According to the State of Cross-Channel Marketing report, email is the most commonly used channel for marketing, with over 80% of B2C marketers saying they use it. Even more importantly, the majority said that email was their organization’s most effective engagement channel.

But to get real value from your email marketing efforts in today’s age, you need to make sure they are personalized to your customers.

Email personalization is non-negotiable for marketers who have any intention of remaining relevant. In a sea of generic messaging, audiences want content that speaks to them. 

This article discusses what makes email personalization so critical in modern marketing, how to go about personalizing marketing emails, and provides concrete, real-life examples for brands to consider.

What is Email Personalization?

Email personalization is a marketing strategy that involves sending customized emails to the recipient, based on their demographics, location, preferences, interests, behaviors, and journey stage.

A truly personalized email goes beyond first name personalization and makes the content feel intended for the specific reader. This greatly impacts email marketing metrics such as click-through rates and conversions, as can be seen in MoEngage’s Customer Engagement Benchmarks 2024 – North America Edition.  

However, many marketers still admit that creating effective instances of personalized marketing a challenge. This blog is intended to help with that.

What is the difference between email segmentation and personalization?

Segmentation is the process of defining customer profiles based on customer demographics, location, behavior, and interests, and then using that information to determine what messages are relevant to different customer groups.

Personalization is the opportunity presented by that process. Insights derived from segmentation allow you to deliver a unique, seemingly bespoke experience to each customer through use of these segmented profiles. The insights from segmentation ensure that the marketing communication you send is delivered at the right time and is impactful, further improving email metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and overall engagement. Essentially, personalization empowers you to speak to each particular segment individually.

More simply, segmentation tells who you should and shouldn’t send a particular email to; while personalization helps you define what you send to each person. 

Why is Email Personalization Critical in Marketing?

Each email presents a multitude of opportunities to personalize from the subject to the signature. Few marketing opportunities give you as many touch points tied up in the same convenient package. Overall, email personalization helps to:

• Improve open and click-to-open rates: Catching the customer’s attention with a catchy and personalized subject line and preview message makes them more likely to not only open the email, but also click the intended link/attachment.
• Ensure customer engagement: Keep customers actively engaged and in-the-loop with updates on recent orders and transactions, news of the latest offers, loyalty rewards benefits, and other brand communication. 
• Enable orchestrated omnichannel customer journeys: Email personalization empowers teams to connect with customers on an additional channel touchpoint that can be incorporated into an omnichannel flow. This provides greater brand visibility and pushes users further down the conversion funnel.
• Increase conversions: Personalized recommendations and offers sent via emails are far more enticing, eliciting greater clicks, engagement, and — ultimately — sales. Personalized emails can also result in customers opting in to communicate via other channels (like SMS) or get them to download your mobile app.
• Reactivate (potentially) dormant customers: Timely, personalized email campaigns can be used to reach and engage customers that have a high propensity to become inactive or churn or reactivate those that have already become dormant or churned. 
• Enhance the customer experience: Personalized emails that deliver relevant recommendations, promotions, and communication to customers enhances their experience with — and impression of — your brand. This impacts customer retention. 

Below we provide key statistics surrounding email personalization and email marketing benchmarks that can be achieved through different types of personalization.

Email Personalization Statistics and Benchmarks

Personalized experiences are no longer optional; customers expect them from the brands they use regularly.

According to our Customer Engagement Benchmarks 2024 report, different types of email personalization help brands significantly increase open rates (OR), click-to-open rates (CTOR), and conversion rates (CVR).

These benchmarks provide the following insights:

• Customers are 1.2X more likely to open emails personalized according to their journey stage as compared to generic messages.
• Customers are 1.2X more likely to open emails personalized according to their behavior as compared to generic messages.
• Customers are 2.1X more likely to click emails personalized according to their journey stage as compared to generic messages.
• Customers are 6.3X more likely to click emails personalized according to their behavior as compared to generic messages.
• Brands can experience 8.2X higher CVR when they use customer journey insights to personalize email communication instead of sending generic messages.
• Brands can experience 29.3X higher CVR when they use customer behavior insights to personalize email communication instead of sending generic messages.

There’s no doubt that personalized emails perform better than non-personalized emails, with behavior-based personalization impacting performance most. Not only do they get a lot more eyes on your emails, but they drastically increase CTOR and CVR, showing they resonate with customers far more than generic emails.

What to Personalize in a Marketing Email

We’ve already established that email personalization is important but there’s more to it than customizing the email on the basis of first name. 

Personalization isn’t just about knowing basic demographic details like your customer’s name and age, it’s about understanding where they are in the customer journey, their preferences, and their actual behavior. Are they in the middle of the flow of the sales funnel and need a reminder to re-engage? Have they recently made a purchase and you want to incite positive feedback?

There are so many different components to an email that can be personalized. Below, we look at what you can — and should — personalize in your emails.

Subject Lines

An email subject line is the first thing the customer is going to engage with, and it can be the difference between them opening or deleting the message. Subject lines need to be direct and to the point, communicating as much information as possible while still enticing customers to click. 

Preview Snippet 

Notifications on both web and mobile often display email previews before they are opened. Craft personalized content for this preview and make sure it’s tailored to entice customers to open the email.

Main Copy

This is the segment of the email where you need to drive impact home while still getting to the point. Storytelling is important, but your customer’s time is precious. While your email needs to be crisp and engaging throughout, you need to avoid the need for scrolling too much (unless you are certain you can keep the customer’s attention).

Ensure the copy has highly relevant and contextual recommendations that are aligned to your customers’ behavior, buying patterns, and usage trends. Furthermore, adding personalized deals that are relevant to the customers helps to set your brand apart, incentivize active engagement, and leads to conversions. 

Dynamic Content

Grab customers attention and motivate engagement with dynamic content like images, videos, and gamified elements like scratch cards and spin-the-wheels. These elements can be differentiated based on the email use case, e.g. cart abandonment or search drop off. But make sure this is not a heavy file and will load and display properly on different browsers and mobile devices.

Call-to-action (CTA)

Your email also needs to have at least 1 personalized CTA that can be tracked. For example, download our app, sign up for SMS, continue shopping, read this asset etc.

Timing

Email scheduling is just as important as the content itself. Sending emails at irrelevant timings can lead to the customer overlooking them or cause frustration. Make sure you are hitting your customers when the data indicates they are prone to engage. Leverage AI to help you find the best time and day to send messages to individual customers. 

Frequency

How often a customer receives communication can be the difference between active, consistent engagement and someone opting out of email campaigns altogether. Effective customer segmentation enables brands to perfect the frequency of campaigns to maximize engagement and keep customers happy. For e.g. price-conscious customers can be sent more emails during sale time to promote the attractive offers and get them to convert. 

AI enables you to conduct automatic A/B testing and figure out the best frequency for different customers and segments. Either way adding a frequency capping is essential to ensure customers don’t feel spammed.

For best results, B2C marketers will want to personalize all of these elements, optimizing each component over time to improve traction and engage customers more effectively.

Email Personalization Best Practices: Strategies for Success

There are lots of ways to incorporate personalization in email marketing, so we’ve compiled a list of strong strategies to get you started.

1. Use personalized subject lines that grab your customers attention

The subject line is the first thing the customer sees. If it doesn’t make an impression, you stand to lose the customer within seconds. Personalization starts with communication that feels human to human.

However, since the character count is limited, you need to be crisp and precise in conveying your message and personalizing the subject line.

Give recipients an idea of the content and context of your emails by conveying whether the email is informative, promotional, or transactional directly in the subject line. 

You can even use subject lines to create a sense of urgency on time-sensitive campaigns, encouraging prompt engagement.

Customized subject lines are a great way to cater emails for special occasions, like a customer’s birthday. Instead of adding a generic subject line, grab your customer’s attention by addressing them directly and offering them a personalized reward. 

Emojis are another great way to not only lighten the tone of your emails and catch your audience’s attention, but also to convey ideas and tone in a short amount of characters, which is great for subject lines as they have strict limits on character length.

2. Leverage generative AI to create enticing email copy and visuals

Save your organization significant time managing your email marketing campaigns with generative AI that can create high-performing copy and visuals for subject lines, preview snippets, and the main copy.

Generative AI can analyze past campaign performance, understand context based on your particular audience and use case, and consider the positive and negative connotations and reactions to your email campaign copy. 

Based on campaign performance, it can then help you personalize and optimize your email copy over time to improve performance and build successful campaigns.

3. Implement gamification to supercharge email engagement

Gamifying elements in your marketing communication is a great way to both enhance and encourage engagement with your brand and drive conversions.

Add interactive elements (like a live sale timer) and games (like “spin-the-wheel” and “scratch cards”) that entice customers to participate in promotional offers. This is a great way to get customers to actively engage with your emails, ensuring they click-through to perform other actions, such as taking advantage of the offer they get.

Not only that, these gamified rewards incentivize customers to open future emails so they can play again and win attractive offers. For this reason, gamification is not only great at driving immediate engagement, but it’s also a valuable tool in evoking consistent engagement with your emails, as customers will be waiting for monthly, weekly, or even daily scratch cards or wheel spins.

4. Send event-triggered emails that arrive at precisely the right time

Timing is everything when it comes to email engagement. If your email doesn’t come at the right time, it will remain unopened or will be deleted months later when they clear out their junk mail.

To make sure you always send your emails at the right time and with the right context, set up event-trigger based marketing campaigns that automatically trigger when a customer takes a particular action. These events can be pre-determined and set up in your customer engagement platform’s dashboard, automatically triggering when a customer completes onboarding, completes a purchase, abandons their cart, or when their membership is about to expire in a week.

This ensures they receive messaging in a timely fashion, while it’s still relevant, drastically increasing open and engagement rates.

5. Conduct thorough A/B testing to make data-driven improvements

It’s not easy to perfect the content, timing, and frequency of your email marketing campaigns. It takes trial and testing to learn what works and what doesn’t. And even then, it can be difficult to identify the difference between a smash hit and an absolute flop.

B2C brands that use AI-based, dynamic A/B testing are able to get reliable insights into what is — and isn’t — working so they can optimize their email marketing campaigns to increase OR, CTOR, and CVR.

6. Give customers the ability to provide feedback

Customers should be given the power to decide the frequency of emails they receive and be able to give feedback on the content they are receiving. 

For this, you can add a CTA at the bottom of your emails asking them to leave feedback or even send periodic feedback request emails. But make sure you respond quickly to such feedback, make improvements, and communicate those back again to your customers or you could risk churn.

5 Best Email Personalization Examples From Top B2C Brands

Knowing the strategies to implement and executing them effectively are two different things. Let’s look at some real-life examples of personalized email marketing campaigns to see how leading brands drive engagement, conversion, and retention.

1. Duolingo reactivates customers with humor

Duolingo is known for its content game and tongue-in-cheek marketing campaigns that often tease customers for lapsing in their language studies. This personable and conversational style goes a long way to bridge the gap between the brand and customers who have become disengaged.

But Duo isn’t just an adorable green bird, it’s a savvy marketer using customer segmentation to target — and reactivate — inactive customers and reduce the potential for customer churn. 

They use creative, fun email campaigns to remind customers of their streak progress when they’re falling behind on their courses, encouraging them to get back to learning and keep them on pace.

2. Adidas mitigates cart abandonment with event-triggered emails

Adidas also uses a tongue-in-cheek communication for certain campaigns which imply that customers that left a checkout incomplete must have had a technical error. This is a light-hearted way of alerting customers of an abandoned cart and is extremely effective at increasing conversions.

Such unique, quirky, and contextually relevant email campaigns resonate well with customers and help you deliver an optimal experience at the exact times customers abandon their cart.

3. McDonald’s motivates customers to convert with personalized offers

McDonald’s sends regular emails to its customers to keep them engaged. Often the intent of these is to entice them with attractive offers that’ll get them to open the app and place an order.

They also collect customer feedback using surveys to help them engage customers more effectively in the future, attempting to understand what types of content customers want from their future emails.

4. Rocket Money sends customized financial updates to improve customer satisfaction

Email marketing isn’t always about direct sales, it’s also about sending crucial information to your customers that enhances their experience.

Rocket Money sends customized financial reports via emails to their customers that summarize their monthly activity. These emails contain deep insights into their spending habits and help customers with personal financial management.

Providing customers such helpful, personalized, and relevant emails drastically increases engagement with email campaigns, from OR to CTOR. 

5. Netflix reactivates customers with targeted emails

Netflix analyzes every single interaction their customers make with the platform so they can understand their preferences better. Then they leverage the wealth of information — like in-app activity and watch history — to deliver hyper-personalized recommendations that keep customers engaged and reactivate customers that have gone dormant. 

For example, the above email from Netflix is providing a fully personalized recommendation based on the individual customer’s recent activity, reminding them to return to the app and continue watching their favorite series. 

Keen on driving engagement and conversions with campaigns like those above? Personalizing your emails gets a lot easier and more scalable with the right email personalization software.

How to Choose the Right Email Personalization Tool

You can’t make your audience feel special unless personalization is done right. Here are some features to look for when comparing email personalization tools:

1. Customizable Templates

The tool should let you create dynamic emails using templates you can customize as per the recipients’ needs. It includes changing colors, adding images, and using the right CTA buttons. Does it also allow you to drag and drop different elements in your email without using any code? Even better!

2. Customer Segmentation

You should be able to segment your customers and prospects into different groups like inactive customers, loyal customers, cart abandonments, and more. Such segmentation makes it easier to send hyper-personalized emails in real-time, like product recommendations, based on the group the recipient belongs to.

