Intelligent enterprises know that social channels are where customers now devote their time, and social messaging channels have become a great way of reaching and engaging with those customers.
Advances in personalization have revitalized the digital experience to a certain extent, but even this is not enough. Many customers now expect two-way interaction with a brand through messaging and online chat. Therefore, to maximize customer engagement, brands need to use the communication channels their customers prefer, and the messaging needs to be cohesive across all channels.
Today, social media and messaging app services invest heavily to make sure users have a good experience in these apps and do not receive unwanted or generic marketing messages. Brands need to follow best digital engagement practices like local regulations and understand customer preferences for channel engagement. In the long term, it’s beneficial for all parties – especially since customers have chosen to communicate with brands through this channel, and it allows for richer and deeper engagement.
Read More: How is Artificial Intelligence Optimizing Digital Experience?
Understanding Customer Needs
More customers are now using messaging channels to engage with brands and make purchases. This is especially evident in the number of first-time users who adopted a messaging channel in 2020.
A recent study done by CRM software producer Zendesk on the wide-ranging adoption of messaging found that in 2020 almost 40% of millennials and Gen Zers used messaging to connect with a brand for the very first time.
Today, customers expect brands to meet them where they are through messaging channels. And at the same time, customers have a sophisticated understanding of automation that brands use to keep up with the proliferation of messaging; hence they expect automation for common questions that do not require a lot of hand-holding.
Managing Customer Data for Messaging
Messaging is an important aspect of overall customer engagement and also a valuable source of customer data.
Marketing leaders believe that data derived from a lot of customer engagement is disorganized and needs to be integrated into the data layer with some additional tools and processes. This unstructured data can include customer service, reviews, social discussions, and live chat, and so on. There have been advances in natural language processing that have helped derive essential insights from voice channels that used to be merely qualitative.
After the unstructured data gets standardized, brands can create unified customer profiles to power customer experience beyond marketing use cases. And, all the data can then be activated through coordinated decision-making and orchestration.
Read More: Crafting a More Personalized B2B Content Strategy to succeed in 2021
Metrics to Measure Messaging Success
Even if a brand has had success with its past text messaging endeavors, it’s important to identify what works and what needs to be improved. Since text message marketing offers many different data points, brands need to have metrics in place to understand the return on investment for a text message marketing campaign.
Customer engagement platform Braze found that while 88% of the marketers think their engagement strategy is excellent or good, 74% worry about how these metrics translate into business outcomes. Many brands are still focused on metrics like opens and clicks instead of focusing on what really matters most, like long-term customer lifetime value and customer loyalty. Those factors depend on building relationships, which in turn is dependent on the two-way interactions with the customers.
Businesses should adopt a company-wide definition of success that can be mapped onto each department and individual KPIs. A holistic methodology can be implemented to measure both short-term and long-term effects on customer behavior and business results. Brands must also ensure that they are capturing the right metrics across each department that interacts with customers to understand how the teams and their programs are performing.
For more such updates follow us on Google News TalkCMO News.
