In unprecedented times, periods of economic uncertainty, or even in times when your business is changing in general, it can be difficult to decide what’s next. As you shift your marketing strategies to fit the position you’re in, it can be hard to determine what to keep, what to shy away from, and ultimately what is going to provide the most value to your business and engage your customers. Luckily, in times where difficult decisions need to be made to consolidate efforts, we have some data to guide our decision-making process — there are channels that have proven ROI and more creative control than others that marketers can turn to. In light of current challenges, we’re exploring how marketers can use these proven, reliable channels to engage customers and see ROI from their efforts.
3 Proven Tactics to Engage Your Most Valuable Customers
HOW TO IDENTIFY HIGH-VALUE CUSTOMERS
Before you can attempt to engage and convert customers, you’ll need the proper tools and strategies to first identify the best consumers to pursue. First things first — you need your data to be in tip-top shape to pull this off. Disparate, siloed data will not get you very far in the battle for engaging top customers.
To start, you’ll need to collect all of your relevant customer data and begin the process of unification to get a full understanding of just who your customers are. Once you have your data in one place, then you can begin the process of data activation. Data activation is a hefty topic, but basically it boils down to using the power of AI against your customer data to provide 1:1 customer experiences. If you like to learn more, check out our Data Activation blog series and our Data Activation Guide.
With your data in the right place, bring on a tool like Blueshift’s Customer Data Activation Platform (CDAP) that can intelligently segment your users with the power of your customer data. Our Adaptive Segmentation feature allows marketers to easily create segments that update in real-time to ensure they’re always targeting the right customers. Segments are designed with your unique business goals in mind and the parameters are fully customizable, but the creation is fully autonomous. With these segments updating with the most recent actions from each customer, it’s a breeze to see who you should be targeting at any given moment.
Now that you have identified your top customers and they’re ready for messaging, let’s walk through tactics for building strong customer-centric campaigns and comms that drive engagement.
1. CRAFT MESSAGES CHOCK-FULL OF VALUABLE INFORMATION
As we all make the shift to a more digital world, email boxes and notification walls are sure to become increasingly crowded and marketers will have to fight even harder for consumers’ attention. Creative and catchy subject lines that you have A/B tested and optimized will get your customers opening emails the first few times, but if you’re not providing real value inside, they’ll quickly amend their habits.
No matter what kind of message you’re sending out, it’s important that you personalize it to the preferences and interests of your customers — 72% of consumers only engage with messages tailored to their interests. Using Blueshift’s AI-powered recommendations and drop and drop template editor, it’s easy to create tailored messages that wow.
Pull data in real-time from your Singles Customer Views to populate email and push notification recommendation blocks. This information autonomously populates the blocks you’ve included in the template. The blocks can also be customized with certain goals in mind — recommended items in a product launch, recently viewed items that have gone on sale, or new streaming content that’s within a customer’s interest parameters — the possibilities are endless.
2. USE PERSONALIZED, TARGETED MESSAGING
Engagement begets more engagement — you’ll get the most value and the most ROI from narrowing your messaging to customers that are actively engaged with your brand. Additionally, businesses can see a ton of value from not regularly messaging low-value, unengaged customers.
With the right tech, like Blueshift’s Predictive Segmentation, it’s easy to define your segments with information that’s relevant to your business and goals. These segments are updated in real-time so marketers can always be sure they’re messaging the right customers with the right frequency and messaging.
For email, Blueshift’s Deliverability Expert, Kim Paxton, again weighs in and notes that marketers should be using precise segments and regularly conducting list cleaning to maintain a strong sending reputation and to bolster other personalization efforts to make sure they’re not falling on uninterested customers — or worse, getting thrown into spam.
Additionally, within Blueshift it’s possible to create a segment of high-value users who have shown low rates of engagement lately. You’ll want to send less frequent push notifications and emails, but ensure that they’re providing a ton of value and win-back incentives. As soon as a customer shows signs of regular engagement, they’re shifted to the “engaged” segment and are on their way to a conversion — all without back and forth from engineering teams and third-party resources.
3. UTILIZE TRIGGERED MESSAGING TO REACH CUSTOMERS AT THE RIGHT MOMENT
Given that most customers are now solely digital, it’s important to get your timing just right. Folks are on their phones more than ever, which means they’re quickly browsing and seeing messaging from competitors constantly. Once a customer is ready to convert, it’s important that your messages are timely.
Triggered messages can be activated to whatever actions are pertinent to your business needs. Behavioral data is collected and unified with historic, catalog, and transaction data to craft hyper-accurate messaging in response to an action. If a customer has been on and off your app the entire day, you might want to send a push notification with a coupon. If a customer abandons their cart, send an email reminder with an easy link to pick up where they left off and some product recommendations.
What all these tips and tricks ultimately boil down to is this: providing great experiences to customers is good for business. If you’d like to learn more about how Blueshift activates data to further great customer experiences, download our Data Activation Guide, or learn how you can stop fighting your tech and win in 2020 with our Marketer vs. Martech study. Want to see Blueshift first hand? Sign up for a demo with our team, today.
