Identifying The Right Customer Strategy
Identifying The Right Customer Strategy
With the Engagement Marketing Trajectory, brands know exactly where they stand with customers — and have a framework for where they want to go.
When perception trumps reality in business, it can result in a disparity between where a brand thinks it is positioned in the market, and where data proves it to be. A brand could also think it knows exactly how customers perceive it, only to find that data reveals a different story. When perception and reality don’t align, advantageous marketing opportunities exist to bridge the gap. To measure a brand’s marketing maturity and level of customer engagement, Ansira has created a framework called the Engagement Marketing Trajectory (EMT). This framework helps clients: • Understand the impact of their current marketing execution • Identify where they want to be in terms of customer centricity • Outline the technological platforms, tools, systems, and content needed to reach the desired level of customer centricity
The manner in which a brand markets to customers will impact its position within the framework, and any shift is dependent upon desired customer relationship goals, budget considerations, and timeline. The EMT serves as a visual guide to help all stakeholders discover a brand’s true market position — and helps determine the level of customer centricity it needs to meet marketing and business goals.
The Engagement Marketing Trajectory visually guides all stakeholders to discover a brand’s true market position.
• Demonstrate how the brand compares relative to key competitors and industry leaders
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Identifying The Right Customer Strategy
Ansira’s Framework The type of relationship a brand wants with its customers will impact its engagement strategy, which in turn is dependent on the nature of the product or service. For example, a toaster company doesn’t necessarily need to create two-way dialogue with customers because those customers simply want the toaster they purchase to work. But if the brand is Disney, the desired outcome is quite different: Customers want an individualized experience that focuses on entertainment, amusement, and creating memories. A brand’s level of customer centricity is also impacted by budget, as well as the point of diminishing returns. For example, grocery stores have the data to offer individualized communications, but the return on investment is small and doesn’t justify the cost of the robust marketing campaign this would require. When it comes to determining marketing spend, brands must first determine how much of an investment is relevant and appropriate for their particular product or service. Ansira assists clients with their marketing strategy by analyzing the brand in its current state to determine where it falls within the EMT framework. The greater the depth and breadth of marketing capabilities used, the farther to the right the brand will fall on the trajectory.
Product Focus BROADCAST
EXPAND
• Brand and promotional messaging
• Branded experience across channels
• Little to no data leveraged
• Not individualized • Data is in silos
Product-Focused Brands: These companies market to customers with promotional messaging (email communication or direct mail, for example) but use little to no data to determine messaging, frequency, channel, or cadence. The brand may take its marketing up a notch if it leverages a branded experience across channels, but the messages aren’t individualized and any data used is analyzed in silos. Examples: Automobile warranty and residential real estate companies that send untargeted direct mail campaigns to a mass list. Communication-Focused Brands: These brands want to connect with customers, but are focusing on the outcome of the communication rather than focusing on one-to-one marketing strategies. Brands in this category may use analytics to offer more relevant customer experiences, and some use predictive analytics to communicate in the customer’s preferred channel. Example: Retailers that send email discounts/coupons focused on driving immediate campaign sales results. Customer-Centric Brands: These brands are focused on engaging customers and delivering an impactful experience. Marketing strategies include proactive, individualized, real-time communications to shape the customer’s journey. Brands that are the most customercentric see marketing as the key to putting the customer first, and have the technology infrastructure in place to support and orchestrate one-to-one relationships. Examples: Disney and Zappos, which offer immersive, relevant, individualized customer experiences.
Communication Focus CONNECT
Customer Focus
CONVERSE
ENGAGE
• Single view of the customer across channels
• Use analytics to deepen individual experiences
• Trigger and segmented communications
• Predict behavior and converse in the relevant channel
• Real-time and proactive communications during journey
EXPERIENCE
• View marketing as interrelated, real-time interactions that cumulatively • Move to make up always-on the customer communications experience 2
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Identifying The Right Customer Strategy
The type of relationship a brand wants with its customers will impact its engagement strategy. How We Do It
• Provide the framework for discussions around where the client would like to be in relation to its competitors or industry leaders • If the brand is conversing with customers but its competition is engaging customers, what does the brand need to do to increase customer centricity? • Determine where customers expect the brand should be in relation to its competitors and industry leaders
The EMT framework allows Ansira to conduct a formal assessment of a brand’s current state, laying the groundwork for a comprehensive marketing strategy designed to boost or enhance customer engagement. The EMT is a vital part of the business planning process and eliminates the guesswork that often shapes the brand’s perception of its market position.
