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Webinar Transcript: The New Rules of Marketing
Speakers:
- Vijay Chittoor: Co-founder & CEO, Blueshift
- Houman Akhavan: CMO, CarParts.com
Welcome and Introduction
Vijay Chittoor: Hello, I am Vijay Chittoor, co-founder and CEO of Blueshift. Welcome to this session of the Martech conference, where we will be talking about the new rules of marketing and how marketing is, for the first time, becoming a customer experience function.
We live in an always-on world where customers are leaving behind more data than ever before, and customer journeys are fragmented across countless touchpoints. Marketers are now tasked with:
- Understanding customers through the lens of all this data.
- Engaging them by delivering one-to-one experiences on every touchpoint.
Doing this requires marketers to get savvy about:
- The right trigger moment to engage each customer.
- The right next best offer, product, or content at a one-to-one level.
- Highly precise audiences that can be distributed across many applications.
This is where the Smart Hub CDP comes in.
- The CDP unifies your customer data and brings it all into one place.
- The Smart implies making intelligent inferences from this data.
- The Hub helps you distribute those decisions to every part of the customer journey.
Delivering this connected customer experience is a huge opportunity for every brand. That is why I am excited to be joined today by a forward-thinking CMO who has implemented this transformation and seen results from it.
Houman Akhavan is the CMO at CarParts.com. Houman, we are grateful for you and the CarParts team. Thank you for that partnership, and thank you for being here. To kick us off, tell us a little about yourself and the customer journey you envision for your customers.
Houman Akhavan: Thank you, Vijay. It's great to be here today. CarParts.com is a direct-to-consumer retailer of aftermarket auto parts. Our mission is to get drivers back on the road by making it easy and convenient to shop for auto parts online. We're also the fastest-growing website in the automotive aftermarket, attracting over 10 million visits per month.
Through our Smart Hub CDP integration, we have generated over a quarter-billion personalized one-to-one messages this year alone. It's fitting that we're here at MarTech talking about the new rules of marketing. While I have the CMO title, I think the traditional definition of the role is somewhat antiquated. I believe the marketers of today who understand the convergence of marketing and technology and know how to put it to use to understand their customers are going to be the marketing leaders and CMOs of tomorrow.
What is Driving the Transformation in Marketing?
Vijay Chittoor: That's a fantastic summary. Houman, you mentioned that the world of marketing is being transformed and you've seen it play out professionally. How do you characterize this transformation in the marketing function, and what is driving it?
Houman Akhavan: If we look at how we were marketing even a year ago, we didn't have a CDP in place. We had a lot of challenges:
- Scalability: We had a vast data set, but we weren't able to take into consideration real-time signals. This created scalability challenges.
- Personalization: Our messaging was one-to-many. We would craft one message and send it to a large audience. We felt we were falling short of achieving one-to-one personalization, and with all the advancements in CDPs, we saw the value in understanding the voice of the customer to market in a very relevant and personalized fashion.
What Does Customer-Centricity Mean for CarParts.com?
Vijay Chittoor: Many marketers talk about being customer-first, but your strategy makes it very real. What does customer-centricity mean to you and CarParts.com, specifically? How do you get away from being channel-first to truly customer-centric?
Kuman Akhavan: We have a very customer-first strategy because I think before you can take advantage of the technology, you have to have a very deep understanding of your customer. That's what determines how you roll out a personalization strategy.
For us, in the auto parts vertical, understanding our customers meant understanding that they are drivers with very unique characteristics from one to another. One obvious example is that somebody might have a Chevy truck while someone else drives a Ford Taurus. Being able to market to them around their specific vehicle is crucial.
The same thing applies to many different verticals. It goes back to truly understanding your customer and creating a profile of their preferences and motivating factors. Only then can you devise a personalization strategy that drives your technology.
I also believe in the old adage, "the customer is always right." They're not going to tell it to your face, but those insights are in your data sets. You have to have a strong understanding of what your customers are indicating to you by the actions they are taking on your website and throughout their journey.
How Did You Choose the Right Technology?
Vijay Chittoor: You faced challenges in understanding customers at that level and unifying disparate data sets. How did that play into your thinking about the right technology stack and the right teams for your strategy?
Houman Akhavan: Some of the challenges we dealt with before we made the decision to go with a CDP were:
- Scalability: We have a very large data set, so we needed a platform that could ingest millions of records and scale with large data sets. With e-commerce penetration doubling recently, there's no shortage of data being generated.
- User-Friendly Interface: In previous platforms, a lot of our efforts were manual. Having a user-friendly interface is very important for campaign orchestration.
- Real-Time Signals: Our first-party data strategy needed to be based on real-time user signals, which were nonexistent in our traditional platforms. Many CDPs today are built to take in real-time user signals so you can get to one-to-one personalization.
- Predictive Modeling: Once the platform was in place, we needed the predictive intelligence to identify which users were likely to be high-LTV customers or likely to churn. This allows for custom-tailored marketing strategies for vastly different audiences.
