Marketers by nature are tinkerers, always looking for ways to improve their effectiveness. That statement is supported by the use of numerous metrics, reports, dashboards and scorecards. So it comes as no surprise that we want to push the envelope and ensure that we cover the customer’s entire journey with timely personalized messaging. So, how are smart brands using digital marketing to acquire, engage and retain customers? It’s not as difficult as you might think.
If you happen to be at Salesforce Connections this week, you’ll be hearing from a number of brands. If not, that’s ok. This post will give you the foundation for success with Marketing Cloud to achieve similar results as those sharing insights and successes at Salesforce Connections.
Start Connecting What You Have
While the move to omni-channel may be seen as a revolutionary change for your organization as a whole; let’s think about it as evolutionary rather than revolutionary as far as taking your marketing to the next level. The first step is identifying the data sources and consolidating all the data. This is somewhat simplified if your “source of truth” is a system that is already tied to other systems and can be much more complicated if it is not.
Structurally, the communication channels used to educate and earn the trust of prospective customers will work to speak with your customers after the sale. Marketing Automation suites used for campaigns and scoring are great tools for communicating with known customers.
If your organization uses social media to educate prospects and facilitate sales, this is the perfect opportunity to expand the role of the social media channel to listen and respond to customer issues and respond in a timely manner. Further on that point, the customer service channel is a goldmine of customer information. Email, phone, chat and self-service communities provide the channel to speak with your customers directly while knowing their history.
Point of Sale information, or more generally, sales history is typically housed in a separate system. But, this is very powerful information. What did the customer eventually purchase after their journey?
These data points should be collected for analysis and content development, ideally these systems will talk to each other to build a robust customer view.
Build On What You Know
Now that we’ve identified or connected new sources of data, it’s time to put this information to work. It doesn’t make sense to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so let’s talk about beefing up our content machine. Here’s where planning and testing come into play. Does the newly combined data help us identify more buyer personas, does it help us further personalize communications to each customer, does it allow us to communicate at a decision point in the buyer’s experience or all of these together? Adding a branch in the Marketing Automation logic or specific product/service based content or action based triggers can easily be done with existing tools and it makes sense to test their effectiveness.
Meet Your Customers Where They Are
The systems have been connected and the content/personas updated. Are we waiting for prospects and customers to come to us? This question is both literal and figurative.
Literally, where are our customers and can we reach them with localized offers? The answer is yes. GPS enabled mobile devices with GPS apps allow us to reach our customers at very specific times and places. With our past history data, sales can be incentivized without cannibalizing margin.
Figuratively, let’s find out where our fans are talking and join the conversation. This means testing social media tools if they’re not already in place. It means monitoring social forums or creating your own community to engage your customer base. It means building a 1:1 customer journey that allows us as marketers to engage at each touchpoint. Regardless of the actual location, each channel must contribute to the overall profile of our customers and be able to feed data back into the system.
Repeat
We just covered a lot of ground from a technology, data and content perspective, so what’s next? As marketers we’re ready to analyze and iterate. Our first question should be whether the tools we have in place meet our needs.
- Does the Customer Service platform allow the team to provide outstanding service?
- Does the technology provide the data we need to drive personalized content?
- Can we measure effectiveness?
- Can we communicate effectively with our prospective customers?
The answers to these questions guide us to make changes and review our processes.
Most organizations will have some if not all the channels listed above. The smart brands connect the data from all these channels to analyze, score, build content and speak directly to their customers. Salesforce Marketing Cloud is the automation tool that can set you apart from your competitors.
