Customer experience focuses on the relationship between a business and its customers. It includes every form of interaction or communication with the customer, whether direct or indirect, even if it doesn’t result in a purchase. When optimizing for customer experience, marketers emphasize tasks that increase engagement at every touchpoint.

In this article, we’ll dive deep into why and how businesses should have a more customer-centric approach and answer the most frequently asked questions about customer experience. More specifically, we’ll cover:

• What is customer experience?
• Why is customer experience important?
• How to choose the right customer experience strategies.
• How to measure customer experience.
• Popular customer experience platforms.
• Frequently asked questions about customer experience.
• How to improve customer experience?
• How improved customer experience helps brands.

Estimated reading time: 16 minutes

What is customer experience?

Customer experience is the result of any interaction a person has with a brand. This includes, marketing materials, product design and quality, customer service, online interactions, sponsorships, public statements by employees, store appearance, suppliers and more. Any encounter with something identified with a brand is customer experience. It shapes customers’ opinions and has a direct impact on the bottom line.

Why is customer experience important?

A positive customer experience can massively boost your business. It can help retain clients and encourage them to refer your company to others. After all, word of mouth marketing is one of the most influential elements driving purchase decisions today. In fact, 84% of customers say they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations, according to BrightLocal’s Local Consumer Review Survey.

Marketers are recognizing the benefits of CX platforms and strategies in growing numbers, especially after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. 94% of marketers changed their digital CX strategy over the 18 months following the pandemic onset, according to Acquia’s Global CX Report. And data from Pointillist suggests that digital transformation of tools and strategies remains one of the top CX priorities for brands.

Customer experience can make or break your brand, so marketers would be wise to invest in solutions that drive positive interactions. 

Examples of positive customer experience

Essentially, customers are more likely to return to your business if they feel like their needs are understood and expectations are met. This includes listening to customer feedback and implementing changes.

Some other examples of positive customer experience include:

• Intuitive website design.
• Realistic expectations about products or services.
• Sales being transparent about pricing.
• Easy-to-access self-help resources.
• Always-available live customer support with a short waiting time.
• Proactive messaging around known issues.
• Use customer feedback to understand your audience thoroughly.
• Smooth omni-channel experiences (ex. website and mobile app integration)

Good customer experience encompasses more than the absence of disjointed elements. It requires brands to proactively engage with customers in creative ways to foster greater engagement.

Examples of bad customer experience

Poor customer experience, on the other hand, may cause serious damage to your brand’s reputation and negatively impact brand loyalty. The implications of bad customer experience are far-reaching and may involve customers switching to a competitor, poor lead conversion, and a drop in your customer lifetime value.

To put it simply, a bad customer experience is when a customer feels a business has failed to meet their expectations. The most common indicators of poor customer experience in digital interactions include:

• Having to enter information multiple times.
• Unresolved issues/questions.
• Too much automation.
• Service that is not personalized.
• Websites that are slow to load.
• Confusing UI/UX.

Poor customer experience has the potential to derail your B2B marketing campaigns. Because so much time and effort is put into purchasing decisions, these potential buyers are more aware of disruptions and discrepancies that make their jobs even more difficult. Brands that force customers to take undesirable actions or sift through disjointed experiences will inevitably see more drop-offs.

How to choose the right customer experience strategies

While many customer perceptions of your brand hinge on personal preferences, there are plenty of tactics marketers can enact to foster better experiences. These strategies are designed to measure, facilitate, and foster more positive customer experiences at every touchpoint.

Here are some tips on how you can improve your customer experience strategy.

Create feedback loops

Customer feedback is the easiest way to understand what your customers expect from you and understand how to provide them with a better experience. It provides first-hand insight into what customers think about your brand, what issues they have, and what works for them. 

Remember to acknowledge their feedback and do your best to act on it. This builds trust, shows your customers that you care, and gives them a solid reason to continue doing business with you.

Create an omnichannel experience

When you develop an omnichannel CX strategy, you’re creating a more efficient and effective way for customer service agents to interact with customers. Having multiple channels that integrate within a single system allows customers to pick up right where they left off, providing a consistent communication journey and delivering a good experience across channels.

Personalize the user experience

Personalization includes interactions through customers’ preferred method of contact, product recommendations based on past purchases and search history, or an online experience tailored to each customer.

Using data to figure out who your customer is (their preferences, habits, basic personality, etc.) helps marketers better understand what customers expect, which can lead to faster support and resolutions. 

Empower customers through AI

Digitalization is evolving at an increasingly rapid rate, and through it, so are machine learning applications, chatbots, or mobile messaging. AI-powered chatbots and virtual customer assistants are effective for quick, repetitive tasks. 

Keep In touch with your customers

Ensuring your customers remember you is essential to retaining them. Following up with customers through their preferred contact method or surveys can help you learn where to improve your business and show your customers they matter. Adding them to a mailing list can also be a way to send them personalized recommendations, letting them know when you expand your services or offer them seasonal or customized discounts. It helps you build trust and familiarity with your customers.

Deliver proactive experiences

In addition to acknowledging and responding to customer reviews and feedback, businesses can be proactive in their approach. Anticipating customers’ needs and solving problems before they arise or escalate can help generate unique and personalized experiences.

Create a FAQ page

Customers often prefer resolving issues on their own rather than contacting a live service agent if the issue is fairly common. You can help them by making self-help services more accessible and easy to use. Usually, this is in the form of a FAQs page that quickly resolves relatively common customer questions. Ensuring that your content is accurate and regularly updated is crucial – an unhelpful article can quickly translate into a poor experience.

Use analytics to improve the customer journey

Research and data provide many insights into the efficiency of your customer support team. Data helps improve customer satisfaction with the interactions, provides insights regarding consumer behavior trends, and much more. Modifying processes and services with your customers in mind begins with understanding what your existing data is telling you.

How to measure customer experience?

Customer expectations are constantly changing, so the services put forth to meet their expectations need to change with time as well. Being able to measure how well your customer experience strategies are working allows you to know what’s helpful and what to improve.

