How to Create Continuous Customer Engagement

Speaker:

• Josh Francia: Chief Growth Officer, Blueshift

The Customer Data Dilemma

Josh Francia: Hi, my name is Josh Francia, and I'm the Chief Growth Officer at Blueshift. Today I'd like to talk to you about how you can create continuous customer engagement and unlock growth.

Customers share more data with companies now than they have ever done before. In fact, customers share over 2.5 quintillion (that's 18 zeros) of data every single day, and 90% of the world's data was actually created in just the last two years.

We share this data through:

• Explicit interactions, like creating a profile and entering personal information.
• Implicit interactions, like clicking a link in an email or visiting a website.

This leaves behind a trail of insights and preferences.

Over the last several years, there has been a rise in data privacy concerns. A recent study by Deloitte found that 81% of US consumers feel they have lost control over how their personal data is collected and used. What's more interesting is why consumers feel this way. Another study found that 75% of consumers feel the data collected by companies is used to benefit the company more than the consumer.

Yet, that same study found that most consumers (76%) are willing to share personal data if they receive certain benefits or enriched experiences. It's not that the majority of customers are afraid of sharing data; quite the opposite. They just want that data to be used to benefit them, not just the company. They want reciprocity. "We'll give you personal information; you make our experience better, easier, and more intuitive."

The "Groundhog Day" Customer Experience

Nothing frustrates these connected consumers more than when a company asks for a lot of personal information and then doesn't use it to enhance their customer experience. It's like the customer is in a perpetual "Groundhog Day," always having to answer the same exact questions and reintroduce themselves.

Let me give you a real-life example with my bank, who shall remain nameless. I've been with my bank for a very long time, like 25 years. As a bank, they know a lot about me. They know my name, birthdate, where I live, what I purchase, my assets, my mortgage, and so on. I have their mobile app, I use their website, and I even go into a local branch.

Every time I interact with my bank, it feels like they're meeting me for the very first time. I was on the mobile app, logged in, and saw an option for a "mortgage refinance analysis" listed under my current mortgage account. My expectations were that when I clicked this link, I'd be brought to a new screen inside the app that would show me different options for my exact mortgage and whether I could lower my monthly payment. I would then be asked to confirm some information, and my application would be submitted.

But when I clicked the link, I was kicked out of the app and brought to a brand new landing page that asked for my name, my email address, my phone number, my zip code. I mean, I was on their mobile app, logged into my account! We've known each other for 25 years. Because my expectations were not even remotely met, I left the site, closed the app, and forgot about the whole refinancing process altogether.

This is happening all the time to your customers, and you likely don't even know it. A recent survey found that only 5% of marketers claimed their company personalized customer experiences on a one-to-one level. As customers share more personal data, their expectations of a frictionless, consistent experience increase.

Why Companies Fail to Meet Expectations

Why do most companies fail to meet these new expectations? I doubt there are any company meetings that start with an action item called, "How can we piss off our customers by pretending we don't know who they are." Companies aren't intentionally creating poor experiences. But yet, we all suffer from these frustrating interactions daily.

The reason is simple: Companies can't access or activate their customer data in a way that actually helps their customers. It's crazy. Customer data is stored and federated across a myriad of data lakes and warehouses that are meant for compliance, internal reporting, and ad hoc analysis. Customer data is stored to help the company, not help the customer. This extremely rich dataset is essentially "put to sleep." It's stored in places called Redshift (literally meaning "moving away from something," in this instance, your customer) and Glacier (literally meaning "barely moving").

The Solution: Smart Hub CDPs & AI

In 2011, I was working at a large online travel company, and we were in this customer data dilemma. As you can imagine, we had a lot of rich customer data. We knew where customers lived, where they liked to travel, their favorite room and flight preferences. But we couldn't access any of it. It was in many data stores with fragments of information intentionally obfuscated to make creating a customer profile almost impossible.

A small team got together with a simple goal: what if we could personalize the promotional emails we send based on a customer's previous trips and recent searches?

We talked to every data and engineering team, learned how and where the data was stored, and built rudimentary processes to grab this data and store it in a new kind of database that was organized by the customer's email address. It was very simple: you enter the email address, and instantly, every trip, every search was available to you. We then created very simple business rules to match customer signals with flight, hotel, and rental car options.

It took us about five months, and we were finally ready to hit that first personalized email based on a full customer profile. Everyone was very nervous. This was a large departure from our typical batch-and-blast messaging. We launched it, and the results were incredible:

• First year: 60% growth in attributable revenue year over year.
• Second year: 50% growth.
• Third year: 45% growth.