3. Email Automation

From scheduling reminders and sending nurture emails to new subscribers, to sending coupons and subscription renewal emails, the tool should automate it all. Email marketing automation ensures that a personalized email is sent to the right audience whenever customers trigger the desired action. For example, an order confirmation email should be automatically sent to a customer who completes a transaction.

4. Analytics

Another consideration when choosing email personalization tools is email analytics. Select a tool that allows you to analyze email open rates, bounce rates, and other key metrics that can help you understand whether your email personalization strategy is working or not.

5. Ease of Use

Finally, the email personalization tool you pick should be easy to use. Not just for you, but for the rest of your team, too! Because if the tool comes with a steep learning curve, you don’t want the ROI to decline due to associated training costs, right?

Send Highly Personalized Emails That Your Customers Will Love —With MoEngage

Email is one of the most commonly used marketing channels. Because of this, modern consumers receive an abundance of emails that never get opened. For your emails to stick, you need to be giving customers hyper-personalized emails that speak directly to their needs, preferences, and where they are in the customer lifecycle.

MoEngage’s Customer Engagement Platform (CEP) can help you personalize the content, timing, and frequency of your emails so you can deliver communication that resonates with your customers. 

With MoEngage’s generative AI engine — Merlin AI — you can automate copy creation and campaign optimization, freeing up time to develop future campaigns. 

Use Sherpa AI to A/B test your email campaigns and find out things like ‘best time to send’ to hone in on what’s most effective, allowing you to increase engagement.

Whether you’re a retailer, a quick service restaurant (QSR), a bank or financial institution, or a media & entertainment company, we can help you deliver engaging marketing emails that drastically increase OR, CTOR, and CVR. 

Schedule a demo today to find out more about how we can help you execute a flawless email marketing campaign at scale.

Fundada na França, a Up Brasil é uma marca voltada para benefícios corporativos e vem liderando o mercado atualmente no Brasil. Com alta capilaridade na Europa, o negócio também está presente no México e na Colômbia, expandindo sua operação e fincando bandeira nas Américas.

Como toda marca, a Up Brasil tem grandes desafios, considerando principalmente a existência de três stakeholders principais: clientes RH, estabelecimentos parceiros e usuários finais.

Com uma base diversificada, para garantir um alto nível de engajamento em toda a cadeia é necessária uma solução abrangente para estruturar as redes de relacionamento, análise de dados, monitoramento de resultados e, claro, propor estratégias eficazes.

Foi para resolver isso que a Up Brasil e a MoEngage trabalham em parceria. A marca entendeu que as soluções oferecidas pela MoEngage atendiam ao desafio de trabalhar em várias frentes, oferecendo soluções amplas e se comunicando com as necessidades dos stakeholders.

Afinal, sabemos o quanto o engajamento é fundamental para uma marca que trabalha com benefícios corporativos, contribuindo diretamente para a satisfação dos clientes, fidelização dos mesmos, identificação de oportunidades de melhoria e competitividade no mercado.

Agora, conheça algumas das principais funcionalidades da MoEngage implementadas pela Up Brasil para melhorar o engajamento, e a importância de cada uma delas para o negócio.

• Visão 360º do cliente: a MoEngage oferece uma visão completa da jornada do cliente, incluindo comportamentos e preferências; pontos fundamentais para a retenção dos mesmos, além de ser um meio de identificação de oportunidades;
• Dados e Insights: ter toda a estruturação de dados para analisar, testar e propor ações de maneira clara é uma das portas de entrada para o verdadeiro empoderamento do negócio;
• Experiência Unificada: contar com uma plataforma que entrega maior controle sobre os resultados e análises de uma maneira otimizada faz toda diferença no dia a dia para entender com facilidade o que está acontecendo e tomar decisões assertivas.

A parceria entre a Up Brasil e a MoEngage é mais que uma escolha estratégica. É uma união de forças para elevar a experiência dos stakeholders a um novo patamar. Uma vez entendida a importância do engajamento em um cenário complexo de negócios, a Up Brasil encontrou um parceiro capaz de oferecer soluções abrangentes e alinhadas com suas necessidades na MoEngage.

A MoEngage entrega ferramentas poderosas e uma experiência unificada, além de proporcionar clareza, controle e análises aprimoradas. Com a intenção de facilitar a tomada de decisão e, também, impulsionar a capacidade da Up Brasil em identificar oportunidades e melhorar a satisfação dos clientes.

Vamos em frente!

For a long time, marketing within the streaming ecosystem relied fundamentally on mass marketing: broadly deliver and the content exposes and speaks for itself. Customers engage every day and they are exposed to the content merely by being on the platform. However, with the rise of competitors in recent years, it is no longer an option to leave the marketing of a streaming service to languish in this way.

Our Customer Engagement Benchmarks 2024 report revealed that Media and Entertainment is the most popular industry in terms of consumer spending. Projections also show that consumer spending on media and entertainment is expected to increase to USD 903.2 billion by 2027. This displays just how much money is on the table for over-the-top (OTT) and streaming distributors willing to revitalize their marketing strategy. 

In this article, we will explore what marketing opportunities are available to benefit different types of streaming services, how the services differ, and the top marketing strategies that streaming brands can leverage to drive customer engagement.

What Does Marketing for Streaming Services Entail?

High saturation is pushing streaming services to change the way they execute customer engagement. Just promoting content is no longer enough, streaming services need to provide personalized communication and a seamless, interconnected experience to their customers.

With a wide variety of streaming services (movies, television, music, radio, and live events, etc.), it’s harder than ever to attract — and keep — customer attention. 

Effectively marketing streaming services comes down to providing the right messaging at the right time to the relevant customers, through highly personalized communication.

At the same time, the adoption of subscription-based revenue models has made retention a priority for most streaming services. Successful brands drive customer retention and increase app stickiness by building engaging customer experiences throughout the entire customer lifecycle: from acquisition, to onboarding, to purchase and post-purchase.

What Are the Benefits of Marketing for Streaming Services?

Customers have a wide array of streaming options, but a limited number of hours to spend on their devices. Hence, for streaming services, retention is imperative. It’s what keeps customers coming back to renew subscriptions, consume content, and view ads. In fact, effective marketing enables streaming services to increase customer engagement and realize other main objectives.

Elevating your streaming service marketing can improve customer engagement and sets up brands to benefit in the following ways:

• Improved brand awareness and conversions: For entertainment brands to capture customer attention, they need to increase their exposure so that customers recognize them — and think of them when they have to decide what content to consume or service to use. Effective marketing can dramatically increase brand exposure and drive conversions and subscription renewals.
• Increased retention and ROI: The more time customers engage with your marketing communication, the more time they end up using your service, cementing them as loyalists for your brand. This increase in retention directly translates into more subscription renewals and ad revenue.
• Obtain insight on your audience: Streaming services live and die by their ability to provide customers relevant content that their customers are actually interested in. By collecting omnichannel analytics that provide deep insights into customer activity, behavior, and preferences, you’re better equipped to deliver personalized recommendations that connect customers with content they love.

While all of these benefits are achievable for streaming services, different types of streaming services will need to employ different strategies to get the best results they can. 

In the next section, we discuss the common types of streaming service brands and how they can effectively market to their customers.

Marketing for Different Types of Streaming Services

Though it started with over-the-top media (OTT), digital entertainment in all of its forms has now expanded into the streaming market. And top media & entertainment marketers are accelerating brand growth and engagement by perfecting their marketing strategies.

Each form of streaming benefits from different strategies to ensure customers remain engaged with their distribution platforms. 

Regardless of the focus of your streaming service, there is value in observing the way direct and indirect competitors operate.

OTT 🎥

OTT (over-the-top) is a direct response to classic cable video distribution methods. It was instituted to bypass traditional channels and present video content (like movies and TV) directly to the consumer base. 

Netflix established itself as the leader of this new wave of media distribution beginning with mail-out DVDs and evolving to video streaming distribution. Now, 99% of households in America subscribe to one or more video streaming services. 

Having a well-developed OTT marketing strategy is key when competing in a tough market with big names like HBO and Disney+. But while this is an extremely competitive market, it’s also a huge one — rife with opportunity.

Due to the high level of saturation in the video streaming market, proving that you offer a seamless, best-in-class experience is key. 

Netflix changed the game in video, and is still one of the primary contenders in the market because their customer experience is tight. They deliver on their interface and ensure ease of use across all channels of access. They also engage their customers with website personalization and mobile by sending tailored alerts – keeping their platform top-of-mind. 

Audio: Music, podcasts, and radio 🎧

Audio streaming has become extremely popular with the rise of music streaming, podcasts, and audiobooks.

As of 2021, music streaming surpassed radio, with 41% of American listeners accessing music via streaming platforms. Customers have prioritized these services because content is easily accessible and these platforms deliver optimal customer experiences that are convenient and enjoyable.

While some of these services (like Spotify) make money through subscriptions, other services (like podcasts), make their money primarily — if not exclusively — through ad-revenue and sponsorship deals. The creators themselves earn largely based on engagement, with those earnings being tied to ad-revenue as well. When you break it down, both the streaming services and the content creators they support rely on engagement to make a profit.

These brands need to prioritize engagement with their content over everything, leveraging marketing messaging to activate customers and get them to consume — and engage with — content more regularly. 

Spotify engages customers using targeted mobile push notifications and emails that promote artists the user recently listened to or favorited. This motivates the user to spend more time listening to music and using Spotify. Their Spotify Wrapped program is also a targeted engagement strategy that incentivizes customers for listening exclusively on Spotify so that each interaction contributes to their annual metrics. 

Live streaming: Gaming and other services 🎮

Live streaming has grown in popularity in recent years. It’s also extremely popular in the gaming industry, with Twitch being a leading streaming platform that specializes in live streaming of video game content.

Even more than other streaming services, live streaming is especially dependent on engagement. After all, it requires customers to tune-in live, while an event is happening. To get customers to do that, brands have to achieve real brand affinity and loyalty, ensuring they deliver an experience that customers want to be a part of.

For brands to capture this hyper-interactive attention and provide an in-depth experience, they have to offer customers intuitive, convenient, and seamless experiences across all channels. 

They also need to craft personalized marketing that hooks customers and drives them to engage in real time, such as sending timely marketing communication that alerts customers when their favorite creators are live. For example, Twitch sends automated push notifications as soon as a user’s followed creator goes live, so they don’t miss the live stream.

Social media platforms 👍

Social media platforms (like TikTok and Instagram) offer both live and pre-recorded content that is driven by community engagement and communication. Like live streaming, interaction from users is often a key part of the platform-driven experience.

Social media is a streaming juggernaut usually driven less by subscription revenue and more heavily by advertising and endorsement, i.e. engagement-based revenue. Coupling that with influencers capable of delivering vastly different types of content all packaged under the same platform, keeping a customer engaged through all the noise requires deep knowledge of the customer.

To optimize engagement on social media platforms, B2C marketers need to leverage omnichannel analytics to garner deep insights about customer activity and behavior so they can truly understand their customers and accurately segment them. This empowers teams to deliver personalized communication that drives engagement and keeps customers coming back.

For e.g. YouTube analyzes every user interaction to understand what categories of content customers engage with most, helping them deliver better content recommendations that satisfy their customers (and keep them watching). For this purpose they analyze metrics such as views, likes, click-rates, watch-time, and more, to serve curated experiences and marketing.

Top 6 Marketing Strategies for Streaming Services to Drive Customer Engagement

Increasing customer engagement for digital streaming apps and generating stable revenue in a largely subscription-driven marketplace requires prioritizing retention. Marketing strategies that put customers first ensure that they stick around past free trials and first-month release windows. 

The following strategies are designed to increase engagement on digital streaming apps:

1. Distribute seamlessly on multiple channels

Providing customers with access to your platform in more than one way (such as app and web) ensures that they have easy access to your service and it remains on the top of their mind.  

Ensuring that access to your platform is available across various channels ensures that a wider customer base can access it, regardless of the device available to them. 

Because of the modern consumer’s mobility, platforms that prioritize the functionality of one channel (such as the web) for their services risk alienating customers who want on-the-go access to content, and on a device of their choice.

The most popular streaming platforms distribute on every channel possible, from web to mobile to gaming systems. Giving your audience options and seamless connections across channels makes them use your platform as a reflex.

For example, Spotify makes it possible for customers to access their platform on mobile and web — and it doesn’t stop there. Mobile access to their app can be used to remotely control features on their web app or desktop app, and vice versa, projecting sound to the available devices.

2. Use customer segmentation for personalized recommendations

Customer segmentation is when a brand sorts customers into like-minded groups. It allows brands to use gathered information about their customer base– such as demographics, common behaviors, and shared interests — to improve their experience. 

Segmenting customers based on interest and behavioral information garnered over time enables you to create more effective customer engagement campaigns. 

Relevant recommendations ensure that the customer is satisfied and they don’t have to go elsewhere. In other words, they end up spending more time on your platform and less time thinking about competitor offerings.

YouTube has spent years perfecting their content recommendations through deeper insights and customer segmentation efforts. They curate recommendations by dividing customers on the basis of their demographics, interest, past viewing history, and other platform behavior to consister deliver content that customers love. This way, customers are served content that fits the genres, categories, and topics they are most interested in, increasing click-through rates, view rates, and overall engagement.

3. Provide hyper-personalized recommendations to individuals 

Providing hyper-personalized content recommendations involves delivering suggestions to your customer base that are influenced by individual customer data such as behavior, past activity on the platform, interests, and more. 

Making data-driven decisions ensures that your marketing strategy is centered around your customers. 

For example, OTT and video streaming services can send film and show recommendations that are similar to other content the customer has watched. Music streaming services can recommend personalized playlists and artists based on songs users listen to artists they follow. Ultimately, it’s about serving personalized recommendations that the customer is more likely to enjoy.