Many marketers map out customer journeys to better understand their experiences. This exercise helps them see the buying experience from the customer perspective, allowing them to more easily pinpoint areas in need of improvement. 

Mapping out customer journeys also provides a good framework for measuring the success of marketing campaigns. Whether it’s how engaged customers are with your content or how many purchases are made, marketers can customize these maps to reflect their brand’s KPIs.

Here are some of the most effective ways marketing teams can measure customer experience.

Use data to analyze customer satisfaction

Surveys can give you insight into factors like customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) and Net Promoter Scores (NPS). CSAT surveys measure customers’ satisfaction with the product or service they receive from you. They are usually expressed with a 5- or 10-point scale (where 1 means “very unsatisfied” and 10 means “very satisfied”) or through binary yes/no answers. NPS is a customer loyalty score derived from asking customers, “On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this product/company to a friend or colleague?” You can, of course, choose to modify the question slightly to suit your brand or business.

CSAT surveys are more specific to the product and service they receive from you, while NPS is more focused on customers’ overall feelings toward your brand.

Customer effort score (CES) measures the experience customers had with a product or service in terms of how “difficult” or “easy” it was for them to complete an action or obtain a resolution. CES surveys are often sent out after an interaction with customer service, with questions such as, “How easy was it to get your issue resolved today?” It is a great way to keep in touch with your customers and gain quick feedback.

Analyze customer churn rate and the reasons behind it

Customer churn is a normal part of business, but it’s vital that you learn from it so that you can prevent it from happening due to poor customer experiences.

Regularly analyzing churned customers can help determine whether your churn rate is increasing or decreasing. It can also help you understand the reasons for churn; for example, if customers responded well to your personalized communications and returned for business, you know that team or area of your company is doing a good job.

Create a community forum to serve as a virtual focus group

Community forum discussions are a great place to understand customer pain points, how customers receive and use your product and what they are asking for. It works like customer feedback, which can provide direct insight into how customers feel about their interactions with your business.

Forums can be shared via email surveys, social media, or a community page and give customers the chance to offer suggestions proactively.

Look at customer service data 

Look into how long customers have to wait before reaching live service agents or getting an answer. Long wait times are a major reason for poor customer experience.

Also, look for recurring issues among support tickets and understand why they exist. Resolving these issues before customers bring them to you allows you to decrease the total number of tickets your agents receive while providing a streamlined and enjoyable experience.

Talk to customer-facing staff 

In addition to creating feedback loops with customers, marketers should build them with their employees as well. Customer-facing staff, like service agents, may have insights based on direct input from customers or their own experience while dealing with customers. This allows you to understand if and why employees may be having difficulties meeting expectations and what you can do to improve that.

Popular customer experience platforms

Customer experience platforms are designed to help brands manage their interactions with customers to enhance customer satisfaction. They serve as a single place for brands to manage the entire customer lifecycle journey, from overseeing a customer’s interaction to responding to queries.

As customer expectations keep rising, it is crucial for brands to use personalization to improve customer experience. Here are some of the most popular customer experience platforms that can enhance your customer experience.

Zendesk

Zendesk offers many features, such as a ticketing system for quicker customer service, that lets you build an integrated help center and a community forum for consumers who use your products. It is very easy to navigate and has many customizations, giving you a complete view of every customer interaction. It also helps your business stay aligned by enabling a complete sync between all agents with its Sunshine platform.  

Sunshine has a unique feature called the “Zendesk Marketplace,” which allows you to connect to 1,200+ apps. A one-stop shop to find partners, apps, and integrations, it increases agent productivity and streamlines workflow. 

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) 

The most striking feature of the Adobe Experience Manager is its open architecture, allowing you to easily integrate it with existing enterprise software systems. AEM gives you a powerful enterprise toolkit that includes web analytics, automated tools for personalized content experiences, and smart tools to rapidly source, adapt, and deliver your assets across digital audiences. 

It can help customers through every step of the process from acquisition through retention with its digital enrollment and forms feature. The feature also offers end-to-end digital document solutions, which make it easy to create responsive forms that customers can easily complete and securely e-sign. 

Explore DAM solutions from vendors like Acquia, Widen, Cloudinary, MediaValet and more in the full MarTech Intelligence Report on digital asset management platforms.

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Satmetrix

Satmetrix offers brands holistic customer experience solutions, including omnichannel feedback and a customer journey-based design. Its features enable you to combine and analyze all forms of feedback across the customer journey. And, its VOC solution NICE Satmetrix allows you to optimize customer experiences by giving you unified customer feedback from millions of customer interactions.

Satmetrix is built to enhance efficiency by acting in real-time to empower front-line employee performance and help them resolve issues through automated agent workflows.

Zoho CRM Plus

Zoho CRM Plus helps brands improve customer experiences through its wide range of unified solutions. The platform provides marketers with omnichannel engagement support, social media marketing tools, marketing analytics, chatbots, and customer segmentation features.

The platform’s emphasis on unification can help brands meet customer expectations at every stage of their journey. And, since it’s a CRM, the tool brings all team members onto the same page to prevent disruptions in communications.

Qualtrics

The Qualtrics customer experience platform uses AI and automation to provide marketers with resources to foster greater levels of engagement. Qualtrics can use customer data to generate feedback forms, surveys, and other resources that address your audience’s most pressing needs.

This experience management solution also helps brands make better campaign decisions with recommended actions based on customer trends and patterns.

The number of customer experience platforms available is growing by the day, and for good reason. They’re one of the best ways to help you attract and retain loyal customers. They are driving the future of quality customer experiences for companies worldwide and helping build powerful brands.

Frequently asked questions about customer experience

Marketers and brands know customer experience solutions are necessary to increase engagement and ROI, but many have questions regarding why it’s important, how to deliver results, and how to improve it.

Here are some of the most popular questions marketers ask regarding customer experience.

Explore capabilities from vendors like Adobe, Pointillist, SharpSpring, Salesforce and more in the full MarTech Intelligence Report on customer journey orchestration platforms.