The ideas were always there, but the platforms were falling short. We're now able to execute against our vision of true one-to-one personalization.
How Do You Use a Hub for Omnichannel Experiences?
Vijay Chittoor: You talked about the CDP as a hub. What does that mean for your customer journey? What are the important channels? How do you think about the omnichannel experience across all touchpoints?
Houman Akhavan: I see the central hub as the heart of all our marketing. Things were managed in silos five to ten years ago, and we weren't really taking into consideration an omnichannel strategy. Today, consumers are interacting with five to ten different channels before a conversion happens.
Having a central hub that ingests all these insights across multiple touchpoints allows for a truly cohesive experience. If a customer takes an action on our website and then a week later interacts with us through social media, we can leverage the insights from their first visit to present the right message and advertising on social. We use the analogy of delivering the right message at the right time in the right place, but doing it across all marketing channels. That's the value of a CDP being the central hub.
Vijay Chittoor: Are there any non-traditional channels, which might have been more in the customer experience world, that you're now bringing into the fold?
Houman Akhavan: Absolutely. Our contact center is a great example. A subset of our audience may not want to transact online, using the call center to complete a purchase or get additional assurance. When they call, we want to ensure any insights they've already identified to us, such as their vehicle or items they looked at, are readily available to the agent.
We all dread calling a contact center. You don't want to have to explain everything. Time is money. Customers appreciate seamless and fast experiences. So, the CDP is the central hub, and we can collect a lot of insights and make them available to agents so they can do their jobs more effectively.
What Have the Results Been?
Vijay Chittoor: You've implemented a great strategy and have the right tools to action it. What have the results been so far, and what do you expect next?
Houman Akhavan: The results have been incredible. One of the metrics we look at for micro-conversions is engagement rates. We've seen our click-through rates increase as much as 400% when we personalize these messages. The larger your audience grows, the more you need to understand individuals and communicate with them personally.
Consumers today are inundated with ads—anywhere from 5,000 to 10,000 per day. They're more likely to tune out generic messages. It's critical that we talk to consumers with personalized advertising. That's where we're seeing these benefits. We've also seen a doubling of our email channel's contribution to the business in the last 12-18 months.
Vijay Chittoor: Those are very powerful metrics. It sounds like you are taking the one-to-one experience a customer would get with a call center agent and distributing it across email, banner ads, and other touchpoints. You're delivering the customer experience through marketing channels, which is a huge transformation.
You've been through this transformation and are in a great place. A lot of people in the audience are just starting this journey. What advice do you have for them on how to get started?
Houman Akhavan: Absolutely. Some high-level advice:
- Technology is important, in terms of scalability, first-party data strategy, and real-time user signals.
- Having a platform with predictive intelligence is important so you can identify users and what actions they're likely to take.
- However, the people behind the company are also super important. The individuals behind our CDP integration have allowed us to excel. The strategy is critical—it must be customer-first. Understanding your customers and your personalization strategy is just as important as the tech stack.
Our team structure includes both highly technical and highly creative people because it requires all different skill sets. The organizational structure to execute the strategy is key.
What Does the Future Look Like?
Vijay Chittoor: It sounds like you're getting your marketers out of day-to-day operations and into a strategic driver's seat. Have you seen that play out? Are people feeling less burdened by operations and more focused on strategy?
Houman Akhavan: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Before the CDP, a lot of our team's effort went into manual functions. Automation has now freed up time to focus on creative strategy. It's almost like a plane where the pilot can leverage autopilot, allowing them to focus on other metrics.
The automation hasn't eliminated the work; there's now more work and effort around strategy and understanding how you're marketing to your customers. If anything, we're now more customer-focused than ever before because we have these capabilities available to us. Before, our hands were a little tied. The creative flexibility is incredible.
I don't think our work is done. We're constantly thinking about our strategic roadmap. I really want to get to the day where every inch of a page is personalized to the individual, and we're getting there. Every quarter, we roll out new features and enhancements on our personalization roadmap. It's a very exciting time for marketing.
Vijay Chittoor: Very insightful. You touched on big themes: being customer-first, translating that into a clear strategy, using technology to drive predictive signals, and distributing that across every touchpoint. The big shift your team has made from mundane tasks to creative, customer-centric strategy is a great learning for the broader audience.
If you were to summarize the "new rules of marketing," what wisdom would you impart to this audience?
Houman Akhavan: Absolutely. First off, thank you for having me here today. I would highlight the point I made earlier: the customer is always right. As marketers, it's our duty to find the true voice of the customer, leveraging the technological advancements of Smart Hub CDPs to deliver a better experience and truly get to that one-to-one personalization.
Vijay Chittoor: Thank you so much, Houman. And so there you have it, the new rules of marketing and how a Smart Hub CDP can truly create customer experiences at every touchpoint. I'm sure everyone enjoyed the insights you've shared. Thank you so much for the partnership with Blueshift, and thank you for taking the time to be here today.
Houman Akhavan: Thank you, Vijay. Thank you.