Guiding the Customer Journey Gain Brand Advantage from the Very First Click

Transcription

1 Gain Brand Advantage from the Very First Click

2 Table of Contents Executive Overview...2 A Long and Winding Online/Offline Road...4 Negotiating Off-Ramps & Detours...5 Mapping the Journey: Leveraging the Historic Approach...6 Bridging the Gaps to a More Direct Route...8 How to Guide the Journey From the First Click...10 More About BlueConic...12 Appendix: Reference List 2014 BlueConic Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction and distribution of this publication in any form without prior written permission is forbidden. The information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable. BlueConic disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of such information. BlueConic shall have no liability for errors, omissions or inadequacies in the information contained herein or for interpretations thereof. The information and opinions expressed herein are subject to change without prior notice. 1

3 Executive Overview Today the customer journey the ways in which the customer engages with our organizations from first awareness through purchase and referral is more complex and unpredictable than ever. It is by no means a straight and narrow path, but more a long and winding road. Over time and touch points, the journey incorporates traditional/outbound channels Advertising/Trade Shows/Direct Mail, Customer Call Centers, Retail Outlets. It now also includes online/inbound channels across multiple devices Website, Social Media, Content Marketing, Search, Mobile. Marketers must not only learn to understand the journey, but also find ways to help direct it, optimize it and pick it up again even when prospects and customers get off and back on the path. This means that we must understand individual customer journeys to deliver relevant messages, content and offers in real-time and on the channel/device that is active in the moment. This has remained an elusive goal. Some traditional offline marketing disciplines have a fairly good handle on the customer journey as it relates to their customer touch points. For example, User Experience and Customer Service professionals have developed methods like Customer Journey Mapping. Other methods, including qualitative and quantitative consumer research, also help to improve customer interactions in both offline and online channels. Yes, we re doing a good job of using traditional means to gain valuable insights about our customers in a general way. But how do we leverage this knowledge for today s marketing? Enabled by the Internet, prospects and customers are taking control of the buying process and revealing far more about themselves along the way. Yet we must bridge two significant gaps in our ability to create mutual marketing success for both our companies and our customers. 1. How to unify online/offline intelligence and engagement. 2. In online channels, how to overcome the period of pre-engagement anonymity, which we refer to as the marketing blind spot. With online engagement, we have the capability to know our customers better than we ever have even better than we think we do now but we have yet to realize this potential. To motivate customer engagement, we need to move away from campaign mentality. We must actually join the customer journey and recognize our web visitors interests, needs, characteristics and emotions in order to win their hearts and minds with contextual experiences, in addition to useful content. We need better processes for shortening the period of anonymity; for eliminating the marketing blind spot. The earlier in the customer journey we engage, the better chance we have to create competitive advantage, make a sale and build brand loyalty/advocacy. 2

4 A powerful new technology BlueConic now lets us begin learning about each prospect from the first click on a website or Like on a social media page. Companies can implement BlueConic immediately, using existing content and offers simply putting them to better and broader use. They can then help direct the customer journey offline as well as online rather than following it passively. 3

5 A Long and Winding Online/Offline Road We have to orchestrate a positive multichannel experience in order to protect and grow customer value. VP of customer relationship management (CRM) strategy for a global financial services firm. 1 Today, the customer journey the ways in which the customer engages with our organizations from first awareness through purchase and referral is more complex and unpredictable than ever. The journey is by no means a straight and narrow path, but more a long and winding road. It takes place over time and numerous online and offline touch points. It ebbs and flows. Sometimes the journey is interrupted and then picked up again later. The customer journey incorporates traditional/outbound channels. Advertising/Trade Shows/Direct Mail, Customer Call Centers, Retail Outlets still play significant roles, even as marketing and sales evolve toward the digital realm. That evolution is picking up speed as customers both B2B and B2C adopt multiple online/inbound channels across multiple devices Website, Social Media, Content Marketing, Mobile, Search. They are forging fearless new paths that take advantage of the channels most advantageous to them as they search for products and services to meet their needs. Figure 1: Cross-channel campaign management challenges And, in many ways, marketers are struggling to keep up. Ironically, a new landscape resulting from technology advances is suffering from a lack of even more advanced technology to solve new marketing issues emerging from rapid change. The Forrester Wave : Cross-Channel Campaign Management, Q , revealed that more than half of the respondents were dissatisfied with the ability of their existing technology to integrate online and offline campaigns. Yet in the same report for the previous quarter, when asked the greatest cross-channel campaign challenges they expect to face in the next two years, the largest response 57% was, Personalizing messages based on consumer behavior across channels. 3 4