The EMT framework informs strategic conversations, and provides a roadmap to where the client would like to be in order to achieve greater customer centricity.
Determining where a brand falls on the EMT starts with a discovery phase. Ansira conducts interviews with key stakeholders that help the strategists at Ansira understand how and where the client is marketing today, as well as the type of infrastructure in place. Some of the questions include: How individualized is your content? What platforms and technologies do you use? What kind of data do you use to drive communications?
By leveraging the EMT, brands have a formal, consistent way to assess marketing positions today and again in the future.
Once the answers are in, the team uses a scoring system, and the output pinpoints where the brand falls within the EMT framework. This assessment helps to:
Customer-Centric Brands Integrate Strategy and Systems
• Determine where the client is today with its marketing strategy • Is the brand informing customers or providing a truly engaging experience? • Compare actual assessment results to where the client perceives it is in order to uncover gaps, or corroborate accuracy • Discover where the client would like to be in terms of customer centricity • Does the brand need to provide a more individualized experience to gain market share? • Determine the level of effort/budget available to support future marketing programs — and adjust expectations • Determine the right programs and support needed to move the brand along the trajectory toward its ultimate goal, or if the client is in the right place, keep them in their current location
• Do customers think the brand’s competition is providing a more relevant experience? If so, why?
The brand’s position on the trajectory and desired future goals are dependent upon three critical dimensions: technology, customer intelligence, and activation channels. The farther to the right a company is on the framework, the more integrated the strategy and systems have to be. Brands that are positioned to the right will: • Deliver a consistent, relevant experience to the customer every time — and their customers will have grown to expect it • Leverage an omni-channel orchestration platform to utilize all available marketing channels, from email and websites to SMS and loyalty programs • Create content that is hyperfocused to reflect what customers are interested in, and deliver it in a manner consistent with customers’ preferences
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Identifying The Right Customer Strategy
Extent to Which U.S. CMOs/Marketing Leaders Agree That Their Company Is Trying To Become More Customer-Centric,* Oct 2015 % of respondents
Strongly Agree
46%
Agree
2%
44%
My organization is already as customercentric as it should be
7% Disagree
1% Strongly Disagree *Note: in terms of strategic investments and overall business goals. Source: Korn Ferry Institute, “Marketing Pulse Survey 2015,” Dec 4, 2015. www.eMarketer.com
For brands on the right side of the trajectory, content and channels must be integrated, and systems must be aligned. Customer-centric marketing requires campaign management, content management, and real-time orchestration. Customer centricity requires that every facet of marketing — from email and mobile communications to in-store interactions — must give the customer the most relevant, individualized experience possible at every turn.
Technology Needs, from Left to Right Once a brand decides to pursue a more customer-centric approach, the brand’s position on the trajectory and its desired future state will inform decisions around what types of data, tools, and platforms are necessary to achieve results. Moving across the trajectory from broadcast (left) to experience (right), the following are examples of the types of technology used by brands at each point.
The type of relationship a brand wants with its customers will impact its engagement strategy. 4 © 2016 Ansira. All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited. Information is based on best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change.
