It’s Saturday morning, and you’re browsing online for shoes. The perfect pair catches your eye, and you click “buy.” Later that day, you decide the shoes would look great with pants you already own, but you need a shirt or sweater to pull the whole look together. You navigate back to the same brand’s website (or, increasingly, its app) searching for the right shirt, but all the messages the brand sends you — in the app, by email and text — recommend variations of the shoes you just bought and not something to wear with your new shoes.
Why would you want another pair of the same thing? Couldn’t you find it yourself if you did? The messages you’re getting feel outdated because they are outdated and based on minutes- or hours-old data. You’re getting messages intended for the Saturday morning version of you. Every message is based on your earlier browsing activity that remains ignorant of your morning shoe purchase. And while the messages might be personalized, you don’t benefit from them because they’re not made for the current moment.
Consumers move quickly. Without the right data at the right time, brands can miss out on engagement and sales. But unlike cheeses and fine wines, data ages quickly — and doesn’t improve with time. Marketers need data that’s as current as possible to meet consumers’ changing needs, and there’s a vast difference between data from five seconds, five minutes or five days ago.
Automations put your data to work for consumers
Amid continued economic uncertainty, brands have smaller marketing teams, feel greater pressure to hit higher margins, lower CAC, increase CLV, and see increasing demands from the CFO to demonstrate ROI. In the past, marketers who wanted to embrace automation and triggered messages struggled to scale their efforts. Why invest time and resources in automation if those specialized messages reached only 1% of the audience? This challenge prompted many marketers to lean on generic promotional messaging to try and get engagement while acquisition dollars were flowing without stop.
A robust customer engagement platform powers automation at scale, empowering brands to:
Prioritize personalized, real-time cross-channel messaging.
Keep pace with consumer behaviors.
See higher revenue per thousand messages (RPM) and increased customer lifetime value (CLV).
And while many marketers associate triggered messages with simple cart abandonment and welcome emails, modern platforms can activate more precise customer touchpoints across multiple channels:
Browse events.
In-app behaviors.
Past purchase data.
Real-time purchase data.
Email interaction.
Inventory & pricing changes.
With more information at your fingertips, you can orchestrate triggered messages that deliver what your customers want based on their latest activity, not on delayed insights that generate repetitive, off-putting communications.
Consumers agree. They appreciate targeted messaging. By incorporating triggers at scale, you’ll grab consumers’ attention and improve the shopping experience. You’ll also make progress on your ROI goals.
Marketers who expand their use of triggers see, on average, a 43% increase in average order value (AOV). But when marketers struggle to access real-time data — or when their data fails to flow from multiple sources into their cross-channel marketing platform — markets can’t possibly connect consumers with up-to-the-minute recommendations, special offers or other personalized communications.
Next-generation technology for evolving consumer requirements
Marketers can’t afford to miss their opportunity to catch a consumer’s eye because they’ve relied on outdated data. Since 81% of consumers would welcome relevant information from a brand — and 70% of consumers would share more information if it meant an improved shopping experience — marketers shouldn’t rely on depreciated data at all.
Unfortunately, while most brands collect data in real time, only a third of marketers report that they can transform that audience, attribute and behavioral data into real-time personalization for their cross-channel marketing. And nearly all (91%) said they wished they could more easily activate real-time data in their campaigns.
Most marketers face technology constraints, often with “legacy solutions” that lag behind modern marketing needs. These solutions fail to connect with a marketer’s entire tech stack and lack a centralized customer data platform (CDP), preventing effective (or timely) data orchestration, activation and engagement.
While more agile cross-channel marketing solutions offer enhanced access and activation of real-time consumer data, some marketing leaders’ fear of data migration headaches precludes them from making the switch. In years past, marketers faced an uphill battle to migrate all their data into a consolidated, accessible location. Memories of neverending timelines — and wasted money and resources — prevent many brands from executing data migration crucial for true real-time data activation. Compound this trepidation with marketers’ shrinking budgets and resources, and it’s no surprise that brands remain frozen in time even while their customers’ expectations continue increasing.
To deliver on your real-time data desires — and meet your customers’ needs — choose a cross-channel marketing platform with a built-in CDP and a streamlined data migration process. This next-generation solution equips marketing teams with richer, more immediate data to orchestrate campaigns and set up automations that generate a greater return on their efforts and more satisfied customers.
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Remember those new shoes? Brands with the ability to access and activate their data in real time will offer recommendations to complement not duplicate your purchases. Brands equipped with robust cross-channel marketing capabilities can use all of your behavioral data to improve communications wherever consumers spend time — through email, SMS, apps and website communications. The right technology helps marketers abandon the chains of outdated data and keep up with consumers.