6 Negotiating Off-Ramps & Detours Our choice of systems had to resolve the fragmented, siloed management of customer data. Extracting and shipping into other data marts was killing us. New customer data took months for some sources. VP of direct marketing systems for a multinational bank 1 Currently, companies are hard-pressed to follow the customer journey, let alone understand it. But to grow business, understand it we must. In fact, understanding the individual customer and helping to direct and optimize his or her journey is the path to the next level of engagement. If we can follow the journey, we can proactively provide stepping stones along the way, delivering relevant messages, content and offers in real-time and in the channel or on the device that is active in the moment. But here is the challenge: From the time a prospect becomes aware of our company and our offerings, their engagement with us is anything but linear. Prospects and customers may begin a journey with us and engage for awhile but get off and then back onto the path at some future time. This may have nothing to do with the quality of our products/services, the competitive environment, changing technology or roadblocks put in the way by siloed online-offline marketing efforts. It may have everything to do with life itself. Life is not linear. It s full of life-stage changes, evolving interests and unexpected twists and turns despite what we might plan. If we can read our customers transitional signals from stage to stage, we can engage more appropriately to meet changing needs. For example, it stands to reason that if we provide products for young women, we ll know them through early career, marriage and into motherhood. As they move from one stage to another, we may lose them for a time, but depending on our offerings and how we present them, they may return when they arrive at another phase. But can we recognize them when they come back or are we forced to re-start the relationship from scratch? Traditional, demographic-based research can give us some insight to group journeys, say, women age 21 to 34, college graduates, living in urban markets. Fortunately today, despite customers taking off ramps and on ramps as they engage with our companies, we have the potential to understand and influence individual journeys. What a powerful idea! 5

7 Mapping the Journey: Leveraging the Historic Approach We no longer have a batch and blast mindset for customer communication. Instead, we are in constant dialog with our customer base to deepen relationships and loyalty. VP of Analytics for a large financial services firm 1 Traditional offline/outbound disciplines have a fairly good handle on the customer journey as it relates to their customer touch points. User Experience and Customer Service professionals have developed methods including Customer Journey Mapping to understand and improve customer interactions with their departments, see examples in Figure 2. These efforts could yield even greater opportunity and leverage with purposeful integration of offline and online customer knowledge, currently a rare occurrence. Let s take a look, though, at how traditional marketers approach the customer journey and how this approach can be leveraged in the digital age. A post titled, Using Customer Journey Maps to Improve Customer Experience, 4 on the Harvard Business Review blog defines customer journey mapping: A customer journey map is a very simple idea: a diagram that illustrates the steps your customer(s) go through in engaging with your company, whether it be a product, an online experience, retail experience, or a service, or any combination. The more touchpoints you have, the more complicated but necessary such a map becomes. Although the post explains that there s no one right way to create such a map, it proposes that customer journey mapping can be used to chart a small segment of the customer experience, such as un-boxing a product. Or, it can attempt to trace the entire process from first awareness to purchase completion. Figure 2: Examples of Customer Journey Maps 6

8 However, historically, there has been insufficient information available to accomplish this latter feat across all channels. Customer journey mapping has been based on predictive modeling, largely informed by traditional customer research, which, as stated earlier, is good for mapping group journeys. While one-to-one customer interviews and day-in-the-life research may drill down into the thoughts and emotions of a group of individuals from which some more general inferences may be extrapolated, these techniques are incapable of following the actual, individual journeys of millions of prospects and customers. And the data we collect online, which has the potential to offer us understanding of individual customer journeys, has remained largely if not fully siloed from what we know about our customers from offline channels. Yes, we re doing a good job of using traditional means to gain valuable insights about our customers in a general way. But how do we leverage this knowledge for today s marketing? According to a survey of corporate and agency marketers by New York-based econsultancy, an information portal for digital and ecommerce marketers, and UK-based Lynchpin, a web analytics consultancy, three main obstacles emerged to measuring customer journeys across online and offline channels. 5 These were: Lack of resources. Lack of buy-in from senior management (and lack of understanding of the importance of the relationship between online and offline and what can be gained from it). Lack of quality data. So how do we enable our organizations to understand and guide the customer journey? How can we connect online to offline marketing in a way that is: Cost effective Salable to management Capable of producing even more insightful data that can benefit marketing efforts across all channels? Sophisticated, new technology systems can now make cross-channel communications better and easier and help marketers determine the next best step for contextual engagement with individual customers and, potentially, the more profitable step for the business. 7

