Transforming to Customer Intelligent Marketing Part Two: Micro-Moments of Engagement

Read part one of this series here.

Here is an action plan for providing exceptional customer experiences in the micro-moments of engagement.

Marketers are facing an inflection point. They need to lead their enterprise in using more customer attributes to deliver more exceptional customer experiences. Those that do will become the future winners of their industries; those that don’t will likely wither and fade.

To leap-frog the competition, marketers need to help move beyond today’s world of batch and blast or basic personalization (messaging based on a few attributes) and become like Amazon, Google, Uber, Netflix, etc. This requires breaking through a wall of complexity and making personalization possible on hundreds-to-thousands of attributes.

The new data intelligence technology all comes around to how you do personalization. These are two very simple steps to think about at a high level:

First step – get serious, even fanatical on capturing every facet of your customer’s interactions with you, their interests, intentions and desires, and loading it into a real-time accessible Customer 360 Profile Data Store.
Second step – load these signals and customer attributes into machine-learning decisioning models to deliver hyper-personalized experiences.

Then, continuously experiment and iterate on the attributes used while refining your decisioning models to deliver exceptional personalized customer experience and become the Google or Apple of your industry.

Your marketing can grow in phases as you add additional attributes and decisioning capabilities. Think about starting by personalizing your messaging using segments and rule-based dynamic content, such as content based on gender. The number of available segments will grow as you add more attributes. You can then begin to blend customer-specific content such as product recommendations to produce truly personalized content.

The Key Systems and Components to Transform

Marketers have always had the goal of sending the right message to the right person at the right time. We are now able support that vision by collecting data on the customer’s micro moments in real-time, make in-the-moment decisions, and orchestrate delivery of that message across channels. We are in the Golden Age that marketers have long envisioned.

To break through the wall of complexity, consider addressing each of the four key technical components you will need to develop. You don’t have to take all of these steps at once, but when combined, they become the architecture that will power your ability to deliver Customer Intelligent Marketing and provide exceptional experiences for your customers. If done well, you will see incremental gains in your marketing performance as each of these components are implemented.

Get serious about the customer profile. The ability to unify, enrich, segment and analyze your customer profile data in real time is essential to enabling your ability to engage with your customers on their terms. Capture customer interaction events and signals across your web sites and mobile apps. Pair these events in real-time with the appropriate content and offers to capitalize on personalized retargeting opportunities. Remember, it is not enough to collect massive amounts of data. You must also have the ability to put that data into context, derive meaning or understand customer intent, and produce an actionable output from it.
Develop a library of content and content components and tag each content item within your content management system. This will allow you to perform rapid experimentation to deliver the content that drives the best results.
Match machine learning and AI based decisioning tools with your profile data and content management system to enable real-time construction of personalized messaging combining intelligence from customer attributes and the context of customer interactions.
Use machine learning, customer preferences and engagement history to determine the right channel (or channels) and timing for best results. Use customer engagement to determine the appropriate cadence, timing and channel mix for additional follow up messages to deliver a delightful customer experience and turn your loyal customers into brand advocates.

If you have not already started your journey to Customer Intelligent Marketing, it’s time to get started. Your goal should be to start with a firm foundation based on quality customer profile data. Deriving context and customer intent from that data, combined with automated content and a cross channel delivery system will enable you not just to grow your business, but to develop brand champions as well.

Never undervalue the good a customer profile can do for your campaigns. By better understanding and knowing your customers, the better you can personalize and market to him. A unified customer profile helps tremendously, and a customer data platform (CDP) is the tool to use. Find out how to “Do More with Customer Data Platforms.”