Avoid Tone-Deaf Marketing That Acts Like Political Solicitations
How many emails have you received from political candidates out of the blue asking for money?
Or how many times has a brand asked you if you are ready to place an order within a split second of coming to their website?
It reminds me of a joke told by a leading marketing expert that says: “A digital marketer walks into a bar and asks the first person they see to marry them.”
While the aforementioned digital marketer’s question is “tone deaf” and overly presumptuous, we as leading marketers are often tasked with driving short-term KPIs that risk a longer relationship with that user. The company wants you to make a sale—no matter the cost. And the cost can be losing a customer for life.?
Many, perhaps even most, politicians do the same thing. They send out blast emails asking for donations without ever truly knowing anything about you.
While the idea of throwing as much mud on the wall as you can and some of it will stick might have worked in the days when marketing was a one-way street with just a few television networks, a limited number of radio outlets, and some print publications dominated communications, that is no longer the case.
We are now in a two-way street of communications between the customer and the brand—and between the voter and the candidate.
Today’s customers want, no, demand, to be treated as individuals. They expect to be recognized by businesses—both those that they have purchased from before and those seeking to establish a new business-customer relationship. The operative word is relationship and consumers expect personalized conversations.
Marketers have used basic personalization techniques for some time, but many of those techniques are still designed to go to mass audience segments—e.g., men or women, adults, parents, etc.
Some have gone deeper to better isolate different groups with more defined demographics—combining incomes, location, age, etc. to better stratify different groups for marketing purposes.
But today’s best marketers use the power of AI, generative AI, to orchestrate customer journeys. Orchestration goes beyond basic demographics that segment customers into large groups and delve into the deep granular details of customers with similar journeys that AI can uncover. Beyond deep demographics, and channel preferences and other customer-specific information, this detail enables a marketer to craft personas based on similar customer journeys to create communications strategies that are personalized, and relevant. Messages arrive at the exact right moment to meet the needs and demands of discerning consumers.
AI helps identify key customer touchpoints across all channels, enabling marketers to map these diverse journeys from the customer’s perspective. This detailed mapping allows for the delivery of truly personalized experiences that drive engagement, moving beyond
superficial approaches.
Understanding similar customer journeys uncovers people who shop and think alike, which is more powerful than demographics. Keep in mind that people who have very similar demographic characteristics can often have very different preferences in frequency and types of marketing messages that they want to receive. It explains how two people, perhaps one in their 50s and another in their 30s, end up buying similar products.
The purchase is not about who they are—rather it is about the fact that they have similar needs and journeys that get them to end up buying the same product.
Content and messaging need to be tailored to individual customer preferences to provide meaningful and engaging experiences for each individual. The better the personalization, the better the engagement and the higher the customer lifetime value (CLV).
Orchestrate Campaigns Across Channels
Customer journeys today often start in one channel and finish in another, sometimes with other channels involved as well. For example, a customer seeking a new television may begin with an internet search on a laptop, use social media to find product reviews, place an order via the phone, and receive a text message or email confirming the order, delivery date, etc. The customer expects a seamless experience regardless of the channel(s) used. They need to be able to continue journeys from where they left off when changing from one channel to another. Marketers must provide relevant experiences as the customer moves from channel to channel.
Changing With the Customer
Consumer preferences and habits change for a variety of reasons—income increases, so they have new purchasing power; a new child is born, so infant clothes, diapers, etc., are needed; they start preferring a new or different social media channel. Plus, that same child may have parents and grandparents—each buying similar products, but each buyer in age brackets a generation apart.
With older tools, it can take months to recognize these changes—so long that the newborn is now several months old, and the parents’ (and grandparents’) needs for certain items like clothing have changed at the speed of an infant’s growth.
AI-powered journey orchestration enables marketers to recognize these changes more quickly, but it’s still up to the marketers to implement different strategies due to these changes. Any strategy should be tested with a small group of customers first to ensure that it produces the expected results before rolling it out across the customer base. The advantage with driving marketing using AI based on customer journeys is that marketing strategies can be developed, tested and tweaked (if necessary) much faster than ever before.
By leveraging today’s technology and following the steps above, marketers can help ensure that they don’t make ridiculous proposals—or act like tone-deaf politicians (sometimes there may be little difference in the two).
Pini Yakuel is cofounder and CEO of Optimove, a global leader in customer-led marketing. A pioneer in AI-orchestrated marketing and embedding AI into CRM to predict customer behavior, Yakuel holds an MS in industrial engineering and management from Tel Aviv University.