The following is Part 2 of a two-part series on driving customer loyalty in a digital world.
In Part 1 of this series, we covered the need to deliver personalized, relevant engagement to customers involving large amounts of data, across a diverse and increasing number of media channels. This second part of the series discusses an analyst’s advice on how to achieve that goal.
In Constellation Research’s recent report on loyalty and digital marketing, it recommends that marketers take five specific approaches to managing personalization and relevance.
According to Constellation Research, marketers should:
- Connect all customer channels and touchpoints
- Provide social collaboration capabilities
- Drive right-time interactions and engagement
- Use behavioral customer data for real-time decisions
- Advance loyalty management capabilities
These are the five keys to increasing engagement and transforming traditional marketing organizations into modern marketing platforms. But what does it take to execute these approaches?
Retooling for Success
First and foremost, these new methods have steeper system requirements than traditional marketing. They require a powerful data platform that can span multiple parts of the organization (and beyond marketing). Secondly, there’s a need for right-time behavior management engines that include both analytics and modeling. Lastly, they demand that loyalty management systems be already in place to track and reward customers for their ongoing engagement with the brand.
The combination of a powerful data platform, a right-time behavior management engine, and a loyalty management system underpin marketing’s ability to drive customer loyalty in the digital age.
Driving Better Business Results
Taking these five approaches one step further, Constellation recommends the following integrated plan:
- Enable an integrated data source approach — Data exists both inside and outside the organization, but the only way to understand context is by connecting it all seamlessly. Integrating all of that data helps you understand your customers better and gives the customer a more consistent experience in every interaction.
- Provide ubiquitous channel integration solutions — Customers are communicating on many channels and marketing must be able to have conversations wherever and whenever. And the best way to do that is through system- and platform-agnostic technologies.
- Encourage behaviors using real-time customer data — “Seeing is affecting” in the marketer’s world. Having real-time data is the backbone of being able to proactively affect the outcome of customer interaction. Responding with relevance isn’t an over-the-shoulder data exercise—it’s the result of data arriving in the moment that interaction takes place.
- Orchestrate right-time interactions that result in engagement — Being fast isn’t enough if engagement isn’t personalized, no matter how that personalization is achieved. Getting the right interaction in the right moment, based on the appropriate context, creates relevancy and loyalty. This orchestration is the right blend of engaging emotions without creating information overload.
- Increase loyalty and customer lifetime value — Loyalty ultimately comes down to trust: the traditional marketing techniques and technologies of “batch-and-blast” mass messages do nothing for customer loyalty. Getting the customer experience right is the only path to create both loyalty and brand advocacy.
This coverage of Constellation’s research is just a brief summary of the rich information found in the report. To learn more about how to drive customer loyalty in a digital world, watch the webinar with Natalie Petouhoff, the report’s author, and see how you, too, can deliver personalized, relevant engagement in a world of abundant data and diverse channels.
