Take the Guesswork Out of Loyalty
an equal opportunity in proactively building a better-educated and aware public for your category. Get your marketing and sales organization to use listening tools to collaborate, answer questions, demonstrate "how-tos," and more!
Most organizations, large or small, have a presence on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and the like. The real challenge is not to merely exist on such platforms, but to use them actively to deliver value to your fans and future followers. However, our experience repeatedly shows that clients lack clarity on their social goals. While many consider "branding" and "driving traffic" as their primary social goals, very few speak about improving/designing their customer experience.
Get Intimate with Analytics
Big data and analytics are ubiquitous marketing buzzwords today. How can we leverage the volume, variety, and velocity of data available today to help create a customer experience that will drive loyalty?
Your consumers' decision-making journey and the sources from which data is generated have been altered in the last 10 years by the convergence of several digital megatrends, such as mobility, multichannel access to the Web, and machines and devices connected to the Internet of Things.
Advanced analytics dealing with these diverse, rich data sets provide marketers with enhanced "outside-in" insights into consumer behavior across channels and the buying life cycle. Data scientists are deploying analytical models to optimize pricing, product/service bundling, marketing campaigns, distribution/stocking strategies, and in-store and online operations in real time to maximize marketing ROI.
Interactive dashboards can help you gain 360-degree views of your social presence, track conversations around your brands, manage leads, and improve demand forecasting. A closer look at these interactions can help you predict when and where product promotions will be most effective.
While your potential customers can now study, evaluate, and track your products and services without committing to a purchase for long durations, you can move beyond the "vanity metrics" (social media likes, comments, and retweets) and convert data into actionable insights. Once such potential prospects enter the sales funnel, they must be tracked and engaged with to educate them and garner higher mindshare. It is crucial to know when they are at the tipping point of making a purchase. Marketing automation tools can manage this process for you by personalizing targeted, relevant offers that increase the likelihood of conversion.
Adopting a Holistic Approach
The traditional drivers of loyalty (e.g., discounts and reward points) are no longer enough. Today, customers look for innovative products, ease of interaction, and overall brand experience across multiple channels to determine whether they stay or go elsewhere to meet their needs.
Our company believes that large enterprises will continue to partner with CRM vendors to build out their capabilities to support end-to-end customer interactions. In fact, Gartner even predicted that businesses will design the enterprise around a CRM platform, rather than the ERP system, integrating different technologies and tools into it.
To take a holistic approach to customer loyalty, businesses must embrace omnichannel, social, and analytics technologies into an integrated enterprise-wide transformation initiative. The need to delight and hold on to customers is likely to get only more intense. The good news is that the data to make smarter decisions are available, as are the tools.
Gus Gikas is the chief delivery officer at Minacs, an outsourcing business solutions partner to global corporations in a wide range of industries.