A poll question during Tuesday’s Loyalty360 webinar, Why Mobile Should Be at the Core of Your Omni-Channel Personalization Strategy, which was presented by Genesys, asked attendees how they would rate their organizations’ current use of personalization across multiple channels to create better customer experiences.
Only 8% responded ‘very good’ while 52% indicated ‘good/average’; 20% ‘fair’; and 20% either ‘poor’ or ‘non-existent.’
Lindsay Frazier, Mobile Marketing Offer Lead, Genesys offered attendees her opinion on why some companies are lagging behind when it comes to prioritizing personalized experiences.
“It goes back to the poll question,” Frazier told attendees. “It’s maybe being done in silos. The challenge is to personalize and connect in that with an omnichannel view. It’s a challenge to connect the dots.”
Frazier said that multichannel mobile marketing can help marketers create personalized conversations that lead to great mobile customer experiences and drive tangible business results.
Some key components to keep in mind include:
- Engage your customers where they interact
- Connect experiences across the customer lifecycle
- Maximize revenue, reduce costs, and improve loyalty
Frazier cited the statistic that 50% of U.S. cross-channel shoppers expect to be offered promotions or merchandise that reflect their past online shopping behavior and purchases.
The revenue impact from a 10-percentage point improvement in a company’s customer experience score can translate into more than $1 billion. U.S. companies lose $83 billion each year due to bad customer experiences.
By 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator, Frazier noted.
JetBlue, she said, stated that a customer who is a PROMOTER is worth $33 above the average value of its customers, while a DETRACTOR is worth $104 below average.
Chris Connolly, Strategic Director, Digital Channels, Genesys offered Forrester’s definition of omnichannel: “Omnichannel is all about ensuring that data and context from initial contact carries over to subsequent channels — reducing customer effort, improving the customer interaction, and enabling the business to tailor the customer journey.”
The challenge with multiple channels revolves around various devices, CRM platforms, and marketing programs that create fragmented data about consumers, he said. Customer journeys are varied and they include an average of 10.7 sources of information before a purchase decision.
“They know more and you need to equip your staff members with the right information,” Connolly said.
Frazier offered some best practices for personalizing mobile marketing programs.
- Leverage all the contextual data available to create consistent, personalized, and relevant conversations
- Real-time information includes web page browsing, current location, device type, channel, time of day, search entries, and most recent activity
- Recognize moments and take action by knowing,
- Who the customer is
- What they need
- When and why they contacted us or we contacted them
- Which channel is being used
- How the business wants to help them
- Which channel is being used
- How the business wants to help them
After collecting the customer information, use the mobile channel to increase speed and reduce effort. Create a preference center, ask for express consent opt-in, utilize your loyalty program, CRM, and purchase data especially on birthdays and anniversaries.
What’s more, Frazier noted some survey opportunities:
- Trigger survey upon completion of customer service activity
- Close the loop with unhappy customers
- Location and timing
- User-supplied address or zip code
- Mobile carrier query
- IP address lookup
- GPS
- HTML5 mobile web
- Native app
- Passbook
- Beacons
- Timing
- Enters a store or location
- Clicks on an ad or link in SMS
- Responds to a marketing promotion
- Watches a video
- Posts to social media
- Makes a purchase
- Flight is leaving soon
Mobile personalization drives tangible results, Frazier noted. A regional superstore reported a 17% click-through rate for personalized rewards offers via SMS, and SMS redemption rates significantly higher than typical direct mail
A convenience store reported a 10% redemption rate of a mobile coupon in less than three hours, which resulted in $15 in incremental sales for each $1 spent.
Mobile should be a core component of a brand’s omnichannel marketing and loyalty strategy, Frazier summarized.
“A great personalization strategy utilizes customer info, past behavioral data, and real-time actions,” she said. “Recognize moments and take action.”