SoundCloud is a great example because it caters to the underground. It presents itself both as a listening service and as an indie distributor for up-and-coming artists. SoundCloud stands its ground by acting as a platform for emerging artists and talents: by musicians, for musicians. 

They utilize customer data to create hyper-personalized experiences which ensure that their customers feel valued and catered to. Their “Personalized Playlist: SoundCloud Weekly” demonstrates this by curating playlists for individual listeners that are personalized by their activity and interests to show them up-and-coming artists that align with those interests.

4. Activate and reactivate customers with mobile push notifications

Since mobile push notifications go directly to a customer’s mobile device, they offer great visibility with high open and click-through rates. Because of this, (when executed properly) they are extremely effective at activating existing customers and reactivating dormant ones.

Netflix uses mobile push notifications to recommend content the customer has previously engaged with, encouraging them to come back and interact with the content (and their service) once more. Whether the customer hasn’t watched anything in a few days or a few months, the mobile push notification uniquely targets them based on their searches, saved content, and watchlist — incentivizing engagement. This turns dormant customers into monthly active users (MAUs) or daily active users (DAUs).

Similarly, other OTT apps can leverage stored media in their content library and share curated clips and trailers as a value add to keep customers informed of hot, up-and-coming content.

Making customers excited about upcoming content or creating FOMO over released content will ensure they spend more time on your platform instead of turning to your competitors.

5. Implement AI to elevate your other marketing strategies

Use of AI tools provides businesses of any size with the ability to scale their marketing efforts. They can supplement the hard work of your marketing team to simplify campaign processes and guide decision making. 

AI tools can help to streamline A/B multivariate testing for efficient experimentation on which campaigns customers engage with most strongly — therefore taking other proven strategies like customer segmentation to the next level. 

Predictive AI like MoEngage Sherpa can be used to automate and test different journey paths and figure out the best channels, and optimal message timings and frequency for each customer.

Similarly, generative AI such as Merlin AI allows marketers to create engaging copies for various channels.

6. Leverage real-time, event-triggered alerts to keep customers engaged

Making sure that the high-value content on your platform is reaching and resonating with your audience relies heavily on timing. Event-triggered alerts engage your viewers at just the right moment to maximize engagement.

By initiating communication after a customer performs a particular action, you’re able to send contextually relevant communication to your customers, whether that’s a content recommendation or a service alert. 

For example, if your customer is about to exit your website, you can trigger an in-app message to check if they actually want to leave or stay for some more time. Similarly, if it’s been a certain number of days since the user has visited the app, you can trigger a push notification to remind them of an unfinished film or podcast. Or, like Spotify, encourage more (and deeper) engagement by promoting newly released albums of a customer’s favorite artist.

Enhancing Your Streaming Marketing with MoEngage

Modern marketing strategies for streaming services such as customer segmentation, hyper-personalization, and omnichannel marketing, all work together to ensure a cohesive experience that keeps audiences engaged.

Prioritizing customer engagement secures audience affinity for your brand, improving retention,  and keeping customers satisfied enough to pay a premium for access to your platform. 

Book a demo now to explore how MoEngage can help you turn your platform’s customer base into a driven community of engaged and loyal subscribers.

If you’re a marketer, chances are you regularly work with a predefined grouping of marketing solutions to help you do your job.

These tools are there to make your life easier and your work more efficient. However, over time, the tools required to achieve the desired results can grow and change—sometimes for the better, and sometimes for the worse. 

This is where martech stack optimization comes in, and typically, it begins with a martech stack audit, which is exactly what we will cover in this article. Here, we’ll dig into what makes up a solid martech stack, the importance of investing in future-ready software, the signs it’s time to optimize featuring insights from industry expert Meri Williams, and how to run a martech audit. 

Let’s get to it.

What is a Martech Stack?

A martech stack—or marketing technology stack—is the collection of software and tools that, when compiled, make up the cohesive solution used by an individual marketing entity to perform the processes needed to track and measure the customer journey and meet their specific goals for growth.

Although thousands of martech applications are available, most martech stacks consist of a few core platforms. This can include tools for email marketing, social media management, analytics, customer relationship management, customer engagement platforms, and more.

What are the key components of a martech stack?

A standard B2C martech stack foundation would include the following primary components:

• Content Management System (or CMS): This is what the company’s website is built with and houses most of the company’s digital content. 
• Customer Data Platform (or CDP): Customer data platforms enable brands to collect customer data from multiple sources and collate all data about one customer together to create a unified customer profile. The CDP then combines these data points to build out a unified customer profile. Any of the platforms connected can then access this profile.
• Customer Relationship Management system (or CRM): This database contains valuable customer information and helps marketing, sales, and customer service teams create customer profiles, automate customer service efforts, collect customer data, and examine trends.  
• Customer Engagement Platform (or CEP): This tool ingests customer data and allows brands to optimize the customer lifecycle by segmenting and personalizing communication across channels, analyzing and predicting customer preferences, and aiding in real-time engagement strategies to create relevant and timely customer experiences.

Then, there are other critical components that may or may not be included as features within the foundational software but that teams will need in order to execute effective campaigns. Those capabilities include:

• Email Marketing 
• Social Media Marketing and Management
• Online and Offline Advertising
• Analytics 
• SEO

What does a good Martech Stack look like?

As mentioned, it is a best practice to have software applications available for marketers to achieve their goals. For the best results, these solutions should consist of modern marketing technologies and tools that are agile, scalable, and innovative.

Having a more modern martech system opens up many valuable opportunities for businesses to connect with their target audience. Businesses can improve their marketing efforts, personalize customer experiences, secure customer data, and run operations more efficiently, resulting in increased productivity and growth.

We’ve seen the exact growth with most clients that have taken the same modernization approach. Skroutz, the only marketplace that has beaten Amazon in Greece,  uses a modern customer engagement platform to engage with more than 8 million unique web & app visitors monthly.

By creating a cohesive martech stack, businesses can better execute and track their campaigns, leading to more informed decision-making and ultimately improved ROI.

But what if your marketing tech stack doesn’t look like the one above? Or what if you don’t feel like your current setup is enabling you and your team to work efficiently, effectively, and successfully?

In the next section, we’ll look at performing martech stack optimization based on recommendations from renowned industry expert Meri Williams, and how to identify the signs it’s time for a change.

5 Signs to Update Your Marketing Tech Stack Now

As noted, Meri Williams is a seasoned technology executive with experience at Pleo, Monzo, MOO, Marks & Spencer, and Procter & Gamble, as well as a published author, international speaker, and chair (co-curator & host) of The Lead Developer conference series. 

She’s identified five key indicators that your martech stack may not be future-ready and the key reasons for optimization. 

1. Outdated Technology

Many businesses, particularly as they expand into large enterprises, often find themselves grappling with outdated technology and a heavy reliance on legacy systems, some of which are so old that they could be considered vintage. Usually, these old systems function on-premise rather than in the cloud, which presents considerable difficulties in keeping up with current trends and technologies. Their scalability and potential for future growth are limited.

Marks & Spencer spent over a million pounds to commission and build a new website, which immediately reduced conversion rates by half when it went live. It was a difficult time for the company because, while they had made a significant investment in a new website and stack, they had done so in a manner that took 5 years to complete. By the time the new system went live, it was already outdated. And even at the point of go live, it had been such a long road that it was already exceedingly difficult to keep up with the demands and needs of the business.

The key message that Meri Williams pointed out on this is that… 

It’s absolutely worth considering how your tech team is going to react, how your IT colleagues are going to react, and making sure that you choose more modern tech that is going to be easier to scale and easier to develop into the new capabilities that are needed as your business grows and hopefully scales.”

In the marketing realm, this message illustrates the importance of investing in flexible marketing technology that can be implemented in a timely manner and updated as needed by the marketing practitioners themselves to avoid costly delays and disruptions to business operations.

2. Inefficient Workflow

If there is a significant amount of duplication of effort across key tools, a lack of automation, and challenges in measuring the return on investment, it is possible that your workflows may be inefficient.

Pleo, Europe’s leading business spending platform, had acquired a variety of tools that teams later discovered were not compatible with each other. These tools lacked the ability to automate key processes, and the business had difficulty measuring return on investment.

Monzo, one of the pioneers among the new app-based challenger banks in the UK, initially focused on building their own tools in-house without considering the bigger picture of workflows and end-to-end processes. This approach posed some challenges for them in the early days because they suffered from inefficiencies that wouldn’t have existed if they had considered purchasing more agile software.

Proctor and Gamble went through a phase where they kept trying to change the way people worked by changing the technology they used, rather than first realizing that they needed to, even if it was in a manual way, change the process and get people used to the new process before they enshrined it in the technology.

There’s a saying in tech and IT circles that if you try to change processes by just changing technology, you’ll often fail. You must also be realistic about how frequently your processes and workflows will change and adjust accordingly.”

Choosing martech tools that are flexible and reliable at scale is essential. Marketing tools should have multiple options for customizing workflows to fit your specific needs. This is a necessary strategic decision that you must make within your business when deciding on tooling: whether you will put in the effort to adjust the way you work to the way the tool works or whether you will find something flexible enough to adapt to the way you want to work.

Culture also influences internal processes and investment decisions. Whether you iterate frequently, resulting in constant changes to your processes and workflows, or you don’t optimize very often, leading to infrequent changes but dated processes and practices, it is a strategic decision how closely you match the process to the tool, or the tools to the process. 

3. Data Silos

This is one of the most frequent problems businesses face within their organizations, as communication silos often lead to disconnections in the customer journey.

Disconnected data sources and the inability to create a unified view of the customer prevent you from obtaining consistent insights, which then causes challenges in personalizing marketing campaigns, delivering targeted messaging, and ensuring that the product adapts to the customer and is personalized to the individual rather than just one of a few personas. 

Overcoming this requires more than just having the tools to allow easy data export and pulling data into a different system or data platform. It also requires an understanding of the schemas and data structures.

We hear a lot about data lakes these days. If you’ve ever come across the term data lake (and wondered what it means), the simplest way to describe it, according to Meri, is a method of gathering a bunch of unstructured data into a single location, which can then be organized and structured as needed.

Think of it as this big lake of data that you then use pipes to pull water out into the right structures and shapes that you need.”

When looking for martech tools to optimize your stack, it’s important to consider whether the tool can efficiently import warehouse data and data from various sources or seamlessly export data into your existing data infrastructure and architecture. 

Really test the vendors’ platforms on this to ensure you aren’t just being sold the dream but that it works as advertised. This will save you from spending half of your time figuring out why one system says something different than another and arguing with your analysts about which numbers are correct rather than discussing what insight you get from those numbers.

Another thing that you can look for is whether there’s really really good analytics in the tools themselves. But again, sometimes the challenge comes when you’ve got multiple data sources, multiple bits of insight that you want to bring together.”

Additionally, it can create a great deal of administrative burden for teams attempting to look into or explain why certain things don’t match or why the insight differs between tools. 

So the ideal thing to do is to work very closely with your IT counterparts and, if you have a data team, to ensure that they can get everything they need out and into the analytical tools that you’re using in your organization, whether that’s Tableau, Looker, or any of the other options that exist.

4. Lack of Integration

Another sign is a lack of integration, which is just as common as the issue of data silos. The inability to share data across platforms inevitably necessitates manual work to sync information between systems. 

This frequently leads to a lack of real-time information, ultimately leading to decisions being made based on outdated information. It’s difficult to have a comprehensive view when you have multiple platforms, systems, and tools that can’t or don’t communicate with one another.

MOO, one of the world’s fastest-growing print businesses, once faced a significant operational challenge because its product, customer service, and manufacturing platforms were all separate. 

It was hard to track an order from when a customer placed it until it was manufactured and delivered, and any necessary customer service was provided. To allow for cross-platform interoperability, the company had to build a system on top of each of the three legacy systems.

If you’re thinking about updating your martech stack, switching platforms, or trying to incorporate customer engagement into your digital transformation, it’s important to choose tools that have well-designed APIs with good documentation. 

Marketers should have a deeper understanding of the significance and the role APIs play in the overall tooling process. Without reliable APIs, you’ll be stuck manually handling large files, which can lead to errors if someone forgets or doesn’t follow the correct process consistently. 

It’s a domino effect that can greatly affect the entire team regarding time, resources, and financial setbacks.

API just means a standard interface for asking for something and getting it back consistently. So think of an API as being like a menu. You can order off the menu, and you can be reassured that you’re gonna get exactly what you order every time. That’s essentially what an API does. It just gives you a consistent response to whatever you ask for.”

5. Lack of Alignment with Business Goals

Businesses that strategically align their martech stack with their business objectives will maximize the value of the tools they have invested significant resources in. They can enhance their concentration on their target audience, streamline their workflows, and ultimately enhance their operational efficiency and financial success.

Remember that the products you choose and how you approach them should be based on the realities of your business and your customers (i.e., their needs, preferences, and the technologies they use).

This helps guarantee that you are making the correct technology investments and seizing the right opportunities to foster your company’s expansion.

How to Conduct a Martech Stack Audit: 10 Steps

If you recognize these warning signs in the technologies you currently have, it may be a good idea for you to evaluate other options with an martech audit. Take charge of the audit process, engage in open and transparent discussions with key stakeholders, and establish well-defined objectives to ensure that martech tools are in sync with business goals.

Below are ten specific steps to follow when performing a martech stack audit:

1. Define the Purpose of the Audit

• Identify Business Objectives: Clearly outline the business objectives, such as improving customer engagement, streamlining campaign management, or enhancing data-driven decision-making.
• Set Audit Goals: Your goals might include identifying tool inefficiencies, optimizing workflows, or reducing costs. For example, you might aim to move from a fragmented customer engagement architecture to a more unified system like MoEngage.

