A quick search for “customers hate irrelevant messaging” reveals numerous studies dating back to 2012 that caution businesses about the negative impact of aggressive marketing. Despite these long-standing warnings, many companies continue to overstep by bombarding customers with excessive messaging, pushing products or promotions that don’t interest them, and sending communications without obtaining explicit consent. The problem persists even after a decade of research highlighting these issues.
While these tactics might occasionally produce slight results, they often lead to a noticeable decline in your mailing list over time, with increasing numbers of unsubscribers—a more pressing concern. Let’s explore the issues affecting your engagement strategy and how adopting an insight-driven approach could be the remedy for these challenges.
In What Ways Are Brands Failing to Engage Customers Effectively?
One might argue that insufficient data could be why businesses struggle to engage meaningfully with their customers. However, with 70% of customers spending their time online, digital interactions have actually increased. This suggests that a lack of data isn’t the issue, as these interactions should generate ample data.
It’s commonly believed that companies lack the tools and technologies to handle large volumes of data. However, this is not the case. Nearly 70% of companies either have a digital transformation strategy or are in the process of developing one. This means that rapidly evolving technology is increasingly accessible to businesses of all sizes.
Another argument for why companies might not be effectively processing data is a lack of investment. However, the global Big Data Analytics market was valued at USD 240.56 billion in 2021, highlighting the substantial demand and spending in this area. This underscores that financial resources are available and being invested in data processing.
If businesses have access to vast amounts of data, can process it, and have invested in analyzing it, what could be going wrong? The issue often lies in their inability to convert data into meaningful and actionable insights. Data-driven insights are crucial for personalization, engagement, retention, and other key factors that effectively attract and retain customers.
Insight-Driven Customer Engagement Strategy: What Is It and Why Is It Important?
Thanks to technological advancements, businesses now have a comprehensive understanding of their customers. They possess a 360-degree view that goes beyond basic details like names, ages, or locations. Today’s businesses gain deep insights into customers’ interests, buying habits, preferences, and digital behaviours, allowing them to build personalised, one-on-one relationships with each customer.
However, as previously mentioned, knowing your customers is not enough on its own. Businesses must leverage this knowledge to customize experiences at every interaction. This is where an insight-driven customer engagement strategy becomes essential.
Insight-driven customer engagement depends on leveraging data, tools, and processes to develop actionable strategies that truly delight customers. Instead of using data merely to execute strategies and assess their effectiveness afterwards, you can use it to generate insights and craft a more intelligent engagement approach. This shift in perspective places the customer at the centre of your decision-making process, rather than focusing solely on the campaign itself.
Creating an Effective Insight-Driven Customer Engagement Strategy: A Brief Guide
Your insights are only as valuable as the quality of your data. Therefore, if your business faces data hygiene problems, you are likely setting yourself up for failure.
While working with a data-driven framework often involves dealing with issues like junk or outdated data, problems such as data silos can be avoided. Our research reveals that only 27.8% of teams use an integrated approach for planning, executing, and streamlining customer engagement. These low numbers suggest fragmented customer profiles and unreliable insights. To overcome this, businesses need to centralise their data through collaborative efforts, creating a single, accurate source of truth.
Integrate Your Business Processes
Collaborative operations shouldn’t be just a one-time task during database updates; they should be integral to your team’s daily activities. Continuous input from various teams or team members enriches customer data, providing deeper insights into their affinities, preferences, interests, and other engagement factors. This comprehensive approach leads to a more effective customer engagement strategy, enhancing customer experience and driving numerous positive outcomes.
Identify the Primary Customer Oriented KPIs
Key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics in traditional engagement differ significantly from those in insight-driven engagement. Traditional methods focus on broad, generalized data from target audience segments, while insight-led engagement relies on specific, customer-centric insights. These insights are typically found in:
- Customer Insights: demographical, behavioral, psychographic, geographic, preferences, brand perception and affinity, customer lifetime value, and other such information.
- Journey Insights: stage in the buyer’s journey, probability of churn, drop-off moments, interests, number of interactions, level of engagement, etc.
- Campaign Insights: most engaging content, the preferred channel of engagement, ideal times for messaging, open rates, click-through rates, and other such information.
Hyper-Personalization – is the way forward
Keep in mind that insight-driven engagement aims to create personalized one-to-one relationships, unlike traditional engagement, which groups people based on common traits. To achieve this, use previously gathered insights to transform a one-size-fits-all strategy into a highly tailored approach.
Hyper-personalization represents a more detailed level of personalization, where businesses use customer insights and product or service details to craft a unique journey for each individual. Every customer interaction—ranging from outreach to support—is informed by data-driven insights to enhance engagement.
Choose the Right Customer Engagement Platform (CEP)
You can’t effectively upgrade your strategy with an outdated tech stack. Therefore, the path to insight-driven customer engagement begins with choosing the right Customer Engagement Platform (CEP). CEPs are advanced software applications that compile a database of interconnected customer insights, tracking the journey from visitor to lead, prospect, customer, and ultimately, brand advocate. These platforms utilize cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data analytics to process large volumes of data in real-time, allowing for hyper-personalized customer experiences at every stage of the journey. As a result, each customer journey is unique, with engagement strategies tailored to individual insights. Thus, a CEP is crucial for implementing a truly insight-led engagement strategy.
Insight-driven engagement revitalizes your outreach and customer-centric marketing strategy to the point where your customers genuinely anticipate hearing from you. In today’s highly competitive business environment, this is a significant advantage.