Click here to download!

How to improve customer experience

While there is no one one-size-fits-all for this, here are three essentials. 

• Prove CX matters: The C-suite has to be directly involved. One person should be in charge of customer experience, with all the authority and resources they need.

• Empower employees: Are they able to resolve a customer’s problems? Why or why not? You can find this out via an employee pulse survey. This can uncover any common pain points in the employee experience and show where you need to improve.

• Personalize interactions with customers: There are many ways to personalize and many of them can be automated. These include: thank you emails to customers after purchase; customer follow-up surveys; and website offers based on user preferences 

How improved customer experience helps brands

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 5.4 million new business applications were filed in 2021. This is a clear indicator that businesses will have to be unique, experience-driven, and differentiable to succeed. Enabling excellent customer experiences will act as a huge differentiator for your brand, helping with customer acquisition, brand loyalty, and customer retention. 

Here are some of the most important benefits of improved customer experience.

Greater profits

Companies that excel at customer experience drive higher revenues and profits than their competition. A better customer experience leads to higher customer retention, a five times cheaper alternative to customer acquisition.

Word of mouth and brand loyalty 

Word of mouth marketing is key to organic growth. Excellent customer experience means customers are more than happy to recommend your brand to their inner circle and are open to purchasing your products again. 

Enhanced customer experiences help you build a strong connection with your customers. It helps you create a winning experience that helps you stand out from your competition.

Improved company culture and reputation

Building a better customer experience helps you nurture a company culture that is centered around customer satisfaction. This is especially important today in the digital age, where customer feedback can either make or break your brand. 

Improving customer experience creates a powerful foundation for your company as one that pays attention to the evolving needs of its customers. It is one of the most undervalued assets of any business and can scale up your growth, sustainability, and reach. It will grow your brand value exponentially. 

Provide the best customer experience you can

Think of the last time you had a great experience purchasing a product or service – how did that experience leave you feeling? Now, do the same for a poor experience you’ve had as a customer. What would you have liked that business to do better?

Having a customer-centric approach when coming up with new ways to grow or promote your business can go a long way. Collecting customer feedback and analyzing trends to improve negative experiences and enhance positive ones will help boost customers’ feelings about your company. A happy customer is likely to come back for more – they’re one of the best ways to increase brand awareness. At the end of the day, customer satisfaction should be a key part of your marketing plan. 

The post What is customer experience and why does it matter? appeared first on MarTech.

Customers want to be treated as individuals, not as users, accounts or prospects.

In this guide to personalized marketing, we’ll dive deep into personalization and its potential to increase engagement. We’ll cover:

• What is personalization?
• Examples of personalized marketing.
• How personalization can help marketers.
• What are the challenges of personalized marketing?
• What marketing technology is needed for personalization?

What is personalization?

Personalization is a one-to-one marketing strategy that seeks to better understand and connect with customers. It uses real-time data and insights to deliver highly relevant messages and offers. 

It is a shift away from a traditional one-size-fits-all approach prioritizing the reach and breadth of an audience toward methods targeting customers based on needs and interests. It emphasizes tailoring messages to specific individuals or segments of buyers.

Personalization is about changing the face of marketing, moving from assumption-based, batch-and-blast approaches to meaningful, personalized customer experiences. It is how brands tailor their offers, communications and advertising to buyers’ needs.

Customers – whether B2B or B2C – expect customized experiences, and marketers must lean on smart targeting solutions to fully understand the people they’re selling to. Personalization tactics apply insights gathered from customer data be used to guide people through the buying process.

Examples of personalized marketing

Today’s customers expect personalization in each interaction they have. These can be built on name recognition, location-based recommendations or messages based on preferences.

Customers also expect seamless experiences wherever they encounter brands. Any disruptions will almost inevitably cause them to drop off. 

This is why it’s essential to ensure content meets the personal needs of the audience. Customer journey analytics enable these experiences to be optimized and personalized across all channels.

Explore capabilities from vendors like Adobe, Pointillist, SharpSpring, Salesforce and more in the full MarTech Intelligence Report on customer journey orchestration platforms.

Click here to download!

While the principles of personalization can be applied to both B2C and B2B brands, their application often looks different. Here are examples in both areas.

B2C personalized marketing

Personalizing marketing for consumers is quite complex. Consumer preferences are constantly changing, and marketers need to offer solutions to current needs and anticipate future ones.

Fortunately, there are now technologies which let B2C marketers gain insights from consumer data, giving them tools to offer engaging, personalized content.

Here are three examples.

Data-driven strategies. Marketers rely on customer data to make their campaigns run, and this is even more important when it comes to personalization. Collecting first-party consumer data with tools like customer data platforms (CDPs) can help marketers learn what their audience demands and develop solutions to fulfill those needs.

Marketing automation. Brands have more consumer data to analyze than ever, which can be a double-edged sword. Significant insights may be lost due to team capacity issues or poor technological infrastructure. Many B2C teams now use marketing automation solutions for better data collection, task streamlining and audience analysis – all of which improve personalization.

Artificial intelligence solutions. AI tools are all the rage in marketing circles today, and for a good reason – their machine learning capabilities make it easier to provide customized experiences. These systems learn from consumer behavior and improve tactics with in-depth analysis. However, these technologies are far from perfect, so B2C marketers should ensure proper safeguards before deploying them.

B2B personalized marketing

Personalization among B2B brands looks a lot different than in its B2C counterparts. Aside from the obvious differences in marketing to consumers versus marketing to companies, B2B marketers may face frequent data issues – outdated, siloed or low-quality data – that prevent them from getting actionable business information. What’s more, this marketing is aimed at high-level decision-makers whose interests and priorities are more difficult to decipher than the average consumer.

Marketers must understand these buyers inside and out – especially those in the B2B space. Here are three B2B personalized marketing examples.

Account-based marketing. Account-based marketing (ABM) strategies and tools can deliver targeted advertising and personalized content to high-value accounts. Although this method has been around for over a decade, advances in technology now provide more relevant data from high-level decision-makers. This can include buying intent and quantitative business information. By implementing an ABM strategy with one of many available platforms, marketers can foster greater personalized connections with businesses.

