Why context is becoming the future of customer engagement?
Driving customer engagement and experience with digital capabilities is no longer a red-hot solution. Rapid technology innovations are constantly giving the rise of new consumer management platforms for marketers who seek to understand, envisage, and monitor engagement levels. Foresighted marketers know that engaged customers are the best as they buy more, and promote and show more loyalty towards a brand. However, in today’s competitive marketplace, engaging customers can be a challenging job as customers can no longer be kept engaged with mass marketing.
Customers today expect a personalized experience. So, this can be achieved by attributing context that can help make the experience more meaningful. Creating a successful contextual engagement means the capability to identify and offer customers exactly what they want and when they want it. This typically requires conveying the right message, at the right time, in the right place, and on the right channel.
Understanding Contextual Engagement
There is not an exact solution that ensures that customers purchase the things they really like. For instance, in most cases, consumers search and explore services online, check out various providers’ sites, receive offline recommendations, and click through a retargeted ad, but make a purchase in-store. On the other side, they may see promotional ads on social site(s), search that provider online, visit the store, and then showroom for the lowest price online. However, during such a process, they expect an enhanced, personalized experience. Reports show that a majority of customers would switch a brand after one poor experience.
According to Frost & Sullivan, companies around the globe lose US$300 billion annually due to poor customer experiences.
In this way, embracing contextual engagement allows marketers to deliver pertinent messages to consumers in need of time using their preferred channel. It is possible through technology that supports marketers to understand consumers’ behaviors, both historically and in real-time. They can then be able to create campaigns featuring messaging and offers based on that insight, and deliver those messages and offers right when customers need them.
Delivering Contextual Personalization at Scale
The key to delivering successful contextual engagement lies in the power of context. Without context, the entire process would be noisy. And the power of context lies in the ability to revolutionize marketing campaigns from static to interactive, lowering broad targeting for personalized engagements and exceeding customers’ expectations in terms of effectiveness and value overspend.
As noted by McKinsey, personalization can deliver five to eight times the ROI on marketing spend, and can elevate sales by 10 percent or more. Although the marketing industry has been promising personalization at scale for the past several years, relying on a machine to generate a seamless personalized experience may be an off beam step. Instead of this, systematically testing ideas with real customers is one of the best ways to achieve meaningful personalization. An array of marketing technology, automation, and advanced analytics techniques have already proven their capability where effective personalization at scale is possible.