2. Inventory Your Existing Tools

• List All Tools: Create an inventory that includes tools for customer data management, campaign management, analytics, and integrations.
• Gather Usage Data: Assess how frequently each tool is used, focusing on whether they contribute to your primary objectives, such as managing customer data across touchpoints or automating cross-channel campaigns.

3. Assess Tool Effectiveness

• Evaluate Tool Performance: For each tool, assess its effectiveness in achieving your objectives. Consider if your current tools can optimize campaigns or predict customer actions, as Merlin AI in MoEngage does.
• Measure ROI: Calculate the ROI for each tool by comparing costs against benefits like increased campaign effectiveness or improved customer segmentation.
• Check for Overlaps: Identify tools with overlapping functionalities, such as separate modules for segmentation and audience insights, which might be consolidated into a single platform.

4. Evaluate Integration and Data Flow

• Check Integrations: Assess how well your tools integrate. A robust integration framework is essential, as shown in the example below where data is seamlessly streamed across the stack.
• Examine Data Quality: Ensure data consistency across your stack. Poor data flow can hinder operations, similar to the fragmented data collection and reporting shown in the “Before MoEngage” architecture (below).
• Identify Gaps: Determine if your stack lacks critical functions, such as a unified messaging infrastructure or a recommendation engine that suggests relevant content.

5. Assess Compliance and Security

• Review Compliance: Ensure all tools comply with relevant regulations, especially those handling customer data.
• Check Security Measures: Evaluate the security protocols of each tool, ensuring they meet industry standards, particularly for data management and customer information.

6. Gather Feedback from Stakeholders

• Engage Users: Collect feedback from teams using the tools. Understand pain points, such as the need for agency support or additional modules for personalization.
• Collaborate with IT: Work closely with IT to ensure tools align with the broader strategy and integrate with other systems to streamline operations.

7. Benchmark Against Industry Standards

• Compare with Competitors: Research how competitors use martech stacks and see if they have streamlined their architecture to avoid complexities.
• Stay Updated on Trends: Keep on top of the latest trends, such as AI-driven insights or unified customer data management.

8. Make Data-Driven Decisions

• Analyze Findings: Use your audit findings to decide which tools should be replaced, upgraded, or integrated further. Look for opportunities to consolidate tools or adopt more flexible, future-ready systems.
• Prioritize Actions: Prioritize tools that offer high ROI and align with your strategic goals, like improving cross-channel campaign management or enhancing customer data integration.

9. Develop a Martech Stack Optimization Plan

• Create a Roadmap: Develop a plan for optimizing your martech stack, possibly by transitioning to a unified platform that reduces dependencies on multiple, disparate systems.
• Communicate Changes: Ensure all stakeholders understand the reasons for any changes, and provide training, particularly if new are introduced.

10. Monitor and Review Regularly

• Establish Ongoing Monitoring: Implement continuous monitoring of your martech stack’s performance.
• Adapt to Changes: Be ready to adapt your stack as your business evolves, ensuring it remains efficient and effective, much like the transition from a fragmented architecture to a unified solution.
  

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Bear in mind that no matter which approach you choose to enhance your tooling process and capabilities, continuously piling up new applications and data systems on outdated martech is not a sustainable solution. 

It is costly, fragmented, and only addresses issues after they arise. 

How to Build the Best Martech Stack with MoEngage

Influencing change within an organization is never easy. But at times, it is critical to course-correct when outdated processes, mindsets, or technology get in the way of growth and innovation, ultimately hindering customer satisfaction.

Martech stack optimization and auditing fall into this category of preventative measures that brands can take to ensure the longevity and success of their marketing and customer engagement programs.

If a marketing stack is not continually assessed and optimized, problems that are challenging (and costly) to navigate will arise. This leads to operational debt that can wreak havoc if not addressed before it’s too late, which is why understanding the fundamentals of building and maintaining the best martech stack are key.

If you are facing any of the issues noted in this article and are interested in optimizing your martech stack to include a modern customer engagement solution like MoEngage, get in touch so we can show you just how streamlined, connected, and successful your customer marketing programs can be. 

More than ever in today’s data-powered world, knowledge is power. The more information brands have at their disposal about their customers, the better equipped they are to create brand messaging that resonates with their audience.

Comprehensive data collection gives you actionable omnichannel analytics that let you truly understand your customers. In turn, you can use this data to create highly personalized, omnichannel marketing campaigns that leverage customer habits, patterns, and preferences.

In fact, our 2024 Cross-Channel Marketing Report shows that 33.1% of marketers say leveraging customer data is the most significant contributing factor to making effectively targeted omnichannel marketing decisions.

In this article, we’ll discuss the concept of omnichannel analytics, how to implement it into your strategies, and what key performance metrics you should analyze to reveal the impact of your campaigns.

What is Omnichannel Analytics?

Omnichannel analytics is the process of collecting and analyzing the data of customer interactions across all channels that a brand uses to engage them. This allows brands to holistically understand their customers and offer them a consistent, seamless, and uniquely personalized experience across all touchpoints. It also helps brands understand how each of the channels they use to communicate with customers are performing.

Modern customers no longer interact with brands from a single touchpoint. Instead, most customers connect with brands through a myriad of channels that are both physical and digital, prompting many brands to undergo digital transformations that allow them to provide a seamless experience across online and offline channels. 

Omnichannel analytics empowers brands to deeply understand their customers by unifying data from all of these interactions, creating a holistic picture of customer behavior, habits, and preferences.

5 Benefits of Using Omnichannel Analytics

As we’ll illustrate throughout this article, for you to truly connect with your customers in a meaningful way, you need to understand every interaction customers have with your brand, irrespective of the channel. And even more than that, this data can’t be disparate and siloed, it needs to be unified and cohesive to paint a clear, complete picture of customer engagement.

Omnichannel analytics is what allows you to create that complete picture, informing all of your customer engagement strategies and marketing campaigns. 

Below, we look at the top benefits you can realize by using omnichannel analytics:

• Get a 360° view of the customer: Omnichannel analytics provides insights on every customer interaction across all touchpoints on all channels, providing you a holistic view of their customers’ preferences and activity.
• Improve channel selection: It helps you connect with your customers on the right set of channels by understanding which channels perform best. This further allows you to flexibly adjust your strategy to leverage the right channels for the right types of messages, and for the right audience
• Reach out at the optimal time: With a window into all customer interactions, you can be confident in when your customers are most likely to engage with your marketing campaigns and perfect the timing of your messages.
• Power deeper personalization: With a complete picture of each customer’s engagement patterns, you can better segment your customers to deliver hyper-personalized marketing campaigns that they love.
• Make predictions: By analyzing data from multiple channels, you can better predict customer behavior and make more informed decisions. When you can anticipate customer behavior, you can create experiences and journeys that meet those customer expectations.
• Quantify customer engagement: Omnichannel analytics empowers you to measure, understand, and optimize the performance of your customer engagement efforts. This helps you to take a more proactive approach and identify potential friction points in the customer journey, early on, and even predict things like customer churn.

In the next section, we look at how you can realize these benefits by using omnichannel analytics.

6 Tips to Implement an Omnichannel Analytics Strategy and Gain Deeper Insights

Omnichannel analytics isn’t just about collecting data, it’s about developing meaningful ways to leverage that data to make quality improvements in your campaign to drive more engagement. To do this effectively, you need to implement and execute your omnichannel strategies in a conscious, intentional way.

Below are tips to help brands such as yours, plan and deploy an omnichannel analytics strategy that will lead to actionable insights, and help to improve channel selection/management and campaign performance.

1. Outline your goals and establish the KPIs you’ll use to measure your success

Omnichannel analytics provides a quantitative analysis of channel and campaign performance so you can make data-driven decisions, whether that’s helping you select the right channel, properly time your messages, or find the right communication frequency.

First, as a B2C marketer, you need to determine what goals you care about most. Are you focused on acquiring new customers or improving retention? Are you focused on driving conversions, eliciting subscriptions, or increasing ad revenue? Make sure you define your goals and set achievable benchmarks to work towards.

Once you’ve defined your goals, select the metrics you’ll use to measure your success. Make sure the metrics you choose are closely related to what you’re trying to achieve. Think critically about how you plan on using this data to actually make improvements to your campaigns and channel selection.

2. Define key events to standardize your analytics

To achieve success, it’s important that marketers like yourself clearly define your conversion events, and any other key events across a customer’s buying journey.

Conversion events don’t just have to be a purchase or subscription, they can also be an account sign-up, a newsletter opt-in, or a mobile app download. Key events can be any action customers take that signal they are getting closer to these conversion events.

Think about what actions you want customers to take. How can you define, label, and track each of these individual events? Essentially, you’re defining the events that matter most to you as a brand and provide the biggest signals of success.

When you select useful conversion and key events that actually reflect your brands’ goals and objectives, you’ll be able to measure, analyze, and improve your performance.

3. Collect zero-party and first-party data

The more data you have, the more informed your decisions are. For omnichannel marketers, the right data can be the difference between a daily active user (DAU) and a lost customer.

Brands that want to offer hyper-personalized experiences that customers love can’t just rely on third-party data, they need to collect their own zero-party and first-party data to give them even deeper insights into customer activity, behavior, and preferences.

Unlike third-party data, zero and first party data comes from the source, representing direct customer interactions with your brand (rather than another company’s best approximations). This also doesn’t require you to navigate third-party consent regulations, as zero-party data is volunteered and first-party data is implied when customers engage with your product, service, or platform.

This leads to more actionable insights and meaningful improvements to your channel selection and campaign.

4. Consolidate data from all channels into your Customer Engagement Platform (CEP)

Customer information comes from all over. Whether you’re relying on zero-party or first-party, or third-party customer data, it is important that it is accessible in a unified platform that empowers teams to draw meaningful insights. A brand won’t benefit from data dispersed across various channels, spreadsheets, and siloed databases. When your data is spread out over different channels and databases, manually consolidating and analyzing it is extremely time-consuming. 

Insights from our State of Cross-Channel Marketing 2024 report indicate that 20.8% of marketers are still using spreadsheets to conduct manual analysis for driving omnichannel marketing. And this is causing delays; 37.8% of marketers report that it takes them more than a week to launch a campaign, with 15.3% saying it takes them over a month.

Instead, leverage a unified Customer Engagement Platform (CEP) to ensure all customer insights are located in one place and no information is left out or misattributed. This empowers your marketing team to effectively leverage the omnichannel data you’re able to collect for both online and offline customer activity.

5. Create a 360-degree view of each customer

Interpreting the data accurately is just as important as gathering it. You must enable your teams for success by presenting  the data in ways that they can productively interact with and act upon.

Omnichannel analytics are based on a comprehensive, 360-degree view of customers (and their interactions). This allows brands to better understand the customer journey and accommodate the dynamic buying behaviors of their audience. It also helps improve efficiency by giving marketers the opportunity to visualize, experiment and test different channel combinations and strategies against the customer data you have already collected before setting campaigns into motion.

6. Segment customers based on intent, activity, and channel preferences

Once you have a 360° view of all your customers, you can segment customers to understand which channels different groups prefer and the messaging that is most apt for each channel and use case. This allows you to choose the right channel of communication and deliver personalized campaigns that customers are more likely to engage with.

How to Measure Omnichannel Performance: Top 9 KPIs and Channel Metrics to Monitor

To really understand customer behavior, you need to deep dive into every touchpoint customers have with your business. To do this effectively, you need to analyze their customer journeys and isolate the KPIs that matter most to you along this process.

Below, we cover a traditional conversion funnel to help you understand which metrics you should be using to understand the performance of your omnichannel marketing strategy. 

Armed with the right data, you can understand which omnichannel campaigns are most successful and which may be underperforming, enabling you to optimize (or retire) campaigns accordingly.

Below, we cover the 9 most important metrics for B2C marketers operating an omnichannel analytics strategy.

1. Open Rate

The open rate represents how many people open a message out of the number of people that received that message. While open rate is a common term for email marketing, this is extremely similar to the view rate or impression rate that are commonly used for other types of marketing.

The open rate is a good indicator of how well your campaigns are attracting — and grasping — customer attention. Is your messaging optimally timed to maximize visibility? Are your subject lines interesting enough to get customers to open (and read) your marketing messages?

Ultimately, the open rate helps brands understand which channels are right for different types of messages, based on which ones are eliciting engagement.

Campaigns with low open rates may be failing because they are using channels customers don’t prefer for that type of messaging. For example, a mobile push about a sale that’s two weeks away may not elicit much engagement; but an email with the same content may garner more activity.

Over time, you’ll want to test different email subject lines, delivery timing, and frequency to improve open rates and maximize overall engagement.

2. Click-Through Rate (CTR)

The click-through rate (CTR) represents the number of customers that perform a particular action (typically clicking a link) within a marketing message they’ve viewed or opened.

The CTR is a strong indicator of how well your marketing campaigns resonate with your audience, drive engagement, and get customers into conversion funnels. Is the content, imagery, and overall messaging hitting the mark and eliciting clicks?

If customers aren’t interested in clicking through to engage more with your content or products, then what you sent them simply isn’t resonating with them enough. Maybe the recommendation isn’t relevant, the offer doesn’t interest them, or the messaging simply missed the mark. Either way, you’ve failed to hook them enough to entice further engagement and need to revisit the channel, timing, frequency, and messaging you use for future campaigns.

3. Cart Abandonment Rate

The cart abandonment rate represents the percentage of customers that abandon a shopping cart after adding an item to it.

More than anything, the cart abandonment rate indicates the performance and health of your checkout process and funnel. From an omnichannel perspective, this can help you identify which platforms have poor checkout experiences, which touchpoints added friction, or which channels sent out inadequate communication.

