We have spoken with many brands and they were happily indulged by an infinite inflow of new customers during the good time. While many of us were exploring new advertising channels and marketing stunts for lead acquisition, we marketers seem to have ignored the loyal group of existing customers that we already have relationships with.
For quite some time, marketers, in general, have been preaching and affirming “the marketing funnel is dead”. When we dealt with the traditional marketing channels, we pretty much know how to map the customer journey. We are confident about when, where, and how we should capture the target audience.
In the current time, customer engagements happen through non-linear journeys, which also means it is extremely dated and irrelevant to use the term “O2O campaign”. Vigorous and easily accessible marketing attempts from brands make it more difficult to nurture loyal relationships with their customers.
This has led us to suggest a few initiatives. In order to kick-start this, the simple million-dollar question for retailers is: “Are you able to tell what portion of your business comes from new or repeat customers?”
The odds are that even if you can deduce that from an existing loyalty program already in place, it’s only detecting the most loyal group. What brands need is an integration of systems to consolidate data and ultimately deliver a seamless and painless experience for stitching customer records without intrusive actions.
The binding of digital payments and customer profiles is best illustrated with the masterful execution in China by Alipay and WeChat Pay. the identity of the Consumers is automatically captured whenever they make a payment. It provides an immense amount of business insights thus allowing the enrichment of loyalty and CRM user experiences.
We must keep in mind that the objective is to gain a single-customer-view of every record in our CRM, and brands should pick the brains of marketers to create an array of automation tasks that communicate and engage with every customer in personalized and engaging ways. This is contrary to the traditional practice where automation is merely related to single-direction promotions and offers.
Putting trust in personalization and content marketing is great. Yet, another key factor is the variation of channels and mediums. We have to make sure chatbot conversations are synced among every touch-points. That allows customers to pick up from the last conversation at whatever time they desire, and also no matter if the engagement is via Facebook, Instagram, or the WhatsApp business messaging bot.
Jeffrey Hau