it has great WiFi!
And besides the way we now often integrate our time off with our work, this always-connected lifestyle has given consumers considerable benefits and changed the nature of their expectations from a brand.
Digitally savvy consumers have much higher buying power and are looking for more than just price. Consumers are seeking value and have lost patience with linear, unresponsive advertising campaigns. And they now have the power to just swipe it away with a finger, making it imperative that today’s marketer understand these new dynamics.
The way out of this dilemma may be to embrace the customers’ demands for context. Context is everything for today’s multi-screen customer.
Embrace Context to Make Your Campaigns Smarter
Marketing campaigns once focused on creating memorable campaigns to trigger an emotional response in the consumer. Today, we must focus on continuity of experiences and interactions on all channels and touchpoints, including in the store. Campaigns have to get smarter through real-time interaction management. For instance:
- Be consistent across digital and off-line channels.
- Provide relevant and engaging content.
- Deliver value at the appropriate time. Offers must happen on the customer’s timeframe, not yours.
- Spark continuous cycles of interaction, not one-off content delivery.
Warner endorses five principles for real-time interaction management:
- Recognition: Know your customers at a personalized, individual level across devices and touchpoints.
- Context: Recognize purchasing history merged with real-time contextual insight of their session and what’s going on in the world (weather, world events, etc.).
- Offer: Use robust analytics to determine action, offer, content, or message
- Orchestration: Employ delivery and dialog management at the appropriate touchpoint, even multiple touchpoints and tie it all together.
- Optimization: Gather insights for ongoing interactions and strategic planning so you can continually improve. You must measure the moment, the life-cycle, and over the lifetime of your relationship with your customer.
The Challenges
Integration is the key component in developing a successful real-time interaction strategy. Marketers universally agree that the ability to integrate their marketing and non-marketing functions is critical and more important than having the nicest interface. You have to:
– Orchestrate real-time cross-channel interactions
– Understand how a single interaction relates to the optimal customer journey
– Increase customer engagement or loyalty
– Integrate on-line and off-line channels
Real-time interaction management (RTIM) is about engaging customers with context, value, and utility. It is about defining a real-time marketing strategy based on your customers’ needs. You must design based on your customers’ requirements, not just yours. To develop your own RTIM program, you need to bring together all the elements of your marketing tech to understand and address every step of your customers’ journey.
Learn more about this subject in the Summit 2016 Session 113.
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from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/campaign-management/creating-smarter-real-time-marketing-campaigns/
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