More B2B marketers are adopting account-based marketing than ever before. Find out why and explore the ABM platforms making it possible in the latest edition of this MarTech Intelligence Report.

Click here to download!

Personalized content recommendations. Understanding where your visitors are in the content funnel is critical, but guiding them through it is even more important. Using information such as past purchases, downloads, or search history, B2B buyers can be given personalized content recommendations at each stage. Showing them you’re aware of their business needs helps build trust.

Location-based marketing. Many businesses operate from a single geographic area and primarily serve customers around them. B2B marketers can better reach buyers by providing messaging that speaks to their locality, whether it’s upcoming events about them or special deals for their area.

While B2B and B2C tactics often differ, many can be applied to both. Here are some examples of the most popular personalized content and strategies.

Personalized landing pages. No set of rules will ensure personalized landing page success. But brands that include information personal to the visitor – their name, geographical location and useful content pertinent to their situation – can further increase engagement.

Product recommendations. Giving customers product suggestions through personalized emails or ads shows you care about their needs. And it can positively impact sales, too.

Connecting video experiences. Videos can potentially increase customer engagement, especially if they’re personalized. Brands may want to consider creating customized videos for individual customers. When used properly, these help companies show customers they understand their workplace challenges.

Social media advertising. There are many customization capabilities available on social media platforms. From retargeting campaigns to personalized messaging via chatbots, brands can use these tools to customize their messaging for customers on a personal level.

Customized email messages. Email is one of the most effective mediums to use when personalizing campaigns. With email platforms, brands can send customized messages, offers, images, and even cart abandonment notifications (for ecommerce sites).

Everything you need to know about email marketing deliverability that your customers want and that inboxes won’t block. Get MarTech’s Email Marketing Periodic Table.

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How personalization can help marketers

Although many brands recognize the importance of personalization, some still view it as an optional add-on to their current campaign setups. However, neglecting it is no longer an option for marketers who want to succeed in our individualized digital landscape.

“One-to-one personalization is the future,” said Ehren Maedge, GM of North America at customer engagement platform MoEngage, in his presentation at The MarTech Conference. “Brands need to get there quickly or be displaced by alternatives.”

Personalization can help brands

• Increase customer feedback.
• Improve customer experience.
• Increase customer loyalty.
• Improve lead nurturing.
• Raise customer retention.

What are the challenges?

Here are a few of the challenges involved with personalization.

Technology limitations. Many companies cite the lack of sophisticated marketing technology as a barrier. Fortunately, campaigns can still be successful without the latest, greatest technology. Most tools available today – CRM, email technologies, social engagement tools and more – have customization capabilities. And marketers who don’t have more advanced tools can effectively leverage their current assets, aligning the strengths of each platform with their goals.

Consumer data silos. Organizational alignment is critical to the success of personalized campaigns. Without it, brands risk alienating customers with unorganized communications, such as sending duplicate or conflicting messages. This issue often arises between sales and marketing teams — two groups that have historically run into coordination challenges due to data siloing.

Brands need solutions to consolidate data between these two groups, which is why many turn to CDPs. These can help centralize customer data, tracking prospects across multiple channels.

Respecting consumer privacy. There’s a fine line between showing customers that brands care for them and being intrusive. People care about their privacy and will only respond well to personalized communication using the information they’ve consented to share.

Still, many marketers lament the possibility of U.S. legislation may restrict companies’ use of third-party data, fearing this will disrupt their strategies. However, this fails to account for the value found in first-party data. This offers actionable insights from customers, and collecting it adheres to consent regulations, making it one of the best resources for creating personalized campaigns.

What marketing technology is needed for personalization?

Despite personalization’s growing popularity, many brands have trouble implementing customized frameworks and strategies. They’re looking for practical ways to personalize campaigns without alienating customers in the transition.

To help with this issue, here are some ways to introduce these strategies and technologies.

Gather and leverage market data using a CDP. Customer data is a major part of these strategies. Brands that can acquire clean data and draw actionable insights can make stronger connections with audiences.

But this is easier said than done. Information such as customers’ shopping history, location, buying behavior and other personal data is more protected than ever due to consumer privacy legislation like the GDPR and CCPA. These laws limit the ability to leverage data from third-party cookies. However, this doesn’t mean customers won’t share their information. It just means that brands must practice proper data compliance to collect it.

Respecting consumer privacy through consent management can build stronger customer trust when collecting data. To do this, focus on gathering first-party customer data via a CDP or similar technology.

Consent management platforms (CMPs) can automate adhering to privacy laws. Still, many can only perform basic functions, such as showing simple banners briefly mentioning their data policies. These platforms fail to protect user privacy and respect the data regulations themselves.

Anyone seeking to enhance personalization with first-party data – while complying with consumer privacy laws – should consider adopting a compliance platform. These can control and govern the flow of customer data with autonomous enforcement of user privacy preferences.

Another approach is creating buyer personas – demographic outlines based on customer data – to understand their market better. These profiles are designed to provide a more accurate picture of customer wants and needs.

Using demographic, firmographic and psychographic data gleaned from CRMs, profiles are built representing customers’ interests and behaviors. Even this data can prove limiting; these personas need to be created using personal aspects that don’t always fit their “professional” roles.

CRMs can be used to glean customer insights for these personas from in-depth surveys, social media interactions, form fill-outs and personalized messaging. They can provide relevant insights for persona creation, but you can take it a step further by focusing on one-on-one interactions. Interviewing recent customers or buyers helps you gain insights into their motivations, objections and decision-making process.

Plan out your customer journey content with analytics. Too many marketers wait to optimize their customer journeys until they launch their campaigns. However, planning out the content beforehand with the customer journey in mind makes it easier to tailor it to their needs.

Customer journey analytics platforms are a way to automate this. They identify key stages of customer buying experiences and provide insights based on past behavior. This improves the chance of providing relevant content to customers at each stage of the purchase journey.

