View Transcript
Speaker:
- Vijay Chittoor: Co-Founder & CEO, Blueshift
The Evolution of Marketing in a Connected World
Vijay Chittoor: Hello everyone. We'll get started in one minute. Welcome, everyone. All right, let's begin.
My name is Vijay Chittoor, Co-Founder and CEO of Blueshift. Blueshift is a smart hub for intelligent customer engagement on every channel. In this capacity, we've been very fortunate to work with some great brands who are focused on customer-centric engagement, activating data, and turning it into ROI. Today, I'm going to share some lessons I've learned in these discussions.
Everything starts by understanding that the role of marketing in today's connected world is fundamentally different. In the past, marketing relied on billboards, TV ads, and display ads that were separate from the core customer experience (which happened in a store, bank branch, or call center). Today, the opportunity is to connect with our customers where we can extend their customer experience through marketing.
You might still send an email or show a display ad, but now everything starts with the customer at the center. This means:
- Understanding how a customer has experienced our brand to date.
- Using that knowledge to identify the right moments in their lifecycle to trigger a message.
- Determining the right segments to message.
- Identifying the next best actions, content, or offers to put in front of each customer.
The goal is to make every marketing moment feel like an extension of their overall customer experience. When we achieve this, every customer is treated individually. Customer journeys are no longer linear; they take millions of different pathways, leading to continuously evolving, non-linear, always-on, connected journeys.
In this world of non-linear journeys, the world doesn't end at conversions. In the old paradigm, you drove customers from a marketing touchpoint to an experience touchpoint, and the journey ended with a conversion. Today, because the world doesn't end there, we need to think about flywheels, not funnels.
The first step in this flywheel is to have a marketing moment that captures a bit of customer data. That data is then activated to deliver more relevant experiences back to the customers, extending their customer experience. This extended experience makes customers more engaged, generating customer delight. These additional moments of engagement create more data, which can be activated again to drive even more relevant experiences and further engage customers.
This flywheel, once in motion, not only propels an individual customer's journey forward but also drives your brand forward at an aggregate level, generating significant ROI by converting data into engagement, which then generates more data to fuel the flywheel. We truly want to embrace the idea that today's customer-centric engagement is all about flywheels and not funnels. These flywheels are delightful for your end customers, and they also drive meaningful ROI for your brand.
Three Lessons for Driving Customer Engagement Flywheels
How do you get these flywheels going? Let me offer three different lessons I've learned from talking to our customers, including companies like Discovery Plus, LendingClub, Stitch Fix, CarParts.com, and many others.
Lesson 1: Integrate Marketing with Customer Experience for Two-Way Conversations
The first lesson starts with the realization that the connected customer journey is much more than just marketing. This might seem intuitive. If you think about customer-centricity, it involves understanding the customer, identifying the right moments in their lifecycle, and determining the next best actions for specific audiences. The inner circle here represents traditional marketing moments like emails, display ads, or direct mail.
However, where it gets truly interesting is the outer circle: marketing starts meeting every other function that touches the customer and delivers an experience. This includes:
- Your digital product (app, website)
- Support teams
- Sales functions
- Merchandising
- Loyalty programs
- Offline interactions
Connecting marketing to all these touchpoints with a consistent understanding of the customer is becoming increasingly vital. When done correctly, each marketing piece looks less like a one-way push and more like a two-way conversation. Customers feel truly understood in the moment they interact with your brand. That understanding fuels a dialogue, as you respond to them based on their recent experiences, and they, in turn, feel compelled to talk back.
The first lesson is to integrate your marketing with your customer experience to drive two-way conversations.
Lesson 2: Put Data to Work – Prioritize Zero-Party & First-Party Data
The second lesson emphasizes that data, especially zero-party and first-party data, has become more important than ever before, and for all the right reasons. As a society, we are moving into a phase where brands increasingly respect our data; it's not being packaged and resold as third-party data.
In this new world, marketers must realize that data collected with consent and trust (zero-party and first-party data) is paramount. As the third-party cookie crumbles, we also see customers leaving behind more data with brands because we live in a time of connected customer journeys.
However, the biggest struggle I'm observing with brands is activating this data – putting it to work. Despite having vast amounts of first-party data collected with consent and trust, many brands struggle to leverage it effectively. This translates into many brands "working for their data."
I often ask marketing teams: "Are you working for your data, or is your data working for you?" Ideally, you want your data to work for you. Unfortunately, many marketing teams find themselves working for their data. To reverse this:
- Data needs to be marketer-accessible: It shouldn't be hard or complex to query. Marketers shouldn't need to learn complex SQL or understand technical systems.
- Actionable Identity: It's not just about knowing a customer's ten different email addresses. It's about knowing the best way to reach them (e.g., is email even the right channel? Is it SMS? Which is the best email address? How are people in their households connected?). This requires truly actionable identity.
- Real-time Automation: Data shouldn't just flow into your system; it must also flow back out to the customer in real-time, delivering engaging experiences based on that data.
Brands that effectively "put data to work" drive what I call engagement agility. This agility is critical for getting the flywheel going and driving ROI by enabling more engagements back to the customer.
Lesson 3: Scale Storytelling to Millions of One-to-One Stories with AI
Finally, the third thing I encourage marketers to think about is that storytelling is the essence of marketing. Many of you entered marketing because you were excited about storytelling. However, the challenge and opportunity today lie in scaling that storytelling to millions of one-to-one stories.
How do you define the broad outlines of your brand's story but then ensure those stories meet individual customers at the right moments in their lifecycle and on their preferred channels? To achieve this, you need to marry the creative side of storytelling with analytical insights. AI becomes very critical here.
AI marketing is the key to all of this. What AI can do for you is infuse the right elements of who, what, when, and where to personalize your stories into those millions of one-to-one narratives:
- Who: Who should you message at this moment in their lifecycle? What are the right audiences?
- When: When is the right time to engage within a day to optimize it? For example, don't interrupt a busy customer, but extend their experience by being relevant.
- Where: What channel should you use? As a customer, I want to be connected on my channels of choice.
- What: What items to recommend?
When you combine the who, what, when, and where from AI with the creative storytelling from marketing, it unlocks the concept of a data artist. This is a marketer who has accessible AI and uses that combination to drive intelligent storytelling. I encourage all of you to think about how you could become a data artist and unleash the data artists hidden within your organizations. Turbocharge marketers with accessible AI and the right data, or connect data scientists with marketing storytelling to unlock their potential.
Conclusion
To bring it all together, the three lessons are:
- When you integrate marketing and customer experience, you start delivering experiences that look like two-way conversations instead of one-way blast marketing.
- When you put data to work, rather than working for your data, you drive agile engagement.
- When you combine marketing and AI, and all these ingredients work for you, you start driving customer-centric engagement. This meets the customer at the moments and channels they are most interested in, extending their experience into marketing channels.
This customer-centric engagement looks like flywheels, not funnels.
That's all I had to share with you. I'd love to connect with the audience here and understand the direction they want to take some of these thoughts. My contact info and LinkedIn are available. I look forward to hearing from many of you, and thank you for the opportunity today to let me share some of my thoughts on what I've learned. Thank you. Very excited. Thank you, Martech.