How to stop spamming and start serving your customers

Five ways to make customer-centric marketing happen

Ad blocker usage was at least as high as 42% in some countries in 2018. The problem? Brands need to earn customer attention in a vast, crowded landscape, and the majority aren't doing a very good job at it. 

So how do you build high-quality customer engagement that's worth skipping the Adblocker? We believe it boils down to these five best practices:

1. Space out the conversion
2. Be relevant: orchestrate, segment and experiment
3. Help, don't intrude
4. Once they convert, stop chasing them
5. Get started quickly with the tools and data you already have

1. Space out the conversation

In the words of Rob van den Berg, Senior Online Marketer at multinational utility company Nuon:

"If someone doesn’t click after you’ve shown a banner for the 3rd time, it’s pretty clear that he doesn’t find this relevant, so you’d better stop right there."

Just because someone has visited your website twice, doesn’t mean they want to see your ad across every platform. Too much too soon can quickly decrease marketing performance and lead to banner blindness – meaning your prospect will ignore your advances completely. Frequency capping is useful to limit the number of times a tagged user sees your ads on display channels... but maybe your ambitions extend further than that.

Why not space out the conversation between different channels to determine and automate the right content on your customer’s next-best-channel? If they prefer email to display ads, you can create a win-win situation by personalizing your outreach and saving on media spend.

How do you tell where they want to hear from you next? Actually, they will tell you. By using engagement and interaction data from past experiences, you can determine what each individual customer is more likely to interact with next — and extrapolate to new ones as well. This is the power of the customer data that you already have!
 

2. Be relevant: orchestrate, segment and experiment

What is the ‘average customer journey’? Or perhaps more importantly: why should we reduce consumers to the average when they have their own preference of channels, products, and frequencies of interaction?

By using a data management solution to combine your customer's owned data with sourced second- and third-party data, you can start with the basics by creating simple rules for different segments, such as differentiating between customers and prospects across channels. Then you can apply Intelligent Journey Orchestration principles to these interactions to create individually personalized interactions regardless of channel, using predictive technology to automatically go where your customer will want to hear from you next.

Adopting a test-and-learn attitude is key here: constantly optimizing, tweaking and measuring new messages and platforms — and having the flexibility to do so across any channel or database you choose — will both make your customers feel personally valued, and generate real marketing results.

So what do great customer journeys look like?
 

3. Help, don't intrude

What does great personalized marketing look like to you? Think about how your message is helpful to this specific type of customer, at this moment.

Omnichannel marketing managed well always involves a hybrid of marketing and service: it needs to add value. And again, this all starts with making use of data that you already have about your customers.

For example, based on their mobile check-in and activity history, companies can use their data management solution to digest real-time location data and trigger a push message at the right moment.

A bank might suggest a list of nearby ATMs to assist cash withdrawal abroad, following a customer’s search query. And because they know the customer is abroad and withdrawing money at an inflated transaction rate, they can recommend a credit card via an exclusive email offer, specifically designed to manage spending overseas.
 

4. Once they convert, stop chasing them

A surprising number of companies are unable to stop targeting prospects beyond one or a couple of channels once they’ve made a purchase. 

Serving the same ad for a product someone has recently bought only serves to annoy people — so use burn tags to remove individuals from a selection once they reach a booking confirmation page.

This necessary silent treatment can even be activated through old-fashioned in-store transactions via a data management solution to orchestrate digital and offline systems: think using email receipts to match CRM or loyalty card data to online channels within a single customer profile.

Then next time, you can add them to an upsell campaign.

>> Change these 3 KPIs for a more customer-centric organization
 

5. Get started quickly with the tools and data you already have

Having a human conversation with your customers is not a futuristic dream. Data management technology can enable you to make relevant, cross-channel customer journeys happen across Facebook, CRM, email, mobile apps, beacon technology, and beyond.

It's great if your goal is to keep your prospects front-of-mind with people-based marketing. But it's up to marketers to determine which technology is best for their business, learn how to use it, and start experimenting with orchestrating this omnichannel dialogue. Your customers won’t wait for you to overhaul your marketing platforms — and neither should you.

Instead, let’s start today to create customer journeys that make it a pleasure to remove Adblockers. Let's take marketing to the next level by building on your existing technology, adding what's needed, and keeping your customers around longer.

The key to success: your customer data

Customer satisfaction ladders up to customer retention, loyalty, and advocacy — and it all starts with better personalization through customer data. Get the best new strategies and insights in our insights hub:

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