First-party data can be used to repurpose relevant customer insights into content corresponding to the awareness, consideration and decision stages. These can include:

• Blog posts about customers’ interests.
• Infographics pertinent to customers’ problems.
• Webinars featuring topics customers consistently search for.
• FAQ pages with relevant answers.
• Case studies featuring existing customers in similar situations.

As customers move through the content funnel, note how much attention they’re paying to personalization. Data from Renegade (below) illustrates how personalized efforts tend to deteriorate as customers move through the funnel.

There are plenty of ways to personalize content, but marketers who craft it with customers’ journeys in mind can help build trust with an improved customer experience. Fortunately, the sheer amount of data and technologies available to brands today can help them provide engaging personalization at each customer touchpoint.

The post What is personalized marketing and how is it used today? appeared first on MarTech.

“You need data quality and hygiene to be closer to where that marketing strategy is,” he said. “There’s a lot riding on the quality (or lack thereof) of your data.”

Data quality issues, which often stem from first-line, day-to-day operations, can ultimately harm your bottom line if left untreated. That’s why marketers need to ensure their data collection, analysis, and activation processes are optimized from the get-go.

Here are some data quality strategies Pritchard suggests marketing teams adopt to fix these problems.

Create a data quality report

One of the first steps marketing teams need to prioritize when cleaning up their data is to create a data quality report. As an example, Pritchard shared a report template his team created for their clients that highlights many potential reporting issues, including home address changes, duplicate customers, and profiles in need of suppression.

“[Reporting] isn’t some day-to-day operation that might save you $10 or $15 every now and then,” Pritchard said. Rather, detailing these data issues can help ensure your brand’s long-term marketing success by keeping track of problems as they arise.

Conduct a data quality assessment

“My [next] recommendation is to do a data quality assessment,” said Pritchard. “What that means is to assess your data quality against weighted aspects.”

Data quality assessments can help determine how well your information stacks up to the dimensions of high-quality data, which are weighted according to their importance to your organization. These can include:

• Accuracy.
• Completeness.
• Consistency.
• Timeliness.
• Validity.
• Uniqueness.

Pritchard’s team’s assessment scores clients from a range of zero to 100, but brands can use any scale they like — as long as it’s consistent. Once completed, your team (usually middle managers) can highlight areas of strength and weakness, which will inform the overall marketing strategy going forward.

Improve data quality through hygiene and enhancement efforts

After identifying data issues through quality assessment and reports, marketers should focus on cleaning up the errors through hygiene efforts.

“If you liken your marketing campaigns to playing darts, you want those darts to hit the board, which is the marketing campaign being effective,” Pritchard said.

He added, “Data hygiene would be increasing the accuracy of that dart.”

Data hygiene addresses the verification, suppression, and deduplication issues identified in your assessments and reports. Removing inactive, duplicate, and suppressed accounts in this way can help your team save money, spending resources only on accounts that are actionable.

But data hygiene alone isn’t enough to ensure organizational success. So, Pritchett encourages brands to enact data enhancement efforts as well.

This process involves asking customers for additional first-party data — such as phone numbers, emails, and addresses — to give your brand more context and better communicate with them across multiple channels.

“Using our dart analogy, enhancement gives you more darts to throw,” he said. “If you’re throwing three darts at a bullseye, you’ll have a much better chance [of hitting it] if you throw 100 instead.”

Combined, data hygiene and enhancement efforts have the potential to save money and resources by targeting actionable leads, encouraging more organizational success.

The post Why clean data is key to organizational success appeared first on MarTech.

Rather than tailoring messages to individual customers, marketers in the B2B space are recognizing the need to adopt account-based strategies to resonate with groups of executive-level buying groups. This process necessitates a strong appeal to brands’ goals — often at the enterprise level — and this can’t be done without proper marketing and sales team alignment.

“The other thing that you need to make ABM successful is tight marketing and sales alignment,” Britt said. “It only works if you’re working together as a unified team and deciding who your ICP [ideal customer profile] is. Which accounts within that ICP are you going to go after?”

Here are three ways an ABM strategy can help improve sales and marketing velocity.

Account targeting from a marketing side

“I’ve worked for organizations where marketing ended when the opportunity was created,” Britt said. “We were all about driving the demand and the awareness and getting those qualified opportunities. But then after that salespeople are sometimes like, ‘Alright, it’s mine now. I don’t want any kind of marketing or promotions hitting them because I don’t want this prospect to get distracted.'”

“I think that’s changing now; it’s refreshing to see that marketing does have a role to play with open opportunities,” she added.

Britt says marketing teams can improve account targeting by looking at these open opportunities, especially those one might think to glance over at first. She recommends including opportunities that aren’t just categorized as top tier — those with the highest propensity to close quickly. They should reach out to accounts that are under a certain dollar amount or those that are at a higher stage of the sales funnel as well.

More B2B marketers are adopting account-based marketing than ever before. Find out why and explore the ABM platforms making it possible in the latest edition of this MarTech Intelligence Report.

Click here to download!

Sales engagement and outreach

Britt’s presentation also highlighted the necessity of sharing data between marketing and sales teams. When accounts start to visit your web properties, click on your ads, or attend your event, marketers must get sales teams involved with their marketing campaigns.

She said marketers should share that data with sales so they can see who’s engaging and what type of intent signals they’re showing. This provides additional opportunities for sales outreach — even if no one’s clicking on that ad, they might be showing other intent signals that sales can act on, such as visiting the site or interacting through some third-party intent.

Britt’s own marketing team’s process of collaborating with sales, enhancing their engagement and outreach opportunities. They put together an email template for sales to use (shown below). It showcases an upcoming virtual event in the signature portion, helping sales better connect with accounts via email marketing.

“It’s about continuing to have those touches, that engagement with the account,” she said.

Account analysis and measurement

“When it comes to pipeline acceleration, you’re hopefully improving your win rate with these [ABM] programs that you’re putting the surround sound type of campaigns around,” said Britt. “You’re increasing your average deal size as you’re nurturing them through the opportunities journey and then shortening that sale cycle and increasing the sales velocity.”