This empowers brands to identify which aspects need to be improved to streamline checkout and mitigate friction. Teams can then craft effective cart abandonment emails and mobile push campaigns, optimizing messaging to better guide customers through to complete a purchase, a subscription, or order.

4. Conversion Rate

The conversion rate represents the percentage of visitors that complete a conversion event. As mentioned earlier, conversion events don’t just have to be purchases and subscriptions, they can be newsletter opt-ins, account sign-ups, or completed film viewings.

In general, the conversion rate is a solid indicator of the performance of your campaigns, as it proves they are working successfully. For omnichannel analytics, it can be used to isolate which channels are best at eliciting conversions and increasing revenue. Brands can compare the performance of different channels and individual campaigns to better leverage their channels in the future.

This leads to more completed conversion events that get customers to take the actions your brand wants; whether that’s a sign up, an opt-in, or an actual purchase or subscription.

5. Average Order Value (AOV)

The average order value (AOV) represents the average value of each order a customer makes, whether that’s a purchase, a delivery order, or a subscription. While AOV is the common term in ecommerce and retail, some industries (particularly those that operate on subscription models) may refer to this term as average subscription value (ASV) or something similar.

The AOV is an indicator of how well a brand is doing at driving higher cost purchases and upselling / cross-selling to customers. By comparing the AOV of different channels, brands can better understand which channels have the best performance (as well as which ones may need to be improved). 

6. Repurchase Rate

The repurchase rate represents the number of visitors that make more than one purchase or subscription.

A high repurchase rate is a sign that customers were satisfied with their first interaction with your brand, and an early indicator of retention performance. The repurchase rate is one of the strongest contributors to an increase in customer lifetime value (CLV), which makes each acquisition more valuable. Fostering repurchases is the first step towards long-term retention and deep-rooted brand loyalty.

Understanding which channels and campaigns are most effective at leading customers towards repeat purchases helps brands understand what customers want (and don’t want) in an experience and product. Brands can then optimize how they use channels and fine-tune campaigns to garner greater engagement, driving up their CLV and increasing revenue.

7. Customer Retention Rate

The customer retention rate represents the percentage of customers that remain after a specified period of time.

The customer retention rate indicates a brand’s ability to keep customers interested and engaged with their brand. Brands use this metric to understand how effectively they are driving traction and developing brand loyalty with customers. A high retention rate means your engagement strategy is working well. It may even be a sign that it’s a good time to focus on cross-selling and upselling to your customers.

Omnichannel marketers use customer retention rates to compare the performance of different channels and campaigns, allowing them to identify which channels provide the best experiences for customers and keep them engaged. This helps with channel selection for individual campaigns and how they determine priority channels.

Brands operating omnichannel strategies that put customers first are heavily focused on customer retention, as it’s a strong measure of engagement and a signal for long term growth.

8. Churn Rate

The churn rate represents the percentage of customers that a brand has lost in a specified period of time. The churn rate is the inverse of the customer retention rate, and it’s also an essential metric for analyzing customer retention.

The churn rate is an indicator of a poor experience, whether it’s because of the wrong channel, messaging, frequency, or timing. Fortunately, if brands can isolate where in the customer journey churn is most acute, they can identify the greatest friction points in the customer experience and then make improvements to mitigate churn.

When used properly, omnichannel marketers can use the churn rate to identify where the biggest drop-offs are occurring in your conversion funnels (and how this differs across channels). This empowers B2C marketers to make improvements and close these gaps.

9. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Customer lifetime value (CLV), sometimes stylized simply as lifetime value (LTV), represents the total amount the average customer will spend throughout their entire time as your customer.

The customer lifetime value enables brands to determine the true value of each customer acquisition. This is a solid signal of brand growth and success, but it also allows brands to make more effective decisions about how they allocate their marketing budget. As brands drive engagement, retention, and repeat purchases or subscriptions, the CLV will increase.

For omnichannel markers, the overall CLV is a crucial metric for measuring the health of their omnichannel strategy, as a rising CLV is a good sign of company success and growth. It can also be used to effectively compare the general performance of different channels and campaigns. It empowers you to hone in on your most valuable customers, and deeply understand the frequency, timing, tone, and channels that impress them most.

Omnichannel Attribution: What It Is and Why It Matters

Attribution is crucial to omnichannel analytics. After all, if your goal is to compare the performance of different marketing channels, you’ll need to be able to attribute data to a specific channel and campaign.

Even more importantly, you’ll need to trust that this data is accurately attributed to be confident in the data-driven decisions you make. 

If your data can’t be attributed to a specific channel (or you can’t do it accurately or correctly), it won’t be helpful in guiding you in the right direction.

Omnichannel attribution ensures that all interactions are accounted for across the customer lifecycle. It also helps you find out the channels responsible for bringing in different customers. 

Using omnichannel attribution, marketers are able to analyze all customer touchpoints across all marketing channels, providing them a holistic view of their customer engagement campaigns. More importantly, it empowers teams to accurately quantify engagement in a meaningful, actionable way.

For example, let’s say a customer has the following activity history with your brand:

1.  A consumer sees — and clicks — a Facebook ad for your service and lands on your mobile website. Then they browse your products for a while, before closing their browser.

2. A few days later, they visit your desktop website, and browse through some clothing items.

3. They visit an in-store location, try on some of the clothing items they saw online, as well as some additional items they only saw after visiting the store. They then buy one item they looked at online, and two items they saw in-store. They also give the cashier their contact number and email, and opt-in to receive offers and other marketing materials.

Now, up to this point, it’s pretty safe to attribute the lead generation to the mobile channel, as the customer was first generated through a Facebook ad. However, it’s both the mobile ad and desktop that gets them in-store, making an actual purchase. And it required them being able to visit in-store, and try on the clothes to actually complete the purchase.

So, how do you attribute this conversion? Is it equally weighted between all three? Or is the in-store given more weight because it’s the most recent touchpoint?

Let’s continue.

4. Post the shopping, an email thanking the customer for their recent purchase is automatically triggered. This email also incentivizes them to download the mobile app and register as a member of the company’s rewards program by offering them extra points for completing their recent purchase. The customer signs up and enables mobile push notifications.

5. A couple of days later, a mobile push notification is triggered that welcomes them to the loyalty program, and offers them a guided onboarding experience that will help them navigate the mobile app. The customer ends up adding a few items to their cart, but doesn’t complete the purchase.

6. The next day, another mobile push notification is automatically triggered, reminding the customer of their abandoned cart. It encourages them to return and complete the online order, which they do.

At this point, the email campaign is heavily responsible for incentivizing mobile app adoption, while the mobile push campaigns are heavily responsible for driving a repeat conversion. However, it’s really this entire sequence that is working cohesively to get the customer towards that second purchase — and on track to long term retention.

7. A week later, an email alerts the customer of an upcoming sale.

8. A day before the sale, a mobile push is sent to remind the customer that the sale will be running that weekend.

9. The day of the sale, another mobile push lets the customer know the sale is currently on.

10. The customer browses products via the mobile app, and in-app messages guide the customer along the conversion funnel, resulting in a completed order.

Here, email and mobile channels are being used together to foster continued engagement and drive repeat conversions. But there are still challenges in deciphering this data. How impactful is each channel? Is mobile push the most valuable because it’s used the most? Or is in-app messaging most important because it’s the most recent touchpoint prior to purchase? Or is email most important because it gets the lead into the conversion funnel in the first place?

11. After 1 month of dormancy, geofencing is used to trigger an automated mobile push, which alerts the customer of an ongoing sale in a nearby store. The customer sees the mobile push in real-time, clicking it to view the details about the sale.

12. They then turn around to visit the store, where they make another purchase.

Again, how much credit is attributed to each channel? The entire sequence was only possible because the customer walked by the physical location, but it’s a mobile push that actually alerted them of the sale. However, it’s the visit to the store that closed the deal. Which gets the most credit, and why? And what was most critical in acquiring them, converting them, and retaining them? What role did each interaction play in this process?

Here, we have a situation where disjointed metrics would provide an incomplete picture of the customer journey. And understanding customer behavior gets increasingly challenging with every interaction. Add to it the number of customers and each customer having their own journey and channel touchpoints. 

In the world of omnichannel engagement, there are nearly infinite customer pathway variations, making it extremely challenging to deeply understand how your customers engage with your brand. As you can imagine, analyzing this data is extremely challenging, especially when it’s siloed and has to be done manually.

Savvy marketers understand that each channel, campaign, and individual interaction — when leveraged properly — can have an impact. They also know that they need to employ a reliable customer engagement platform that can automate the entire process and provide actionable insights. 

Get Deep Insights That Let You Truly Know Your Customers with MoEngage

Omnichannel analytics is essential to not only executing an omnichannel marketing strategy, but also creating personalized marketing campaigns and customer experiences that maximize customer engagement.

When used effectively, omnichannel analytics enable brands to deeply understand customer needs and preferences by providing data on every single interaction your customers have with your brand. 

This gives brands the ability to deliver omnichannel experiences and marketing campaigns that customers love and want more of.

The best part about MoEngage is that it removes the need of guesswork from your customer engagement strategy by providing you omnichannel analytics via self-serve dashboards. You can quickly and easily deploy campaigns, track and review performance, and optimize campaigns, all from a single place. With actionable insights that allow you to understand dormancy and uninstalls, you’re better equipped to prevent churn and optimize customer LTV by delivering marketing communication on the right channel at the right time.

Schedule a demo to learn how MoEngage can help you perfect your customer engagement strategy by giving you the insights you need to make data-driven decisions.

When trying to get the best martech for your business, you might not always look to the newest options. Oracle Marketing Cloud (formerly Responsys) is a legacy platform that a lot of brands still use, and it’s good for several things. But when looking at Oracle Responsys vs. MoEngage, which is better for your business?

Let’s explore. 

What is Oracle Responsys used for?

At its core, Oracle Responsys is a cloud-based B2C digital marketing platform. Brands can use it to send marketing and transactional messages like reminders, abandoned cart messages, ads, update emails, coupons, and more. The system works with other tools, like social media management platforms and CRM, to receive data and push out campaigns. That being said, its niche is really email and SMS/MMS marketing. Our clients tell us that it struggles to deliver on the web, ad networks, in-app, WhatsApp, push, and more. Plus, the time to get a campaign live can be more than 10 days (which is lifetimes in the TikTok era). MoEngage allows you to go live with campaigns in minutes.

Who uses Responsys?

Oracle Responsys is still popular with mid to large enterprises that mostly rely on email and SMS marketing or have cumbersome legacy systems they’re still tied to like Airship, OneSignal, or Adobe Analytics. According to Gartner, most of the companies that chose Oracle Responsys campaign management were only ever considering massive legacy brands anyway, like Salesforce, Adobe, or IBM. It’s likely they’re using fully segmented lists based on historical performance and aren’t interested in MoEngage’s advanced tools like our RFM, AI-powered psychographic segmentation, and marketer-friendly code-free campaign setup & channel publishing.

Is Responsys a CRM tool?

No, Oracle Responsys campaign management is not a true CRM. It’s primarily a cross-channel marketing automation platform designed to complement a CRM system by providing advanced capabilities for cross-channel and campaign management. You’d need to invest in their whole CX suite to unlock that level of functionality. In comparison, MoEngage includes a single customer view, and you can connect offline and online data in minutes with 150+ native integrations. That means it can fold right into your exciting tech stack. Use MoEngage with SendGrid, Talon.One, AppsFlyer, Twillio, Microdot, Branch, Attentive, Vonage, Slack, and more, right out of the box.

Is Responsys an ESP?

Since you can use Responsys to send emails, technically, it is an email service provider (ESP), but not a big one. 6sense states, “Oracle Marketing Cloud (formerly Responsys) competes with other products in the Email Service Provider, Cross-Channel Advertising categories. It has a 0.19% market share in the Email Service Provider category…” However, Salesforce, MailChimp, and Hubspot are still the big three, with 12–27% market share. Add to that, MoEngage actually outperforms Responsys email marketing on G2 rankings across several core metrics, including:

• Building and personalizing emails
• Sending outbound emails
• Managing email deliverability
• Automated email responses

MoEngage offers full-stack email marketing. Set up your preferred email service providers in seconds, get a dedicated IP, and receive support to keep your domain and IP reputation for high email deliverability rates. In terms of email marketing features, it doesn’t get much easier than this: you can create templates with a drag-and-drop builder and analyze results from a single dashboard.

How does Oracle Responsys power adaptive marketing?

The company states they make “data from disparate sources actionable by creating precisely targeted audiences and delivering highly personalized messages to those audiences in near real-time.” But that’s what all good customer engagement platforms do. Oracle Responsys might even be a bit clunkier as user lists must be built/imported from Unity or take their Audience Segmentation from other modules. And there’s a real lack of actionable segmentation, too. In comparison, MoEngage offers out-of-the-box segmentation to deliver 1:1 personalization across:

1. Propensity modeling
2. Preferred shopping times
3. Churn modelling
4. Reactivation messaging
5. Uninstall campaigns

And so much more.

How does Oracle Responsys campaign management perform?

Clients complain that Oracle Responsys campaign management lacks omnichannel focus and that mobile and web are real failure points in Oracle Responsys cross-channel capabilities. Then there’s the dependency issue and delays from data sync, which means true real-time marketing is nearly impossible with Oracle Responsys campaign management. Lastly, Responsys email marketing flaws are two-fold. It struggles to bring in data from online and offline sources. Plus, it has made segmentation impossible because you can’t build audiences based on RFM or customer affinity.