Identifying The Right Customer Strategy
BROADCAST
EXPAND
• Brand and promotional messaging
• Branded experience across channels
• Little to no data leveraged
• Not individualized • Data is in silos
CONNECT
CONVERSE
ENGAGE
• Single view of the customer across channels
• Use analytics to deepen individual experiences
• Trigger and segmented communications
• Predict behavior and converse in the relevant channel
• Real-time and proactive communications during journey
• Broadcast: Brands are sending batch-and-blast communications to customers, often with a singular message and through singular channels. Customer data may be leveraged, but is typically pulled from source systems. The technology used is simple and executional in nature. • Expand: Leveraging the technology in play at the Broadcast level, additional channels are added in order to reach customers. Messaging is consistent across channels in a manual management fashion. Data is siloed, with platforms often serving singular roles, and little intelligence is gained across executional channels. • Connect: Data is a large focus. Brands create a singular view of the customer across marketing campaigns. This often leads to more intelligent prospecting across efforts and additional programs, which are more timely and targeted to customers. Technology is largely dependent upon data quality and customer data integration, or master data management efforts at the database level that link disparate critical data to one file. Executional platforms may still remain siloed with some crossfunctionality in order to ensure proper tracking and feedback loops.
EXPERIENCE
• View marketing as interrelated, real-time interactions that cumulatively • Move to make up always-on the customer communications experience
• Converse: Building upon the consolidated customer view in the Connect level, increased intelligence is built through data appends and statistical software to build models. Here, the marketing strategy uses predictive analytics so that communications can focus on meeting a customer’s needs. Conversations take place within the channels where customers are most active. Content is tied to consumer segments or attributes, with increased dynamic communication capabilities and platforms. • Engage: At this point on the trajectory, customers are starting to engage in two-way dialogue with brands in a perceived real-time manner. Strong data platforms with integrated sources and complete response loops linking anonymous and known consumers are at play, along with progressive technology that is nimble and responsive. Always-on communications take precedence over planned campaigns, or at the very least complement complex communication channels. • Experience: Here, consumers experience brands in a real-time manner with mutual value exchange. Technology platforms are sophisticated and often transcend the control of marketing departments, which can provide an extra challenge in order to realize this vision.
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Identifying The Right Customer Strategy
Stack or Scale? When brands move from left to right along the trajectory, another technological consideration is whether or not to utilize a singular solution stack — Oracle or Adobe Marketing Cloud, for example — or a flexible, best-inclass platform that can be customized and scalable to include components designed to manage time-critical events and logical next steps as customers interact with the brand. Technology is an investment, and clients must determine the amount of resources they can invest, as well as the point of diminishing returns.
The brand’s position on the trajectory and its desired future state will inform decisions around what types of data, tools, and platforms are necessary to achieve results. Intelligence The technology in place also helps determine the level of intelligence available to the client. As a brand moves across the trajectory, Ansira’s analytics team can leverage deeper, more comprehensive data driving intelligence to better understand customer behaviors and sales. When moving to the right side of the trajectory, data gathering becomes more involved because there are more channels, variables, and complexities that need to be integrated. And, as the brand integrates across different channels and various programs to understand customers on an individualized basis, the marketing tactics also evolve, such as from a simple email blast to an individualized customer journey across many mediums. For example, for brands positioned at the far left of the trajectory, Ansira can measure sales lift before and after a commercial airs to gauge its effectiveness. At the far right of the trajectory, Ansira can analyze the effectiveness of relevant, real-time offers triggered by in-store beacons in order to quantify sales.
Intelligence: Product-Focused Brand Analytics focus on sales or channel performance and optimization (for example, subject line testing for emails or sales match back for direct mail). While this information is very important, it’s backward looking versus forward looking, and does not take into account any interactions within the medium spectrum. Intelligence: Communication-Focused Brand The addition of individual-level data enables not only a more longitudinal view of a customer, but also the ability to implement descriptive and prescriptive analytical techniques. Profiling and segmentation can ensure the most relevant communication content is pushed while propensity models can be developed to determine the right time to communicate. Additionally, the ability to tie behavior to a single customer allows multi-touch attribution gauging the performance of all marketing tactics with which a person has interacted. Intelligence: Customer-Focused Brand When always-on tech enables a two-way exchange between customer and brand, intelligence is at a true 1:1 level. In addition to evaluating the propensity of a customer to exhibit a behavior, customers themselves provide data into the feedback loop by specifying what is most valuable, resulting in individual algorithms that continuously feed the intelligence and drive the experience.