She suggested marketers develop methods for measuring account engagement — both from a marketing and a sales side. Teams should look into whether accounts are clicking on your ads, registering for your events or your webinars, signing up for the direct mail, and other straightforward measurements, but also less obvious engagement metrics. These include activity time, churn rate, customer satisfaction, customer lifetime value (CLV), and more.

She recommends marketers put together a high-level overview of their analysis for managers, what she calls an ABM scorecard (shown below). Scoring your marketing and sales teams’ account engagement in this way can make data clearer for higher-ups to act upon.

“This is a simple way to display those key metrics, especially when you’re reporting it to leadership,” she said.

The post How ABM strategies can accelerate marketing and sales velocity appeared first on MarTech.

She added, “As more and more workers become remote, you need to be able to provide online engagement for those individuals.”

With so many people working remotely or in hybrid positions, event marketers often find themselves competing with other virtual experiences. There are simply too many distractions vying for audiences’ time, whether it be social media, entertainment channels, educational videos or other kinds of content.

Fortunately, the demand for virtual events is high, and marketers have more opportunities to integrate event technology into their campaigns than ever before.

Challenges clients are facing in a virtual world

Incorporating event technology into marketing tech stacks can be much easier said than done, according to Lovatt. Capturing audience attention in an increasingly virtual world might seem like a losing battle.

“This is a reality of what you’re facing when you try to bring event tech event platforms into your marketing tech stack: endless online meetings every day that you’ve got to engage and energize and fight for attention from,” she said.

However, these challenges don’t negate the potential impact event tech can have on demand generation.

“Eighty-six percent of virtual events deliver a positive ROI in [the first] six months,” Lovatt said. “But, how do you prove that? It’s all about bringing it into your marketing tech stack where you can start to quantify and measure the results.”

One way marketers can prove the worth of event tech is by employing A/B testing frameworks. This can help generate actionable data for executives and stakeholders.

How event marketing technology can help engage audiences

Lovatt says many of her team’s customers often request meeting and event experiences that are completely customized. These can be built on brands’ websites or externally with on-brand elements that energize and activate audiences.

Once these audiences are interested, marketers can then leverage the data and intelligence gleaned from these event experiences.

One of the biggest benefits of virtual event technologies, in Lovatt’s estimation, is their ability to connect marketers with audiences regularly, as opposed to one-off engagements that have become all too typical.

“People no longer come to your event [just] once a year and then forget all about you,” said Lovatt. “You are now able to invite people into your digital event environment every single day of the year if you want to. So, you have an ongoing touchpoint opportunity.”

Event technology can offer marketers many other benefits as well: better integration with other marketing channels, improved lead scoring and conversion tracking, or even online community generation. If marketers use these technologies to connect with audiences in personalized ways, they’ll have a better chance of enjoying a sustainable channel that’s built for a remote-first world.

“Virtual events offer an amazing opportunity to create an evergreen marketing channel that is well-delivered and that can continue to generate leads into the future,” Lovatt said.

The post Why event technology is critical to marketing success appeared first on MarTech.

Industry experts have been well aware of the digital-first environment for years now. In fact, Gartner said that by 2025 almost 80% of B2B interactions between suppliers and buyers would happen through digital channels — and that was before the 2020 pandemic accelerated digital even further.

But, if marketing and sales teams can’t keep up with the acceleration of digital channels, customers will be more likely to abandon their brands. That’s why Bornstein recommends marketers take advantage of the wealth of resources offered by first-part customer data.

Here are three ways he recommends brands optimize first-party data collection.

Give viewers choices during webinars

“It’s amazing how webinars have changed over the past few years,” Bornstein said. “They’re more like TV programs than the PowerPoints of old. We see more conversational formats, such as interviews and talk shows. The audience is a much bigger part of the experience.”

He added, “We see companies creating experiences where audiences are not just watching a presentation, but they’re involved in it.”

Bornstein highlighted a webinar he liked that allowed users to make their own choices: You could click on webpages and different URLs, or ask for a meeting in real-time and then go to a calendar and schedule an event. Giving users options while viewing webinars can help brands make these digital experiences more engaging.

“When I talk about self-selection, that’s what I mean,” he said. “Some people are going to be top-of-funnel, and some people are going to be mid-funnel. And some people are going to be ready to engage with your company — you need to provide them with those options.”

Craft interactive content hubs

“We’re seeing more personalized content hubs,” said Bornstein. “No matter what page you navigate to, you’re going to get something specific, whether it is on a website or a targeted landing page.”

When marketers share content pieces from these hubs, Bornstein recommends adding multiple interactive elements to foster even more user engagement. Whether it’s an inviting CTA, an enrollment button, or a chatbot, marketers can enrich content experiences through interactive hubs.

The authoritative, informative content remains the most important element of these hubs, but marketers will miss out on conversion opportunities if they don’t help foster engaging reading experiences.

“Anything is possible with content experiences,” Bornstein said.

Develop immersive virtual events

“A great virtual event experience is not just streaming presentations to an audience,” said Bornstein. “That’s not interactivity, and you’re not going to learn anything about those people.”

Bornstein and his team got a wake-up call about the necessity of interactive virtual events once the pandemic hit in 2020. They were in the middle of a big company tour and had to end it abruptly. Instead of hosting the next big event, they quickly shifted it into a virtual format. Then, they began brainstorming ways to collect valuable first-party customer information.

Instead of giving out free products and asking attendees to meet with event speakers (as in a live event), Bornstein’s team decided to offer interactive digital content options to keep audiences engaged in their virtual environment.

There are many interactive technologies available, so marketers would be wise to incorporate them into virtual events. The key differentiator between boring and engaging events may lie in the way they bring viewers into the experience.

“The smart marketers out there are not building virtual events to be presentations,” said Bornstein. “They’re building virtual events as real experiences.”

The post 3 ways to optimize first-party data collection appeared first on MarTech.