MoEngage’s dynamic offers are a real game changer. Allowing you to swaps visible offers on the same homepage, so that, for example, first-time buyers can see rates for home mortgages and business credit card rates for business owners. Oracle Responsys campaign management doesn’t offer any of that or useful features like ‘next best action’ or AI-powered intelligent path optimizations. Nor does it have effective built-in analysis like anomaly detection, ‘best performing’ reports, onboarding, integration or post-account creation reports, or even generative AI for campaign copy improvements. MoEngage has all that as standard with Merlin AI and Proactive Assistant.

Oracle Responsys does have some interesting AI-based features like:

• Predictive Lead & Account Scoring 
• Actionable Recommendations 
• Email & LP Authoring
• Send Time Optimization 
• Subject Line Optimization 
• SMS Message Authoring 
• Fatigue Analysis

These might be useful to companies with large internal IT teams & resources to configure and manage them.

Oracle Responsys vs. MoEngage scalability

Your Responsys login isn’t a one-stop shop. Without 150+ seamless integrations and user-friendly UX, brands need a team of developers to keep the Oracle Responsys campaign management cycle running. That’s fine if you have a large internal IT team with the know-how and capacity to make regular updates and enhancements. But that’s not a reality for most businesses. With MoEngage, you get access to a pool of MoEngage experts, consultants, out-of-the-box customizations, and integrations that make it easier to launch, use, and scale versus Responsys email marketing. That’s important because it means you can get more out of your campaigns without taxing IT resources. Instead, marketers can configure your website elements like page layouts, images, and CTAs with a WYSIWYG editor and enable on-site messages like timers, scratch cards, lead gen forms, and more without needing to write code.

Oracle Responsys vs. MoEngage ease of use

MoEngage is made for marketers first. So, its UI is very easy to use. No coding skills or complex tech knowledge is needed. And that’s not even considering the extra features that MoEngage has versus Oracle Responsys. A Responsys login comes with the below subscriptions: 

• Standard 
• Enterprise 
• Custom 
• Tiered 
• Add on

Oracle Responsys provides features for Web personalization, allowing businesses to customize website content based on customer data & behavior. Additionally, it offers various 3rd party tools for social media management. However, it’s essential to know that these features in Responsys may vary depending on the version, subscription plan & add-ons you have. In contrast, MoEngage pricing is uncomplicated, and you get tons of features, such as advanced Web Personalization (for new and recurring visitors).

In just a few clicks, marketers can set up real-time notifications (within 1-2 seconds) with high deliverability and engagement rates, in-app messages, app inbox/cards, and a whole lot more. If your team does run into issues, there is a huge help database and built-in support ticket system that will get them up and running again. Or, alternatively, they can reach out to the Partner Ecosystem and link up with a GSI or agency to help them with complex campaigns or custom integrations.

Oracle Responsys pricing vs. MoEngage

When looking at Oracle Responsys pricing vs. MoEngage, you’re not just looking at the sticker price. You want to consider time to value realization (TTVR) and total cost of ownership (TCO). On both points, integrated platforms like MoEngage are the clear winner, with a TTVR of 3-6 months versus Oracle Responsys at 8–9 months. For TCO, MoEngage is also 25–35% cheaper than Oracle Responsys pricing over time. This is because you can reduce hidden costs like implementation, upgrades, maintenance, training, ops, IT infrastructure, or vendor management charges. And that’s before you consider the free version of MoEngage that’s available for up to 10k MAUs. Responsys, Oracle, and even their full CX suite can’t compete with all the bundled-in features you unlock with MoEngage.

Pedigree of MoEngage

MoEngage is also highly awarded and reviewed, so you don’t have to take this comparison on faith:

If you’d like to explore more, why not talk to a member of our helpful team about your pain points and how MoEngage could be a simple solution? Just pop your details into this form and we’ll be in touch with some recommendations.

Editor’s Note: In 2023, we spoke to several B2C marketers about Ramadan marketing campaigns and how different industries try to maximize engagement this time of the year.

Back by popular demand from marketers (and product owners), we’re continuing Ramadan Bytes 2.0  in 2024!

Our guest for this edition is Mohamed Sayed Abd Elsalam, Group Head of CRM Marketing, Loyalty & Customer Insights at Magrabi. In our deep dive, Sayed highlights the importance of Ramadan for marketers and explains how brands with both physical and digital presence can leverage these channels to their benefit.

In this blog, we’ll try to distill his insights into bite-sized, consumable content for all marketers (and product owners) to emulate this Ramadan season!

Brief Introduction About Mohamed Sayed 

Sayed is a customer marketing professional with 14 years of experience in customer retention and acquisition strategies. He has worked in luxury retail companies like MAGRABi, telecommunications MNOs like Orange, and NGOs like The British Council.

How Brands Can Better Plan for Occasions Like Ramadan

As per Sayed, Ramadan is an important season for the Middle Eastern market for a lot of industries. This is when brands invest a lot of money in marketing campaigns to capture as many transactions as possible and have a brand presence in consumers minds. There is usually an uplift in different categories. 

During Ramadan, different shopping and browsing behaviors by customers are observed. This is when marketers should invest in a lot of A/B testing to understand the correct engagement moment. 

Brands Leveraging Physical and Digital Presence Proven to Maximize Conversions During Ramadan

Brands combining physical and digital presence can unlock lots of opportunities in the customer journey, states Sayed.

He further suggests that both channels can complement each other, where customer can start their browsing journey online at the awareness and consideration stage and then make their first purchase at the store. Another good use case for this is the BOPIS model – Buy Online, Pick Up in Store.

Having the combination of both channels can also give more convenience to customers. Ramadan can be a tough month for customers, especially those who fast, so giving the customer the space to shop and to initiate and end his journey at any channel is a much-needed convenience, especially during peak and crowded times around Eid.

Stitching Offline and Online Data Together to Build a Unified Customer View

Sayed emphasizes the importance of stitching data for brands. He says that brands want to gather all the available information about their customers as it’d help them personalize experiences and build a good relationship.

A good example of data that can be used to build a unified customer view or 360 view is the customer’s online browsing behavior and transactional data (offline). A few other insights brands can look at are: 

• Interests on social media 
• Interaction across channels like WhatsApp, SMS, and Emails 
• Other basic data like demographics, birthdate, etc.

These insights combined together can help brands understand their customer better.

At the same time, there are so many ways to gather information from both channels and merge them together. One of the efficient ways of doing it is through an engagement platform like MoEngage.

2 Cents for Marketers Building Ramadan Campaign

Sayed has the following advice for budding CRM Managers and Growth Managers:

• Have a variation of attractive offers across the month, considering that offers have to get more attractive closer to Eid
• Give customers convenient options to complete their transactions on different channels. For example, free delivery offers or store pick-up options 
• Review historical campaigns from the previous Ramadan to understand the right timing through the day to send the campaigns.

Download your exclusive Ramadan Calendar here.

Ready to Win Big This Ramadan?

As consumer behaviors evolve and become more digitally focused, the integration of physical and digital channels will be paramount for brands seeking to maximize conversions during Ramadan. By leveraging both channels effectively, brands can provide a seamless and convenient customer experience, catering to the needs of customers during this busy and important time. 

The importance of data collection and analysis will also continue to grow as brands strive to understand their customers on a deeper level. With the right strategies in place, brands can capitalize on the opportunities presented by Ramadan, improve customer relationships, and drive business growth in the future.

Readers, you can connect with M Abdelsalam for more tips and advice on customer engagement during Ramadan and how to stay on top of customer’s minds.

What to Read Next:

1. How Super Apps Build Their Ramadan Marketing Strategies
2. Driving Engagement During Ramadan with Sustainability
3. Marketing During and Post-Ramadan: Insights From Apparel Group
4. Decoding Hyper-personalization in Retail Marketing with Sharad Harjai
5. Customer Retention Strategies for E-commerce and Retail Brands [Marketer Spotlight]

Choosing the right enterprise Customer Engagement Platform (CEP) can be a daunting task, especially for large companies with complex internal policies, large stores of data, multiple external communication channels, and well-established tech stacks.

But, the fact is, today’s enterprise organizations still struggle to create timely personalized experiences quickly enough to engage and delight customers.

We understand the challenges facing enterprise marketing teams and the difficulties brands may face when solving them. So, we’ve distilled our expertise into a practical, easy-to-understand guide to aid you in your decision-making process.

The ultimate goal?

To help you transform choosing a platform from an overwhelming responsibility into a straightforward (and fun!) assignment. 

In this post, we’ll look at how consumer purchasing behavior has shifted in recent years, why enterprise customer engagement is critical for growth, and how to effectively select the right enterprise CEP for your business. 

Let’s dive in.

Why Customer Engagement is Critical for Enterprise Brands 

Imagine this: a luxury retailer has invited you to an exclusive fashion show in person just because you looked up their products online. 

If this idea sounds far-fetched, think again.

A Sunday edition of the Economic Times recently featured an article highlighting how Luxury retailer Prada onboarded an enterprise customer engagement platform to drive personalized communications. But why would a 110-year-old brand with millions of followers and a strong brand presence need to manage enterprise customer engagement?

In the last couple of years, there has been a massive shift in customer expectations. Consumers are more digitally connected than ever before. And brands, especially ones in the enterprise space, must adopt a holistic and data-driven approach to customer interactions.  

A report from Microsoft concluded that “90% of companies believe their existing systems for analyzing customer journeys need improvement,” which explains why enterprises (especially traditional ones like Prada) are exploring CEP adoption as part of their overarching digital transformation plans.

Here are 4 reasons why customer engagement is so vital in the enterprise.

1. Enhanced Customer Loyalty and Revenue 

Engaged customers are more likely to become loyal and repeat buyers. Since acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing one, nurturing existing relationships is critical​​​​.  

According to our recent report, 29% of consumers say that the most frustrating thing is when a brand communicates in a generalized fashion or doesn’t remember their preferences based on their previous interactions. On top of that, 56% of consumers say they expect a curated shopping experience from brands they shop from regularly. 

According to Bain & Company, brands that excel at customer experience grow revenues 4-8% above the market, indicating the profitability of enterprise customer engagement. 

Additionally, 80% of consumers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience, underscoring the direct link between engagement quality and revenue potential​​.

2. Seamless Customer Experiences 

For modern buyers, digital engagement is all the rage. Also, they want brands to be available on their preferred communication channels at their preferred times. 

Did you know that 58% of consumers say they interact with a brand at least 2-3 times before making a purchase?

On top of that, over 60% of customers use multiple channels for interaction (including mobile devices) and expect consistent service across these platforms. Enterprises need an omnichannel approach to customer engagement, ensuring consistency across various touch points.

3. Brand Advocacy and Trust 

Creating positive experiences leads to positive word of mouth, which is essential for building extensive brand trust.

Notably, 46% of consumers feel that online business reviews are as trustworthy as personal recommendations from friends or family, highlighting the influence of online engagement and feedback on brand reputation​​.

Keeping these points in mind, in today’s saturated market, enterprise customer engagement can be a key differentiator. With 54% of consumers globally having higher customer service expectations than a year ago, continuously innovating and improving enterprise customer engagement strategies is crucial for staying competitive​​.

4. Reduced Churn and Better Crisis Management 

Finally, regular analysis of engagement helps your enterprise to identify and resolve issues. 

For example, with the proper processes in place, you can identify dormant accounts or those that are likely to churn and use measures to proactively engage and re-activate them, increasing your chances of generating new sales and preventing customer churn. 

Also, in times of crisis or negative publicity, a strong enterprise customer engagement strategy can help mitigate damage and maintain customer loyalty. 

Based on what we’ve covered so far, it is clear that enterprise customer engagement is not just about making sales; it’s about building and maintaining relationships that lead to increased loyalty, revenue, and competitive advantages. 

This relationship leads to outcomes like positive word of mouth, valuable insights, and better market positioning.

Now that you’ve bought into this concept, we can shift focus to the “how.” 

It’s essential to note though, that “drinking the Kool-aid” and executing a flawless enterprise customer engagement strategy are two very separate things.

How Should You Choose an Enterprise Customer Engagement Platform? 

There’s a lot to think about when moving a large organization in a new direction.

Whether your enterprise has built a customer engagement solution in-house or is planning to make a switch from an existing enterprise customer engagement platform, the process can be time-consuming, demanding a significant investment of resources and careful consideration.

The first step in structuring the criteria for choosing an Enterprise Customer Engagement Platform is identifying the challenges you’re trying to solve. This will help you in identifying the factors critical to your business. Then, you can begin your search to identify a partner who has solved this challenge for other brands.

High-level market research of analyst reviews, such as The Forrester Wave™: Cross-Channel Marketing Hubs Report, can be your first litmus test, allowing you to identify the top performers in the martech ecosystem.

Once you have narrowed it down to a couple of platforms that have the potential to meet your business goals, you can start detailing the criteria you and your team should evaluate through every stage of the buying journey: consideration and evaluation.

With that in mind, let’s review the critical questions you should ask when considering and evaluating CEPs.

7 Questions to Ask When Evaluating an Enterprise Customer Engagement Platform

1. I already have a CRM or a CDP in place. Do I need a CEP also?

Did you know that Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Platforms have been around since the 1980s? And the Customer Data Platform (CDP) category was introduced over a decade ago.

Customer engagement platform vs CRM vs CDP: does the CEP offer your enterprise something you don’t already have?

Of course, CRM and CDP technology have evolved since then.

Still, the reality is that to enable your brand to understand what your customers like or dislike, their preferred language, and favorite communication channels, having access to basic customer information is not enough to execute the personalized marketing campaigns expected by modern consumers. 

Today’s CRMs and CDPs collect data from multiple sources and unify them into customer profiles. However, they need to send the data to other platforms to convert it into actionable insights.

