HOW CAN YOU ENHANCE YOUR CUSTOMER'S ONLINE ENGAGEMENT?

The rise of technology and online accessibility in the last 12-24 months has saturated the market with endless options, and now, the power is undoubtedly in the consumer’s hands. We researched how consumers are spending their time online and the data points to a willingness to pay more for a personalised product.  With this expectation of personalised products comes the notion of consumers desiring a fully personalised experience online, i.e. completely designed for their unique needs. And each time they experience this personalisation, the bar is set higher again for their next visit.

While you probably already know how much consumers desire to feel special, many marketers are lacking the tools to implement a strategy that truly enhances customer experience and creates a memorable user journey. Here are 3 avenues we suggest exploring to ensure your customers come back for more, through the lens of Kentico EMS.

Email marketing

In this era of social media madness, every business seems to concentrate on feeding as much content onto their social platforms as often as possible. However, many companies seem to only half-heartedly focus on their email marketing strategy. Why is this, when it is proven to be a better choice to effectively integrate into the consumer’s brand experience?

Many organisations fear to use email marketing as a primary form of marketing communication, concerned about their communications becoming lost in the untouched ‘Junk Mail’ territory of the customer inbox. Or, worse, being caught in the crossfire of your customer and the dreaded ‘delete’ button on their screens.

While you can try to avoid spam words and use third party mail servers, the fact of the matter is, if customers are not interested, why would they read it?

That is where the key to engaging your customers lies. That is, ensuring you are creating interesting and relevant content, where the headline grabs them from the moment your email hits their inbox. If you can successfully tailor your email marketing in this way, Kentico has identified that your click through rate can increase by a whopping 152%.

It all sounds like a lot of work, doesn’t it? Sending out unique messages to each consumer based on what they like, what they value, where they live, how old they are... The segmentation criteria are endless.  

Marketing automation 

Marketing automation, put simply, is as the title suggests. This strategy enables marketers to automate brand communications without compromising on the personalisation that we know customers love so much and have come to expect. Marketing automation is now one of the most commonly used tools to drive insight and intelligence, enhance customer experience and align your sales and marketing teams. If this isn’t monetised enough for you, those that have engaged in marketing automation have seen proven results on their ROI, as well as reducing operational costs.

If you really want to improve your ROI and lead generation, the marketing automation platform on Kentico works interdependently with systems such as email marketing, social media and mobile marketing to scale down the lengthy and sometimes complex process.  

Marketing automation is only continuing to grow, as more businesses understand the benefits in implementing this tool, so consider looking to the future of your customer’s experience, rather than being stuck in the past.

Personas 

It’s no secret that to efficiently market to your consumers, brands need to segment, target and position (STP) their consumer base to send the right messages to the right people, at the right time. If you already do it in your e-mail marketing, and already do it through your promotional material, why should your website be any different?

Personas on your site allow you to change as your consumers do. A persona enables you to determine what behaviours your customers engage in so that you can best match website material to their own needs. These criteria might be based on what they buy, where they are, and what pages they visit. From this collated information, it’s easy to create personalised website profiles, that enable two people sitting next to each other to access your site in a different way.

Instead of creating a one-dimensional website for all your consumer segments, which provides tired, generic messages and decreases engagement rates, why don’t you customise your site to fit certain consumer personas?

Only 19% of marketers are taking advantage of personalisation to meet the differing needs of your diverse group of consumers. Save money by allocating marketing resources where they’re needed and increase your impact on consumer engagement by fully utilising these rich resources at your disposal.

Find out how Digital First can help you optimise your customer engagement rates through our Kentico partnership.