Many organizations use CDPs or data management platforms to collect and activate this data, helping them meet the unique needs of each customer.

Here are some actionable steps Naves recommends marketers take to enhance their personalization by connecting customer data.

Create buyer personas and ideal customer profiles

“Some people say, ‘I’ve got my [buyer] persona, I’m ready to go. We want to go to market,'” said Naves. “But, they’re not ready yet. They need to figure out their ICP [ideal customer profile] as well.”

“They’re different, but they’re both equally as important,” she added.

The buyer persona is the fictional personality marketers create that represents a specific type of user who interacts with their brand. In contrast, the ICP is a description of customers who will benefit from your product or service.

Getting these confused can disrupt personalization efforts, so marketers should set aside time to create accurate versions of each, connecting customer data appropriately.

“For buyer personas, you’re thinking about creating a better user experience for your customers,” said Naves. “When you’re developing your buyer persona, you’ll consider things like their role within the organization, their title, their responsibilities, as well as some of the challenges they would face.”

Reduce churn with loyalty campaigns

According to Naves, marketers can help reduce customer churn through targeted loyalty campaigns. By rewarding customers after they reach designated tiers, brands can foster engagement.

She offered a fictional example of targeting a gamer who’s signed up for a trial, showing the power of a CDP for driving customer loyalty: “We want to make sure that he doesn’t churn. Using a CDP, we can help prevent it. In this example, we have his website data, his product usage data, and all of the information that he provided to sign up in our CRM database … We’re going to create a [segment] around this gaming data to show that he only plays with 10 characters or less because we noticed in our models that if a person is playing a game and only has 10 characters built into this game, that person will churn.”

“We want to create some kind of reward to encourage him to use more characters, so we would add a subscription offering him one month free if he creates 10 or more characters,” she added.

Marketers and brands can employ loyalty programs like these that fit their audiences and industries. The key is to ensure they’re personalized.

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Implement personalized cross-sell campaigns

“Cross-selling increases revenue and helps reduce churn,” Naves said. “This is your opportunity to hyper-personalize.”

“You want to connect with your customers in a trusted, real-time way,” she added.

The chance of making a sale to existing customers is 60-70%, while the probability of selling to a new customer is only 5-20%, according to data from Invesp. So, it makes sense to market to these existing customers first, especially through cross-selling.

Marketers can use the data from these existing customers to generate personalized offers for complementary or similar products to those they’ve already purchased, and, ultimately, encourage these customers to remain loyal to the brand.

“That’s why applying these strategies from loyalty and cross-sell perspectives is critical,” she said. “They’re used for maintaining customers, and personalization is the absolute key.”

The post How connecting customer data drives personalized experiences appeared first on MarTech.

Traditional demand gen, by itself, isn’t enough to encompass an effective ABM strategy; marketers need to treat ABM as a separate activity.

Cerretani distinguishes ABM with these three pillars:

• Identifying high-value targets.
• Engaging buying committees through coordinated marketing and sales programs.
• Measuring the impact against shared goals.

These activities serve the purpose of pinpointing accounts with a high potential to convert and developing more effective marketing strategies targeted toward them.

Here are three ABM strategies, stemming from these pillars, Cerretani believes can help marketers improve their conversion rates.

Incorporate ABM into top-of-funnel channels

“You want to identify your target account list formally and then run it through a program where you can identify who is cold or lukewarm,” said Cerretani. “I’ve called them ‘unaware’ and ‘aware,’ but whatever you call them, that’s who you’re trying to isolate.”

She added, “It should be a high volume of accounts.”

Cerretani recommended that ABM marketers focus on creating top-of-funnel content that aligns with their persona and industry research. This content should be appropriate for that top-of-funnel spot — it’s often best ungated, served up in formats like sponsored content, content syndication and sponsored webinars.

“Sometimes your best chance for conversion is through retargeting,” Cerretani said. “But make sure you’re working with a partner that can allow you to just focus on retargeting your high-fit accounts or high-fit site visitors and not waste any money retargeting low-fit accounts.”

“You need to be thinking multiple channels simultaneously,” she added.

More B2B marketers are adopting account-based marketing than ever before. Find out why and explore the ABM platforms making it possible in the latest edition of this MarTech Intelligence Report.

Click here to download!

Action in-market accounts

According to Cerretani, actioning in-market accounts is the process by which marketers identify “high-fit accounts and key personas at those accounts that are highly engaged or exhibiting high intent signals.”

Once marketers have that list, she suggests they drill down into the factors that got those accounts on that list. They should analyze their visitors and determine how engaged they are with conversion-friendly content, such as pricing pages or customer case studies. The marketers should also note if their brands are surging for competitor keywords, segmenting out those associated accounts.

“So, for example, if you have a bunch of these accounts that are surging for a competitor keyword, you can isolate those accounts and then pick a CTA that makes sense for the fact that they are surging on competitor keywords,” said Cerretani.

Re-engage lost marketing-qualified leads

“One of the things that people often forget with account-based marketing is that it doesn’t necessarily stop at being impactful at generating new opportunities,” said Cerretani.

When brands are looking to launch a new ABM program, Cerretani believes they should take the core tenants of ABM and apply them to re-engagement campaigns. Her team calls them “wake the dead campaigns,” where they work on developing an audience from disqualified MQLs, or those MQLs that have been accepted by sales but haven’t moved forward. This focus on lost (or unengaged) leads can potentially grow your customer base.

In the end, it all comes back to prioritizing those individual accounts.

“You can measure everything kind of top-to-bottom, from email performance all the way down to the deals that you book and ROI,” said Cerretani. “You should see quick opportunities and deals from this type of motion because it is so powerful.”

The post 3 effective ABM strategies you should consider appeared first on MarTech.

“By WebOps, I mean a set of practices that facilitates collaboration and automates processes to improve the productivity of the whole web team,” said Steve Persch, director of technical marketing at Pantheon, in his presentation at The MarTech Conference. “The result with WebOps can be cross-functional web teams empowered to deliver to develop, test and release website changes faster and more reliably.”