On the other hand, an enterprise CEP acts as a unified platform where your brand can build its marketing automation engine under the same customer data infrastructure, allowing you to not only manage the entire customer journey and lifecycle with a single platform but to also implement robust, highly-tailored and individualized campaigns at scale.

2. Is it the right time to add an enterprise customer engagement platform to my martech stack?

As B2C organizations mature, they face the dilemma of deciding when to prioritize customer engagement and invest in an enterprise customer engagement platform. 

If your company is asking this question, it’s critical to pause and compare your current activities to what you want to be doing. This gap analysis will not only help you identify the right enterprise CEP, but also give you some insights into how adding another marketing technology can help.

Here are a few signs the time is right to adopt an enterprise customer engagement platform:

Scaling Challenges: 

As the enterprise grows, managing customer interactions across multiple channels manually or with basic tools becomes increasingly challenging. When it becomes difficult to scale customer engagement effectively, an automated enterprise customer engagement platform provides the efficiency necessary for an enterprise business.

Inconsistent Customer Experience: 

If customers are receiving inconsistent experiences across different channels (like social media, email, and the web app), it’s a sign that a more unified approach is needed. An enterprise CEP can help ensure consistent and personalized interactions across all touchpoints.

Difficulty in Leveraging Customer Data: 

When an enterprise struggles to gather, analyze, and act upon customer data due to disparate systems, an enterprise customer engagement platform can provide a centralized platform for data analysis, helping to tailor marketing strategies and improve customer experiences.

Declining Customer Satisfaction or Engagement Metrics: 

If there’s a noticeable decline in key performance indicators like customer satisfaction scores, engagement levels, or repeat business, it may be time to invest in a new enterprise customer engagement platform. This platform can help identify the underlying issues and improve engagement strategies.

3. Build or buy – which option is best for my brand?

The “buy vs. build” conundrum remains an age-old issue whenever businesses plan to add to or upgrade their martech stack.

While it must be judged on a case-by-case basis, building something as complex and intricate as an enterprise CEP will require time, resources, and, most importantly… money.

Building an enterprise customer engagement platform is not a set-it-and-forget-it activity. 

Enterprise customer engagement is a dynamic process. With consistently shifting channel preferences and purchasing behavior, enterprise brands need to ensure that they can keep up with these trends. This means constantly innovating and adding new capabilities to the CEP, which can be quite resource-intensive in the long run.

And that’s not all. 

When building an internal platform, there is always the potential for unexpected points of failure that could be expensive to diagnose and navigate. So, it’s important to look beyond the surface and consider the implicit costs that could be encountered during or after the build phase.

4. Will integration and migration be a challenge?

The last step in the consideration phase is assessing how smooth the implementation and migration process will be.

Implementing a platform into an enterprise is a complex process and requires participation from multiple stakeholders, prior assessment of business objectives, budgets, limitations, benefits, and more. 

It involves critical assessments, and some hurdles you should be cognizant of are:

• Data Security: It’s essential to ensure the provider has robust security measures in place.
• Data Migration: Transferring data from an existing system to a new enterprise CEP platform can be complex, especially when dealing with large volumes of data or unstructured data.
• Integration: Integrating the enterprise customer engagement platform with existing on-premises systems can be challenging, particularly if application programming interfaces (APIs) or other integration tools are not readily available.
• Customization: Customization can be difficult if the organization has unique or complex needs.
• Change Management: As with any new technology, employee resistance can cause issues and limit adoption.

To overcome challenges when adopting a new platform within your enterprise organization:

• Conduct a thorough review of the provider’s security protocols alongside continuous internal cybersecurity updates. 
• Maintain open communication to address concerns and provide technical support for any issues.
• Prioritize education and training for all team members, along with data democratization

5. What core capabilities do I need?

Once you have considered all the possible scenarios, it’s time to evaluate some of the core capabilities an enterprise CEP can offer and what suits your needs best.

To get started, here are the basic functions that every enterprise customer engagement platform needs to have:

• Storage repository to store and process data.
• Data orchestration engine to set workflows to process, transform, and route data.
• Attribution and segmentation engine to transform data into actionable insights.
• Integration layer to plug in files and APIs. 
• User-friendly interface for stakeholders.
• Business intelligence and analytics capabilities to visualize data assets created within the platform.
• User identity creation by mapping a 360-degree profile view of the customer.
• Ability to comply with internal and external data governance and privacy policies.

6. Does it fit with my current enterprise martech stack?

A key point of contention for many enterprise marketers when purchasing new software is figuring out if and how to integrate it with the current systems already in place. If the new solution doesn’t play well within the current martech landscape, you can bet that it will be difficult to convince others to purchase it, let alone use it. 

Before going too far into the evaluation phase with any vendor, here is a framework for understanding how a new tool or platform might fit in with your current enterprise martech stack:

Step 1: Assess Your Current Technology Stack: Start by thoroughly understanding your existing technology infrastructure. Identify the tools and systems already in place, their functionalities, and any gaps or pain points.

Step 2: Define Your Requirements: Clearly define what you need from the new marketing solution. This includes identifying the specific features, integration capabilities, and scalability requirements that align with your business goals and current technology setup.

Step 3: Check for Compatibility: Evaluate the new marketing solution for compatibility with your existing stack. This involves ensuring it can seamlessly integrate with your current systems, such as CRM, data analytics tools, and other marketing software.

Step 4: Vendor Evaluation and Selection: When choosing a vendor, consider their reputation, support services, and the flexibility of their software. Look for vendors with experience in integrating their solutions into similar technology environments.

Step 5: Request Demonstrations and Trials: Before deciding, request demos and trials to see how the solution works in real-time and assess its integration capabilities with your existing systems.

Step 6: Consult with IT and End-Users: Involve your IT team and the end-users of the software in the evaluation process. Their insights can be invaluable in understanding the technical and practical aspects of integrating the new solution.

7. What is the implementation timeline?

Once you have identified the required core capabilities, assessed potential integration issues, and narrowed down your options, it’s important to look at the implementation plan that will be put in place and any barriers that might hinder success.

When assessing an enterprise CEP’s implementation process, here are some items to focus on:

Implementation Timeline and Strategy: Assess the proposed roll-out strategy and its timeline. Determine the ideal duration for implementation to ensure minimal disruption to ongoing operations.

Data Import Capabilities: Investigate the types of data imports supported by the platform, such as CSV imports, Data APIs, S3 imports, and SFTP imports. This will impact how easily you can integrate existing data into the new system.

Integration with Third-party Systems: Evaluate the platform’s ability to connect with third-party systems for ingesting customer and behavioral data, including customer preferences, transaction data, and historical customer action data.

Data Ingestion, Storage, and Activation: Understand how the platform ingests, stores, and activates zero- and first-party data to enhance enterprise customer engagement. This includes the platform’s capabilities in handling large data sets and its efficiency in data processing.

Data Ingestion Time for Additional Data: Determine the time required to process additional types of data, such as product feeds and product catalogs, which is crucial for maintaining up-to-date and relevant enterprise customer engagement.

Data Export Features: Assess the platform’s ability to support data export to other systems, including data warehouses. This includes the export of anonymous customer data and the speed at which these exports can be performed.

Training and Support: Look into the different product training options available and ensure they are comprehensive and tailored to different user skill levels.

Customer Support: Confirm the availability of customer support to address post-integration needs and issues, ensuring ongoing assistance and resolution of potential challenges.

Top 3 Enterprise Customer Engagement Platforms

Now that you know how to choose an enterprise customer engagement platform, it’s time to pick the right one. Here are three of the best options for you to choose from for your enterprise brand:

1. MoEngage

MoEngage is an AI-driven enterprise customer engagement platform (CEP) designed to help B2C brands deliver personalized and relevant customer experiences across multiple touchpoints. It leverages AI-driven marketing automation and predictive analytics to send campaigns across over 10 channels, including email, SMS, mobile and web push, on-site and in-app messaging, WhatsApp, RCS, and more.

With advanced features like RFM segmentation, journey orchestration, and real-time insights, MoEngage is trusted by global enterprises across industries like banking, retail, Ecommerce, and media.

For instance, Loblaw, Canada’s largest retailer, is an enterprise brand that records 1 billion transactions every year across its 2,500 stores. They were searching for a unified and cost-effective software platform for sending transactional messages across multiple channels. After onboarding transactional messaging onto MoEngage over a 12-week period, the enterprise was able to reduce engineering bandwidth by 70%. It also implemented 5 franchise brands across various business lines.

2. Oracle Responsys

Oracle Responsys Campaign Management offers deep integration capabilities and strong security. It masks and encrypts sensitive customer data within the platform to prevent end users from accessing the details. The platform also uses AI to predict the performance of email subject lines and optimize push notification titles.

The downside? Responsys supports only five channels: email, SMS, mobile push, web push, and WhatsApp. So, if your enterprise needs a platform that can seamlessly orchestrate omnichannel customer journeys, this is not the ideal choice.

3. Zendesk

Zendesk is an AI-powered customer support software platform that integrates multiple channels in one workspace. It leverages AI to help you resolve customer issues quickly and accurately. Its ease of implementation means you don’t need developers as much to help you make ongoing changes.

Apart from detailed analytics that tell you how your support is performing, Zendesk offers support for brands of all sizes, including enterprise brands.

However, Zendesk’s user interface sometimes slows down, which is not ideal for an enterprise customer engagement platform.

How to Implement Enterprise Customer Engagement at Scale with a CEP: Final Thoughts 

In today’s fast-paced digital marketplace, where consumer behaviors and expectations constantly evolve, enterprises selling to consumers face the crucial challenge of staying relevant and engaging. 

This comprehensive guide has navigated you through the intricacies of choosing the right enterprise customer engagement platform, a pivotal tool in this dynamic landscape.

Key points covered include: 

• The significance of enterprise customer engagement for boosting loyalty and revenue, 
• The necessity of a multifaceted and personalized approach,  
• The vital role an enterprise CEP plays in orchestrating this complex symphony of customer interactions, 
• How an enterprise CEP not only complements your existing CRM or CDP but also elevates your marketing efforts by offering a cohesive view of the customer journey.

As you contemplate integrating an enterprise customer engagement platform into your technology stack, remember it’s not just about the technology itself. It’s about the value it brings to your customer relationships. 

An enterprise CEP empowers you to navigate the nuanced terrain of modern consumer engagement with agility and insight, turning every interaction into an opportunity to delight and retain your customers.

Embracing an enterprise CEP is a forward-thinking move, aligning with the evolving demands of the digital consumer.

It’s a journey towards more profound customer connections, heightened brand loyalty, and ultimately, sustained business growth. 

Want to use the steps outlined in this post? Download your copy of the Customer Engagement Platform Buyer’s Checklist to aid you in your enterprise CEP purchasing process. This interactive document contains everything you’ll need to kick off your search: 

Ready to take the next step? Schedule your enterprise customer engagement platform demo to get started.

The Scoop

According to Google, 90% of leading marketers say personalisation significantly contributes to business profitability.

And 71% of customers want businesses to provide personalized experiences. However, 76% are frustrated when this does not occur.

Today, we’re plunging head-first into a topic that’s stirring up major buzz among all Australian consumer brands: Privacy vs. Personalisation in the realm of customer experiences. This debate, as multifaceted and animated as a fiercely contested Ashes series, has marketers and consumers alike on the edge of their seats. Recently, I had the pleasure of delving into a couple of exciting panel discussions hosted by MoEngage in Australia, featuring a lineup of experts from various industries and diverse backgrounds, each bringing a wealth of knowledge and perspective to the table.

Actionable Insights from Industry Experts

• Guillaume Papillon, Head of Marketing, Mable
• Sarah Miles, Ex Chief Privacy Officer, Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC)
• David Fodor, Head of Strategy – FSI, Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• Raj Shah – National Key Account Manager, Vonage
• Nick Eshkenazi – Ex Chief Digital Officer, Prezzee
• Chris Brinkworth – Managing Partner, Civic Data
• Richard Knott – General Manager, Infosum
• Sathya Upadhyaya – Chief MarTech Officer, Lution
• Michael Ricciardone – Country Manager – ANZ, MoEngage

Understanding the Personalisation Paradox

Guillaume Papillon from Mable (a bit like the Uber of the disability and healthcare sector), a platform that connects folks with disabilities, older Australians, etc., to support workers, highlighted the critical role of personalisation. He painted a picture of personalisation not just as a marketing tool or method but to use engagement touch-points (signals) throughout their customers’ journey. They then optimised their channels with the right messages for both (online and offline) to better cater to their customers’ needs and experience.

They also segmented their customers on these signal-focused cohorts to ensure that personalisation is leveraged correctly and simply delivers better results.

According to a McKinsey study, companies that thrive at personalisation earn 40% more money from these activities than their competitors.

Imagine traversing the dense Daintree Rainforest with its lush canopies and hidden wonders. Personalisation is like having a seasoned guide who not only knows the trails but also understands your pace, interests, and fears. This guide is adept at reading subtle cues, ensuring the journey is enlightening and respectful of your boundaries. When executed with finesse, personalisation enhances customer experience just as a skilled guide enhances your rainforest exploration.

The Privacy Shield: Navigating Legal and Ethical Boundaries

Sarah Miles, representing ABC, highlighted the importance of data governance and regulatory compliance. You can liken it to the rules of cricket – you need to know them to play the game right. In the digital world, these rules are the privacy laws and ethical standards businesses must adhere to. Like a cricketer respects the game’s laws, companies must respect these boundaries to maintain customer trust.

The Role of Informed Consent

90% of customers are open to disclosing their behavioural data in exchange for extra perks that make purchasing cheaper or more straightforward. But that doesn’t mean customers shouldn’t be informed about the behavioural data they are handing over to brands. 