9 Bridging the Gaps to a More Direct Route We have relationships with nine different vendors and spend a great deal of time and resources coordinating activities to develop our online marketing strategy. VP of interactive marketing for a leading hotel chain 1 Enabled by the Internet, prospects and customers are taking control of the buying process. Marketers are finally accepting this shift from traditional marketing as a fact to be reckoned with. Yet we must bridge two significant gaps in our ability to create mutual marketing success for both our companies and our customers. 1. How to unify online/offline intelligence and engagement. 2. In online channels, how to overcome the period of pre-engagement anonymity, which we refer to as the marketing blind spot. Let s examine the issue of anonymity first. We know less than we could about how customers engage with us online as they can remain largely unknown and anonymous to us for long periods of time. Enticing them to identify themselves and engage with us has been a voyage into uncharted territory. We have attempted to shorten the period of anonymity by dedicating considerable resources to creating content offers that we hope will entice anonymous visitors to engage with us. However we have been creating and delivering content without context. We ve been operating online with the same type of campaign thinking as we have traditionally done offline. However, if we can change our online mentality from campaign to customer experience we could envision an unprecedented opportunity given the proper tools to provide just the right offer to just the right customer in just the right moment. We could leverage our investment in the content we ve already created and use the real time intelligence we gather about our customers to create and deliver even more meaningful offers. We could turn content from simply useful information into experiences with context that win the hearts and minds of our prospects and customers. However, at the moment, there is a gap in inbound marketers understanding of online engagement. Content is being offered to web visitors without relevance to their individual journeys up until the moment when they finally exchange an address for a piece of information. Even though we have more customer data available than ever, and are taking some steps to put it into contextual timelines, we know less about our customers than we think we do or than we should. What if we could recognize earlier in the journey our web visitors interests, needs, characteristics and 8

10 emotions? What if we could eliminate the marketing blind spot? In an article on mycustomer.com 6 titled, Measuring Customer Journeys Across Offline and Online Channels Can Be Done! the director of a web analytics consultancy put it well: If you can figure out the best methodology of picking up the user, the interested person who s not become anything yet, and taking them through to becoming the customer and tracking that journey, that s gold dust, he said. Because at the moment there is a huge disconnect in terms of capturing the online persona it can be done, but it s tricky because there are so many different systems. Any CRM system is very good in reporting once you have the customer knowing what they do and their preferences, etc. And online data can be collected and reported on by web analysis tools. What we need is the joining of the break between online and offline. Providing more contextually relevant content would certainly help to shorten the anonymity period. But we must also address Gap #1 the process gap that keeps us from better connecting offline and online channels. For example, what if a TV or direct mail campaign could drive prospects to a smarter landing page that would recognize respondents from other channels/campaigns. Or if our website could make trial assumptions about first-time visitors and offer messages in the moment in order to immediately begin understanding the visitor s specific interests? Or if the call center could instantly provide an offer based on online interactions? We would begin to bridge not only the online/offline gap, but the gap in our understanding of the customer journey, closing the marketing loop. Here s where we need new and more advanced technology. One such software tool is already making a difference for companies in the U.S and Europe. 9

11 How to Guide the Journey from the First Click Our aim is to find correlations that will add benefit to customer and company. We need technology that turns marketing into a dynamic game: a platform that moves from preset rules to one that observes, correlates, and pushes out messages on the fly. Managing director at a mobile agency 1 The earlier in the customer journey we engage, the better chance we have to create competitive advantage, make a sale and build brand loyalty/advocacy. It now becomes imperative that we not wait for visitors to engage/convert, but that we begin learning about each prospect from the first click on a website or Like on a social media page. If we have the ability to immediately begin serving up trial offers to each new Web visitor, we can more quickly learn preferences and truly accelerate the potential for engagement. This capability helps direct the customer journey rather than following it passively. What we learn online can more quickly translate to offline leverage, and optimize the whole customer journey (see Figure 3). Figure 3: Engaging The Ever-Connected Consumer Across Touchpoints 10