Websites and other digital systems are complicated, and a poorly functioning web system could prove disastrous for your marketing efforts. That’s why brands need a dedicated team to address issues as they arise and help build trust in their systems.

“A common problem is a corrosion of trust, and that can happen when there’s a lack of confidence,” said Persch. “There’s a lack of fluency, perhaps in the shared tools and processes that web teams are using.”

Websites are digital assets

“In addition to betting on the importance of cross-functional teams in the decades to come, we’re betting on the importance of websites,” Persch said. “We’re betting that websites and web technology will remain central to the success of practically every professional venture out there for the next decade and beyond.”

Persch believes websites have an incredible amount of staying power. The web is the foundation of so many technologies, especially those where it’s not immediately apparent. Channels like email and advertising networks, as well as work platforms, all run on the power of the web.

Brands that view these tools and technologies as valuable assets will more easily see the necessity of WebOps.

“If you’re looking out toward the next decade and wondering what skills your team needs to be developing, what channels you should be betting on,” Persch said, “I think that betting on the skills of the web is a safe bet.”

Teams need a distinct WebOps team

Many brands believe they can get by with a DevOps team, relying solely on IT professionals and developers to navigate the digital landscape. But, these job roles are often too specialized for WebOps work.

“DevOps has done a whole lot to solidify the importance of this concept for the ecosystem of developers and the IT role or system operators,” said Persch. “One of the ways they have brought so much maturation and stability to the deep computer systems we rely on is because they have scoped themselves relatively narrowly to these two roles.”

“In the world of website operations, there are a lot more roles that need to be present in the conversation,” he added.

Some site issues are better suited for a WebOps team, especially when they directly affect marketing ROI. Here are some tasks a dedicated WebOps department can help brands address:

• Lowering a rising cost per lead (CPL) after implementing a new conversion rate optimization strategy.
• Restructuring CSS after a new template causes theme issues.
• Improving the content delivery network (CDN) speed after adding website assets.

WebOps helps marketers align goals

”I think if you have a cross-functional web team, the people on that team need to align their goals,” Persch said.

He recommends brands align goals cross-departmentally through CDNs. These systems have the potential to handle the large traffic spikes and ensure visitors experience a site that’s fast, engaging and secure.

However, it’s imperative that DevOps and WebOps teams set up their CDNs correctly. A poorly configured CDN can disrupt your cross-departmental operations, making it that much harder to align goals.

“We want web teams moving faster,” Persch said. “We want you moving so fast that you can get to the point of safely launching more than one thing at once, or where you can get to a point where you’re working on enough bits of work in progress that any element can get deployed as soon as the business needs it.”

He added, “It’s more important to have a website that can change tomorrow than it is to have a website that is exactly right today.”

The post Why WebOps is critical to digital marketing success appeared first on MarTech.

She added, “I like these stats because they show that omnichannel communication is expected and they also show the uniqueness of each subscriber.”

High-quality, customized brand experiences are what customers expect in today’s digital landscape. As part of its effort to improve these interactions, Belk worked with Salesforce to deliver more personalization.

Understanding omnichannel needs

“A vital part of marketing is understanding the customer’s omnichannel needs,” said Colby Ireland, lead marketing analyst at Belk, in the same presentation. “This comes to life in a few different forms. The first of that being two new delivery methods that we have established in the past couple of years, one of which was curbside pickup.”

Belk also addressed these omnichannel needs through same-day delivery options, responding to customers’ need for immediacy.

“In-store, we’re always trying to drive email signups,” Ireland said. “There are signs where customers can text a specialized number with their email address and then automatically be subscribed to our email programs.”

“We’ve seen a lot of new email subscribers through these signs,” she added.

Belk clearly adapted well after the pandemic hit — but it wanted to go beyond simply meeting omnichannel needs. It wanted to increase personalization across all customer experiences.

Personalized customer experiences

“One of Belk’s most engaged segments is our credit card holder,” Ireland said. “We currently have over 2,000,000 active email subscribers who also have the Belk credit card. These customers typically have the Belk app on their phones. They follow Belk on social media, and they make frequent shopping trips to their local Belk.”

To thank these customers for their loyalty and improve personalization, Belk set up an email marketing campaign that recognized birthdays. The marketing team created a customer journey that gives customers a unique coupon they can use on anything in the store during their birthday month. The coupon is sent on the first day of those months, and if a customer doesn’t use their coupon code, they receive another reminder a few weeks later.

If the customer still doesn’t use their personalized coupon, Belk reminds them about it a few days before it expires. After the month ends, the customers who haven’t used the coupon are removed from the journey.

These highly personalized email campaigns show customers Belk cares about their needs, both in the customized coupons and its willingness to let customers leave the funnel if they’re not engaging.

“Because of this personalization, we have seen great results, including an over 6% increase in conversion rate for each touchpoint,” Ireland said.

Ireland and the Belk marketing team also employed a rewards balance system that keeps customers informed about their unused benefits.

“We will show a customer if they have any rewards dollars that they can use for their next purchase,” she said. “If a customer doesn’t meet that first scenario, we then move on to the second scenario, which would show them how much they actually need to spend to earn that next reward, and if neither scenario is met, we show customers how much they would need to spend to move up to the next tier.”

“These [messages] have increased conversions for our daily marketing campaigns by about 5%,” she added.

Tactics like these can help keep customers engaged, improving their experience and encouraging buy-in.

Relevant content for each marketing channel

Brands engaging with audiences on email, social media, or any other marketing channel need to make sure their communications resonate with audiences. The messages and medium marketers choose should be based on customer preferences and their marketing goals.

“You have to think about it from a perspective of the actual intent behind the messaging,” Ireland said. “Email and SMS are retention channels, and we’re very transactional. We’re trying to drive the customers to convert. We’re trying to keep them happy trying to retain them and so our content is a little bit more geared toward that objective versus social media.”

She added, “I think it all comes back to personalization, having that data on the customer and seeing what channel they prefer.”

The post How Belk elevated its customer experience with personalization appeared first on MarTech.