A significant takeaway from the discussion was the significance of informed consent in data collection and usage. Brands are encouraged to have a transparent dialogue with their legal teams to understand the implications of privacy laws on their marketing strategies. This transparency also extends to the consumer level, where customers should be clearly informed about how their data is being used. This increases trust between the customer and the brand, boosting your retention, loyalty, and customer lifetime value.

Transparency: The Heart of Trust

Transparency in data handling is as crucial as honesty in a game of Two-Up. It builds trust when brands clearly understand why they collect data and how it benefits the customer. It’s about being as transparent as a pristine Great Barrier Reef lagoon. Customers appreciate knowing what’s happening with their data, much like a snorkeler enjoys clear waters to view the marine life below.

Tackling Fraud and Ensuring Data Security

A McKinsey study found that 87% of customers would not do business with an organisation if concerns were raised about its security policies.

Raj Shah from Vonage underscored the importance of security in customer data handling, especially in the banking sector. He highlighted innovative measures like location-based data validation and multi-factor authentication to combat fraud. This approach reflects a growing trend in the industry towards leveraging advanced technology to enhance data security.

The Future of Data Handling: Tokenisation and Minimisation

David Fodor from AWS brought an interesting perspective on the future of data handling. He suggested a shift towards tokenisation, where data is not stored by third parties but accessed via tokens issued by the data owner. This approach significantly reduces the risk of data breaches and aligns with the principles of consumer data rights.

Balancing Personalisation with Privacy in Financial Services

David points out that the financial services sector is relatively advanced in balancing data privacy with personalisation. The industry’s inherent risk management nature means it has long been adept at using data responsibly. However, there’s an ongoing need for improvement in explicit and implied consent areas.

Transparency in targeted advertising can increase revenue by 38%.

Preparing for the Inevitable: Data Breaches

Insights from UK-based analysts Juniper Research estimated that Australian businesses had lost at least $US 1.97 billion to ad fraud in early 2023 (estimated to be tripled by the end of  2023), far surpassing the $US 1.32 billion defrauded in 2022.

Data breaches are the thunderstorms of the digital world – often unexpected and potentially destructive. Sarah Miles stressed the need for a robust plan to handle these crises. Like preparing for a bushfire season, businesses must be ready to act swiftly to minimize damage, protect their customers, and restore normalcy as quickly as possible.

On the flip side, Sathya Upadhyaya  says “data management and security technology are evolving rapidly” with particular importance on the following:

• To be future-ready
• Investment in data clean rooms
• Identity resolution
• Profile unification
• Effective management and disposal of data

The brands that can firmly establish themselves with the aforementioned criteria and processes are the ones that will thrive and achieve personalisation-led growth. 

Distinguishing Security from Privacy

Richard Knott of Infosum shed light on differentiating security from privacy. It’s like comparing Rugby League to Rugby Union – related but distinct. Security is the how, and privacy is the what. It’s essential to have strategies for both, like different game plans for each sport.

The Evolving Role of AI and Machine Learning

Nick Eshkenazi from Prezzee addressed the role of AI and ML in this balancing act. He warned against jumping on the AI bandwagon without understanding the basics of data management. It’s akin to using advanced cricketing gear without mastering the basics of the game. AI and ML can be game-changers for your brand, but only when used on a solid foundation of data integrity.

Future Trends and Predictions

What does the future hold for privacy and personalisation as we look toward the horizon? 

It’s evident that Australian brands must adapt to a new landscape where privacy is not just a compliance requirement but a core aspect of customer trust and brand reputation. This adaptation requires a deep understanding of new privacy laws, a commitment to transparent data practices, and a willingness to innovate in personalisation techniques that respect customer privacy.

When it comes down to it, it’s all about how much data your customers are willing to share to have a personalised experience. Your brand’s perception and trust among customers can show you how much data your customers are willing to share. MoEngage, as your friendly neighbourhood personalisation expert, can help you strike the right balance.

What Next for Australian Consumer Brands?

Wrapping up this topic, it’s clear that privacy and personalisation are two sides of the same coin. They’re like a well-cooked Pavlova – needing the right balance of crispness (privacy) and softness (personalisation) to be perfect. Businesses must navigate this landscape with care, transparency, and a focus on customer needs. 

More importantly, Aussie brands are now realizing and leveraging the importance of agile customer engagement platforms (CEPs), where all the privacy and personalisation standards have been set in place, gaining customer trust. This partnership ensures they can walk the privacy vs. personalisation tightrope with balance, never constantly looking down or back at past challenges. Cheers to mastering this balance!

Talk to a MoEngage personalisation expert today!

Q1. The Quick Service Restaurant (QSR) industry seems to be growing at a good pace in the US and Canada. Do you think QSR brands need to up their customer engagement game? If so, why?

Customer engagement is a pivotal conduit for Quick-Service Restaurant (QSR) brands seeking to enhance the frequency of orders and bolster the average order value. Among the array of strategies available, loyalty and rewards programs emerge as potent tools, leveraging direct incentives to spur growth among the most fervent brand advocates. Yet, while these programs forge a deep connection with loyal patrons, messaging and engagement initiatives wield a broader reach, empowering brands to connect with a diverse audience through targeted and personally relevant communications.

These engagement programs serve as a multifaceted gateway for brands. They transcend the limitations of loyalty-centric approaches by interfacing with customers more individually. Whether or not it directly ties into a loyalty program, these initiatives weave a web of personalized communication that resonates deeply with each recipient. By tailoring messages to suit specific preferences, purchase histories, or behaviors, brands can establish a more profound and resonant connection. This can include promotional updates, personalized recommendations, or interactive content, all aimed at fostering a sense of belonging and relevance for the customer.

Such tailored engagement nurtures brand loyalty and cultivates a sense of inclusivity and understanding. It fosters a dynamic conversation between brand and customer, amplifying the potential for increased order frequency and higher average order values while fortifying brand resonance within the market landscape.

Q2. What are the top 3 emerging trends for customer engagement in the QSR space?

1) Best-of-breed 

The transition from an “all-in-one” to a “best-of-breed” approach in marketing tools denotes a significant change in how businesses optimize their strategies. The former involves using a single comprehensive tool encompassing various functionalities, while the latter employs specialized tools for specific functions or aspects of a strategy.

This shift is driven by technological advancements, which have led to the emergence of specialized tools excelling in distinct areas like analytics, engagement, social media management, and customer relationship management. 

Understanding this shift is crucial as it signifies a move towards a more strategic and nuanced marketing approach. It also highlights the importance of adaptability, integration capabilities, and a deeper understanding of how various tools complement each other within a marketing ecosystem to drive better outcomes. 

Ultimately, the “best-of-breed” approach allows marketers to optimize campaigns more effectively, harnessing the strengths of specialized tools to elevate their overall marketing performance and achieve superior results across multiple channels.

2) Personalized Experiences

In the fast-paced realm of dining, the modern restaurant patron is a mobile-centric individual seeking seamless, time-sensitive encounters with their chosen QSR brand. The expectation isn’t just for a single meal but for a tailored, consistent experience. Meal delivery, curbside pickup, and real-time order updates have become the benchmarks of this immediacy-driven dining landscape.

To thrive in this ecosystem, QSR brands must pivot from traditional approaches and embrace technological evolution. By integrating advanced technology, QSRs can navigate the intricacies of these time-based experiences, ensuring that every customer interaction is swift, personalized, and location-aware.

The cornerstone of this shift lies in orchestrating personalized messages and experiences across multiple channels. This isn’t merely a matter of conveying information; it’s about crafting tailored engagements that resonate with individual preferences and behaviors. It involves leveraging data to understand customer habits, preferences, and context—allowing for the delivery of timely and relevant communications. Whether through mobile apps, social media, or in-person interactions, the goal is to synchronize these touchpoints, providing a cohesive and responsive journey for the on-the-go customer.

QSR brands that adapt to these evolving expectations position themselves as proactive, customer-centric entities. They cater not just to hunger but to the demand for seamless, immediate, and personalized experiences—a testament to their commitment to meeting the dynamic needs of today’s diners.

3) Omnichannel Marketing 

QSR brands are shifting from conventional advertising tactics to omnichannel strategies to meet the demands of modern diners. The transition to an omnichannel approach acknowledges the diverse ways customers engage with QSR brands and underscores the need for a seamless integration of online platforms, mobile apps, social media, and in-person experiences. This entails using data-driven insights to customize communications and channels based on individual preferences, purchase history, and real-time location. 

The investment in technology isn’t solely about operational efficiency; it’s about meeting elevated expectations for seamless customer experiences. By embracing omnichannel strategies, these brands position themselves not only to attract but also to retain customers by delivering timely, personalized experiences that align with the fast-paced lifestyle of today’s consumers.

Q3. It is clear from the emerging trends that QSR brands need to focus on understanding customer preferences more deeply and offer personalized engagement. How would you suggest they change their data/insights and customer engagement strategy?

Today’s customers expect top-notch service in record time from every service in their lives, including quick-service restaurants. Creating the kinds of experiences that will keep guests coming back for more requires QSRs to create better, more personalized experiences in and out of the store, only made possible by using a customer data layer.

Here are four data-driven strategies QSR brands can adopt to enhance engagement and create personalized experiences:

1) Centralized Customer Data Management:

Establishing a centralized data repository, a Customer Data Platform or a unified data system allows QSR brands to gather and integrate customer information from various touchpoints. This includes online orders, mobile app interactions, loyalty programs, and in-store purchases. Unifying this data provides a comprehensive view of customer behavior and preferences, enabling QSRs to create more accurate customer profiles.

2) Customer Segmentation and Personalization:

Leveraging the collected data, QSR brands can segment their customer base into distinct groups based on behavior, preferences, order history, or demographics. This segmentation allows for tailored and targeted marketing campaigns. By personalizing messaging, promotions, and offers, QSRs can enhance engagement and create more meaningful interactions, driving customer loyalty and repeat visits.

3) Experimentation of Omnichannel Engagement:

Experimenting with different communication channels and message formats can be vital. Whether through SMS, mobile apps, social media, or email, QSR brands can analyze which channels resonate best with specific customer segments. This experimentation helps optimize outreach strategies and deliver messages at the right time and through the preferred channels of their audience.

4) Real-Time Engagement and Feedback:

Implementing real-time engagement strategies, such as instant order updates, personalized recommendations during ordering, or timely feedback collection after a visit, helps QSR brands create a more interactive and responsive experience for their customers. 

Gathering feedback and adapting in real-time based on customer preferences or complaints demonstrates a commitment to enhancing their experience, fostering loyalty and positive word-of-mouth. By implementing these data-centric strategies, QSR brands can improve their understanding of customers and enhance engagement by delivering personalized, timely, and relevant experiences both within and outside the store environment. This customer-centric approach is pivotal in retaining customers and fostering a deeper connection, increasing satisfaction and repeated patronage.

Q4. When should a QSR brand consider adding tools like a Customer Data Platform (CDP) and Customer Engagement Platform (CEP) in its MarTech Stack?

Establishing and optimizing a customer data and engagement strategy requires the right people, internal processes, and technology platforms. Before considering an investment in any vendor’s toolset, the brand should ensure the right people and processes are available to support it.   

As an organization’s growth objectives evolve to include more advanced personalization and engagement strategies, the team should consider the full marketing, loyalty, paid ad, analytics, and other martech stack roadmaps. 

If a more capable CEP will help the brand meet its needs over the near-medium term, then a CDP may not be a required investment in the near term. 

But, if the brand anticipates running a CEP alongside a loyalty program in a different system, or if it intends to invest in a sophisticated analytics program, then it might be worth prioritizing a CDP that can handle real-time data exchange across a more complex marketing technology stack. This is especially true if the brand uses first-party data to guide paid media targeting or to personalize digital products in real-time. 

Q4. Why should a QSR brand integrate its Customer Data Platform and Customer Engagement Platform?

Integrating a QSR brand’s CDP and CEP is pivotal for creating a seamless, holistic approach to customer engagement.

Here are some top use cases illustrating the significance of this integration:

1) Unified Customer Profiles:

Integration ensures that customer data collected through various touchpoints—such as mobile apps, online orders, loyalty programs, and in-store interactions—flows seamlessly between the CDP and CEP. This unification creates comprehensive and updated customer profiles. A unified profile allows QSR brands to gain a 360-degree view of customers, including preferences, behaviors, purchase history, and engagement patterns.

2) Personalized Marketing Campaigns:

With integrated platforms, QSRs can leverage enriched customer profiles to create highly personalized marketing campaigns. The CEP can deploy targeted messages, promotions, and offers through various channels by accessing detailed customer insights from the CDP. This personalization enhances customer engagement, increases the relevance of marketing efforts, and drives higher conversion rates.

3) Real-Time Engagement and Feedback Loop:

Integration facilitates real-time interactions with customers. For instance, if a customer places an order via a mobile app, the integrated system can immediately update the CDP with this transaction data. The CEP can then trigger personalized messages, like order confirmations or estimated delivery times. Moreover, integrating feedback mechanisms allows for prompt collection of customer opinions, enabling quick adjustments and improvements in services.

4) Operational Efficiency and Consistency:

Integrating the CDP and CEP streamlines processes and ensures consistency in messaging across various channels. This alignment reduces manual efforts in synchronizing data and campaigns between platforms. It also minimizes the risk of delivering conflicting or duplicate messages to customers, enhancing overall operational efficiency.

5) Enhanced Customer Experience:

Ultimately, the integration of these platforms enables QSR brands to provide a more cohesive and delightful customer experience. By leveraging a unified view of customers and deploying personalized, timely engagements, QSRs can exceed customer expectations, foster loyalty, and differentiate themselves in a highly competitive market.