The revenue growth was also coming from our existing customers. Our revenue contribution from existing customers went from less than 5% to almost 20% in just a couple of years. We had unlocked our first-party data by making it accessible to the marketing and product teams.

In 2014, several startups began to think about how to solve this problem by introducing new technologies that revolved around the customer and all their interactions. These technologies later coalesced around a standard term: Customer Data Platforms (CDPs). This new technology removed internal hurdles and gave marketers a holistic view of their customers and the ability to segment and analyze them.

Leveraging AI to Understand Customers

With this consolidation of data around a single view of the customer, it opened up another area of opportunity: Artificial Intelligence (AI). As the number of data points increased, mathematicians and engineers converged on a new field called data science, using historical data to make accurate predictions about future behavior.

AI marketing can help marketers determine the who, what, when, and where of engagement:

• Who: AI can help determine who is in-market to purchase or convert now, which immediately increases efficiency by reducing the cost per acquisition.
• What: Once you've identified who is in-market, what offer or piece of content will be most relevant? AI can predict which content each customer is most likely to engage with, increasing the probability they will convert.
• When: We all operate on a subconscious timeline. What if AI could tell you not only who and what your customer is interested in, but also when they're most likely to convert and engage, down to the very hour?
• Where: What if a marketer knew that a customer is 90% more likely to respond to an SMS than an email? AI can tell you the likelihood of engagement across different marketing channels.

AI has made marketers into superhuman fortune-tellers. It can do this across all your customers all the time, responding and reacting to new data points seamlessly.

The Rise of the Smart Hub CDP

Okay, we've unified our data, given marketers access, and AI has provided important insights about each customer. Most traditional CDPs stop right there. They provide a ton of insight to the marketer but no value to the customer because the customer hasn't been exposed to any of this yet. The marketer then has to figure out how to get these audiences and insights into several other platforms that can actually execute the campaigns. This is highly inefficient, and there's a huge loss of data fidelity as it's transferred from system to system.

There is a better way. In 2014, a small subset of startups looked further down the road and realized that without a way to act on this data, marketers wouldn't be able to fully realize its value. These startups, later called Smart Hub CDPs, added a layer of decision-making and marketing automation directly inside the platform.

They allowed marketers to:

• Create campaign journeys and workflows.
• Build templates.
• Implement business rules all from the same platform where their customer data and profiles lived.

They built integrations with the best delivery solutions across the entire customer stack (email, web, direct mail, mobile, SMS, paid media, contact centers, and more). This way, marketers have complete control to understand their customers, decide how to talk to them, and then execute on those decisions all in one place.

For example, they could send email messages out from three or four different email marketing providers and test inbox rates without changing any templates or business logic. All the interaction data from these channels flows right back into the CDP layer, continuously enhancing the customer profile. Now the marketer has everything they need to deliver that continuous experience their customers need.

Real-World Impact and ROI

This is all very interesting, but it will remain forever just interesting if this strategy and technology combination doesn't result in significant business impacts. Let's break down the impact that continuous customer engagement has had on companies.

First, let's look at the overall impact of advanced marketing technology compared to basic or outdated technologies. In a recent survey, companies claim that using modern marketing technology like Smart Hub CDPs generates:

• 81% increase in ROI.
• 49% increase in revenue.
• 44% increase in lifetime value.
• 48% increase in customer acquisition costs.
• 16% increase in greater customer engagement.

That's the overall market view. But what about some specific, real-life examples?

• Skillshare (online learning platform) needed to increase course enrollments. They unified their data, used AI to identify customers most likely to enroll, and executed multi-touch campaigns across email and mobile. The result: an 89% increase in enrollments.
• Zumper (online apartment rental platform) needed to increase engagement from email and mobile. They unified their data, used AI to build recommended apartments, and orchestrated a multi-touch campaign. The result: a 128% increase in click-through rate.
• LendingTree (online financial marketplace) needed to increase revenue from loyal customers. They unified their data, used engaged time optimization AI to determine the best time to message, and executed their campaigns. The result: a 35% increase in revenue.

Customers will continue to buy products and services they are interested in. The challenge and opportunity you have is to ensure your engagement with the customer ensures they buy from you and not your competitors. Your customers are begging you to use their data to make their experience faster, easier, and more intuitive. I encourage you to identify the pitfalls in your customer experience and then solve them with the advanced technology available with Smart Hub CDPs. These are purpose-built technologies to help you bring you closer to your customer.

Thank you so much for your time. I hope you have found this helpful. Feel free to visit our virtual booth where we have a lot of reports and guides that help you get started. Thank you so much. Feel free to reach out to me here on LinkedIn and email and on Twitter. Hope to talk to you soon.