As a brand moves across the trajectory, Ansira’s analytics team can leverage deeper, more comprehensive data-driving intelligence to better understand customer behaviors and sales. Activating the Strategy Once the client assessment is complete, next comes the plan of attack. Ansira takes all of the information from the discovery phase and works closely with stakeholders to understand the channels, content, and tools needed to reach the desired level of customer centricity — and 6
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Identifying The Right Customer Strategy
then builds a roadmap to reach the new point on the trajectory. Since every client is unique, the tools needed to activate the strategy will vary. Some of the possibilities include shifting to a new email service provider for a campaign, implementing a data management platform for digital advertising, and using beacons to deliver real-time mobile content. Once the activation plan is in motion, Ansira sets key performance indicators to measure and optimize results.
Ansira sets key performance indicators to measure and optimize results. Steps to Success When an organization makes the decision to implement change and move its position along the trajectory, there are four keys for a successful transformation: 1. All In. The executive, management, and marketing teams need to be on the same page and in favor of change. Moving to a customer-centric approach requires investment and organizational change, and unless the entire team is on board, the effort will be difficult.
3. Have a Well-Defined Plan. Whether the move along the trajectory is big or small, change requires a well-defined and well-communicated plan that includes strategy, milestones, roles, phases, preparation for rollout, and reality checks. The plan should also outline costs so that stakeholders can be sure that the budget matches the ambition. 4. Understand That Change Has a Price Tag. The organization needs to examine the cost for potential technology overhauls, customer intelligence analysis, and activation, including emerging channels, new content, and new capabilities. Marketers often tend to understand desired outcomes and goals, but underestimate the initial investment. In order to deliver real outcomes, brands will have to invest in the technology and innovation necessary to facilitate them.
Moving across the EMT is an incremental process that can lead to a brand’s elevation in the marketplace. With the EMT, brands know exactly where they stand with customers — and have a framework for where they want to go next.
2. Culture Is King. Culture and strategy must be aligned. Organizations need to examine their culture and make sure it allows for a customer-centric strategy. For example, if a health insurance company wants to pivot from being a policy writer to a healthy-outcomes advocate, it needs to ensure that its employees have the tools and the training to promote health and wellness. This requires a cultural shift from focusing on minimizing risk (policy writing) to helping customers live healthier lives (providing wellness-related content). Visit Ansira.com for more on customer engagement services and thought leadership. Follow us on Facebook and LinkedIn. 7 © 2016 Ansira. All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited. Information is based on best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change.
Identifying The Right Customer Strategy
Ansira: The Data-Driven Results Marketing Agency Ansira continually engages customers along the entire consumer life cycle and purchase funnel, using conversion optimization to drive higher sales at a lower cost. Our customer-centric approach applies data and analytics to every interaction, helping clients maximize customer profitability and optimize customer experiences. Designed to adapt with our clients’ ever-changing consumer base, we take the guesswork out of marketing. Our repeatable programs integrate all channels and media to steer consumers along the path to purchase (pre- and post–), leading to predictive ROI modeling. While traditional conversion optimization measures only one phase of the conversion process, we measure each and every consumer touchpoint to determine the best way to maximize marketing spend. Every single program is viewed as an opportunity to test, learn and optimize. Using multivariate and A/B testing, Ansira continually scrutinizes a variety of factors, including landing page effectiveness, messaging and targeting methodologies. We take full advantage of the latest in technology, message delivery and measurement.
Terms to Know Engagement Marketing Trajectory (EMT): A tool that Ansira uses to help clients understand how they market to customers relative to key competitors and industry leaders. Customer-Centricity: A marketing strategy in which all content and communications are designed and delivered with the customer experience in mind. Omni-channel Orchestration: Delivering relevant content across all available channels — i.e. websites, print, social, e-mail, SMS, and loyalty programs — in a systematic, integrated manner that prioritizes customer preferences for messaging, delivery, and cadence.
Contact Ansira at www.ansira.com
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