By Adam Roberts, VeraCentra
In marketing, “relevance” is the measure of how
appropriate and valuable your product offer is to a given customer’s needs.
Delivering relevance today requires a customer-centric (rather than a
brand-centric) approach — one that starts with understanding the individual
customer and works backwards to reverse-engineer an offer and comprehensive engagement strategy that fits their precise
needs and expectations.
The digital age has made meeting customer expectations more
imperative than ever. The ubiquity of smartphones and access to the World Wide
Web has given rise to a new caliber of consumer. Consumers today are more
informed and consequently more jaded when it comes to impersonal and irrelevant
offers; they’ve already researched their buying options and have formed
expectations based on product reviews and superficial brand interactions. This
baseline level of expertise raises the stakes for every interaction businesses
have with a prospective or existing customer. To gain and sustain wallet share
in today’s competitive marketplace, businesses must deliver a kind of
experiential parity — to match the highest level of relevance and ease that
your customer has experienced in interactions with other brands and products —
or risk becoming obsolete by comparison.
Advertisement
Take the example of a cable provider. Imagine calling the
help number on the back of your cable box and immediately being connected to a
person who knows your account, your name, your contract status, what monthly
services/channels you subscribe to and any details about previous inquiries you
may have made through different channels. Not only would you feel more valued
if your call was met with such exceptional personal service, but the
availability of such data
to marketers and reps also leads to a more streamlined and meaningful
conversation and better overall customer experience.
Now imagine experiencing that level of service and then
returning to a cable provider that requires you to navigate a complex automated
menu and manually input your account numbers, only to connect you with a
representative who isn’t up to speed on your account and history. What’s more,
imagine that the representative on the other end of the call launches into a
sales pitch informing you about yet another service that isn’t in line with
your needs, budget or expectations. Herein lies the dual threat/promise of
today’s oversaturated marketplace: once you’ve experience the greatest level of
relevance possible, your expectations for other brand interactions are forever
altered — and no one ever settles for less when they know that more is
possible. Other companies must either rise to the occasion or else lose
customers and wallet share in the market.
Delivering relevance isn’t only beneficial to consumers.
From a marketing standpoint, focusing on relevance leads to mutually-beneficial
customer/brand relationships. Real-time access to customer data is not only
helpful for sustaining meaningful connections (and building brand loyalty) but
also for creating more meaningful and effective cross-sell and upsell offers as
your customer’s needs evolve. Armed with real-time insight into a customer’s
browsing history and purchasing habits, the aforementioned cable provider could
leverage predictive analytics to anticipate that customer’s next move and
propose a relevant solution at exactly the right moment.
Consider the difference in tone and value between the
generic offer, “You should consider our bonus package with X extra
channels for X dollars a month,” versus, “We see you’ve been
purchasing X movies a month — since your subscription will be up for renewal
next month, we wanted to recommend changing your subscription slightly, so
you’ll save money on rentals and gain greater access to the movies you
like.” The first offer lacks context and relevance, whereas the latter was
created in response to that customer’s specific cable-watching habits, and was delivered
at an appropriate and meaningful juncture (when their contract was up for
renewal). Such beautifully orchestrated serendipity not only creates happy
customers — it also lends itself to greater long-term engagement, better ROI on
marketing campaigns and more sustainable revenue growth.
Though the benefits are undeniable, delivering relevance
today requires a more holistic marketing strategy — one that shies away from
thinking of each marketing channel as its own independent department that requires
its own execution strategy. For marketers, the main hurdle to delivering
relevance is not simply adopting a data management and analytics platform that
makes such customer insight and customization possible. It’s learning to think
of customer engagement efforts as inherently cross-channel. To do so, it’s
vital to recognize that no customer interaction or conversation exists in a
vacuum (nor should it be treated as such). Hitting the relevance jackpot means
adopting this strategic shift and leveraging the right technological tools to make it
successful.
If it sounds like the future, that’s because it is. Savvy,
forward-thinking businesses around the world are investing in data management,
analytics and cross-channel engagement platforms that help them deliver the
greatest degree of relevance— and they’re quickly leaving their competition
behind.
Adam Roberts is the Senior
Account Executive at VeraCentra.
