Brands want customer relationships that drive performance. It’s a simple statement, yet the C-suite pressure to drive the growth is palpable, especially in times of disruption and uncertainty.
All Consumers have very high expectations when it comes to products and services they consume. They understand the data-value exchange with various brands, and they’re often very eager to enter into that exchange for better customer experiences.
Marketers are also being asked to drive their brands’ growth while reducing the costs and proving marketing Return On Investment in a concise amount of time. Underlying everything is the industry, which also has undergone various significant changes to the drumbeat of consumer privacy.
To succeed in today’s digital era, marketers must move their levers that are going to drive the brand performance without relying on any one platform or provider and shift from mass communication to mass personalization with four main ingredients, which are as follows:
- Knowledge
No matter how much the first-party centric data they have, most marketers still have a blurry view of their customers. For example, hotel chains know when someone stays at their hotel, which brand they stay with, and how often they stay.
The brand can understand their guests’ personal preferences and interact with them across channels and various devices.
Even with all this original first-party data, the hotel can only see a fraction of the life of that guest. To provide more profound relevance, brands often need a view of each individual that connects the first- and third-party data and allows them to see the individual’s activity outside of the brand.
It’s also essential for the brands to get a very high-definition view of their customers and everyone’s who matters to their brand, but it’s necessary that the data is ethically sourced and protected.
- Identity
We often commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct an in-depth study on identity resolution and found marketers whose brands have low identity resolution face issues such as reaching out to the wrong customer (45%), wasting the marketing spend (42%), and offering irrelevant products or services (38%).
A strong identity foundation can help the brands avoid these issues. It also allows marketers to understand their best and potential customers at the individual level and maintain that specific knowledge to use it effectively for marketing purposes and comply with the regulations.
Firm identity resolution also allows you to predict, learn, and anticipate the consumer signals that lead to positive business outcomes.
- Machine learning
All brands must be able to both ideate and execute at all scales. They must take massive sets of data, operate in real-time, and continuously recalibrate and update their messages based on the patterns people exhibit.
Dynamic creative at a large scale, powered by machine learning, eliminates waste, and allows brands to take the key learnings and bring them back into the creative process.
There’s nothing more irritating or irrelevant than receiving a promotional message about a particular flight or hotel you just booked or a luxurious trip that just ended.
There’s nothing more brand-damaging than accepting an offer for a cheaper rate. That’s broken the customer experience. Without the ability to recalibrate the messages in real-time at scale, the customer experience breaks down.
- Activation
Brands need to activate the messages across all the various channels with performance transparency at the individual level to prove the outcomes. Look for partners that deliver solutions grounded in products, not actions. This also requires them to have a properly managed performance mindset, acting as more than just a managed service vendor.
Ultimately, the brands’ ability to take back the control of their customer relationships to drive high performance comes down to a straightforward equation: the data + identity + machine learning + activation. It’s usually how you move up from mass communication to mass personalization.
Although it’s a straightforward formula, the volume of the data necessary to do this in the right way at the scale and the various complexities of the technology is quite complicated. However, when brands get the balance right, there are no walls between them and their ideal customer.