12 Companies can start this initiative immediately, using the content and offers they ve already developed and putting them to better and more targeted use with the help of BlueConic. This cloud-based software not only identifies new visitors, but begins, proactively, to test client content, calls to action and offers, to begin assessing interests, motivations and buying signals. BlueConic superimposes on existing technology providing a comparatively simple and immediate implementation path. What it learns about each visitor, it stores in an individual profile to which future knowledge can be added. The profile for each prospect/customer will roll up data gathered across channels and devices office computer, home computer, laptop, smartphone, tablet. It can also learn from and inform offline outlets call centers, retail stores, customer service departments to make all channels more effective at ongoing customer engagement. BlueConic scales to address enterprise level complexities. For example, a large publisher is using the tool to continuously collect data for each individual (anonymous, non-customer and customer) visiting/engaging with its 23 labels/brands in more than 60 different channels. To date the company has developed some 32 million active profiles through which it is following and guiding individual customer journeys. Through BlueConic the company is connecting diverse channels including social media, e-commerce, news portals, websites, customer service portals and outbound call centers. It is able to recognize engagement by profiled individuals whether they are interacting via home or office PC s, smartphones or tablets. All of the tracked interactions are connected with its central CRM system containing all customer subscription and transactional data. BlueConic drives multiple marketing processes for this company including: - Delivering specific relevant online articles to improve the individual experience. - Delivering profile-based targeted offerings from third parties. - Interacting with and guiding individuals to targeted in-company e-commerce offerings. - Serving cross-brand targeted offerings (Brand A targets a relevant visitor to Brand B s website). - Interacting with mobile users through a mobile app to deliver additional customer-only content (iphone and ipad). - Qualifying online sales leads and feeding them to the outbound call center. With BlueConic, the anonymous period becomes shorter and more productive, enabling marketers to serve up the right content and offers on the right device at the right moment and to begin guiding the customer journey from the very first click. 11

13 More About BlueConic BlueConic is a state-of-the-art, customer-driven, online engagement solution. It puts the customer right at the heart of your online marketing operations. BlueConic listens for, identifies and records the online behavior of each of your customers, prospects, advocates, followers and other interested individuals, storing their engagement actions/information in unique personal profiles. Over time, as your customer interacts with your company via your websites, social media and mobile channels, his or her personal profile progressively builds up to become a valuable source of customerspecific information. Based on this information, you will better understand your customers needs. With the insights you gain, you can target information directly to them. This forms the foundation for meaningful right-time, cross-channel, online dialogues with your audience/s. Initially, your customers actions automatically invoke a two-way dialogue with you via the Internet using BlueConic. As the customer relationship builds, permission-based options are built in to foster trust, in response to the customer s online behavior, BlueConic delivers targeted, relevant online information in the current active channel. This can be any kind of information and in any form: a poll, a tweet, a clarifying question or a product image. BlueConic analyzes all of these customer dialogues in real time across all of your online channels and brands and lets you adapt your campaigns on-the-fly to provide more relevant, real time and profitable customer experiences. BlueConic easily adds engagement to your existing websites and includes many sophisticated features, including: Cross channel progressive profiling, even for anonymous customers Dynamic segmentation of online customers Instantly-invoked, relevant dialogues with each online customer Real-time engagement tracking Self-explanatory, user-friendly graphical user interface Compliance with the latest customer privacy best practices BlueConic has been developed with the enterprise in mind. It features exceptional scalability and performance capabilities, allowing you to keep track of literally hundreds of millions of online customer interactions over time! For more information, visit or follow BlueConic on Twitter 12

14 Appendix: reference list Resources 1. Forrester Research, Inc., Revisiting the Enterprise Marketing Software Landscape, by Robert Brosnan, February 14, Forrester Research, Inc., The Forrester Wave : Cross-Channel Campaign Management, Q Forrester Research, Inc., The Forrester Wave : Cross-Channel Campaign Management, Q Harvard Business Review Blog, Using Customer Journey Maps to Improve Customer Experience 5. Econsultancy and Lynchpin, Online Measurement and Strategy Report Mycustomer.com, Measuring Customer Journeys Across Offline and Online Channels Can be Done!, Posted by Neil Davies, Publisher Figures 1. Forrester Research, Inc., Campaign Management Customers Get Personal, by Robert Brosnan, March 28, Forrester Research, Inc., Assess The Effectiveness Of Your Customer Journey Map, by Andrew McInnes, October 15, Forrester Research, Inc., Welcome To The Era Of Agile Commerce, by Brian K. Walker, March 11, 2011 Copyright 2014 BlueConic B.V. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.