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In the B2C marketing landscape, understanding and leveraging customer engagement data is a necessity for survival.

In Chapter 6 of “The Customer Engagement Book: Adapt or Die,” we delve deep into how businesses can harness this data to not only stay afloat but thrive in a data-driven world. To bring this chapter to life, we sat down with Vish Ramkissoon, a leading expert from Publicis Hawkeye.

In our insightful Q&A session, Vish unpacks the critical importance of customer engagement data in making strategic business decisions. He clarifies the distinction between actionable data and mere noise, emphasizing the need for a meticulous approach to data tracking.

Vish’s perspectives on the future of customer engagement data and its role in shaping business strategies in the years to come. This conversation is a must-read for anyone looking to truly understand and adapt to the data-centric future of business.

Vish Ramkissoon Q&A Interview

1. What types of customer engagement data are most valuable for making strategic business decisions?

All customer engagement data is important — any time they interact with one of our assets, whether that be an app or web, or if it’s an interaction such as a click-through or open for direct communication, whether that’s SMS, push in-app, email, and even on paid channels with ads.

All of that information is used to categorize the user and model likes, dislikes and preferences.

We can then use that to customize our next communication with that particular individual or enhance their experience based on previous interactions.

2. How do you distinguish between data that is actionable versus data that is just noise?

We have created a methodology called highly engaged visits (HEV) or high-value tasks, which is another way that we look at interactions on our clients’ digital assets.

Tracking an attribute or an event on an app or on the web for the sake of tracking it makes no sense. If we want to use data smartly, we need to do the due diligence ahead of time to track actionable attributes and events..

The way you configure the tracking will determine what you’re able to do with that data later on and can impact your ability to have ability to be able to have meaningful communication or the next desired best action with a particular customer.

3. How can customer engagement data be used to identify and prioritize new business opportunities?

In retail, that would be like identifying potential cross-category shoppers. So you think of Big Box Retailers, for example. There are many product categories such as electronics, clothing, and groceries.

Understanding how a customer engages with their brand and where they’re shopping can illuminate opportunities to get them to shop cross-category.

The benefit of doing that is obvious in terms of customer lifetime value.

Cross-category shoppers tend to stay longer with the brand, churn risk is vastly reduced, and their customer lifetime value spikes.

4. Can you share an example of where data insights directly influenced a critical decision?

One of the most surprising and impactful insights I’ve uncovered came while working with a pick-up truck manufacturer. At the time, the client was primarily focused on reaching a working-class audience — that was the assumed buyer persona.

But once we enriched their first-party data with a third-party data set and ran the analysis, something unexpected jumped out.

We found a statistically significant group of very affluent buyers (people with high net worth who were purchasing these trucks), not for utility, but for what they symbolized. It completely shifted our understanding of the customer base.

These weren’t just tools for work; for some, they were lifestyle statements.

That insight forced us to rethink our customer engagement strategy: who we were targeting, how we were speaking to them, and what kind of creative we were putting in front of them.

We created tailored content that spoke directly to that audience by highlighting features, experiences, and brand cues that resonated with their values and lifestyle.

What’s powerful is that the client still uses that strategy today.

It’s a great example of how data, especially when it reveals something you weren’t looking for, can fundamentally reshape your approach and drive real, lasting results.

5. How do you use engagement data to shape your marketing strategy in real time or your clients?

From a technology and data strategy perspective, I tend to avoid the term “real-time” in marketing communications, opting instead for “near real-time.”

The distinction is important: being too fast can sometimes backfire. Take abandoned cart emails as an example: sending a follow-up immediately after a cart is abandoned can feel intrusive or even irrelevant.

Instead, we take a test-and-learn approach, experimenting with different delays and message cadences to identify what actually drives engagement and conversion.

This allows us to refine our timing models iteratively and improve performance over time.

Where real-time data does provide clear value is in-session personalization.

For example, on a retail website, when a customer adds an item to their cart, we can trigger an event instantly to update product recommendations. This enhances the browsing experience by surfacing complementary or commonly bundled products, driving higher engagement and average order value.

We also leverage real-time behavioral signals to drive contextual offers.

If a customer has shown interest in a category, say, shoes, but hasn’t added anything to their cart, we can surface a targeted promotion before checkout.

These kinds of real-time capabilities, when implemented thoughtfully, enable us to create more relevant, frictionless customer journeys while maximizing both experience and business outcomes.

6. How can marketers ensure their use of customer engagement data aligns with broader business objectives?

Our objective-setting process is grounded in data.

We don’t move forward without clear evidence to support the decisions behind each goal.

Whether we’re aligning with a C-suite directive, driving toward an OKR, or meeting customer engagement metrics tied to shareholder expectations, we treat data as the foundation, not an afterthought.

In my view, data solves all arguments and should steer prioritization. If we can’t validate a business objective with measurable inputs, it doesn’t belong in the roadmap.

Our job is to ensure every initiative is defensible, trackable, and optimized for impact.

7. What challenges do marketers face when trying to translate customer engagement data into these actionable business insights?

One of our biggest challenges is data fragmentation.

Critical customer data is still trapped in functional silos, product teams manage product usage data, transactional data sits in the CDP, paid media teams rely on data in ad tech platforms, and direct-to-consumer marketers operate on yet another system.

Without a unified profile, it’s impossible to achieve a true 360-degree view of the customer. Democratizing data across the organization is not just a technology problem; it’s a structural and operational one. Solving it is foundational to everything else we want to accomplish as marketers.

The second major challenge is personalization at scale. We serve tens of millions of customers, each with their own preferences, behaviors, and needs. Designing bespoke communications for each one isn’t just impractical, it’s impossible without a fundamentally different approach.

To address this, we’re shifting how we work.

One strategy involves building a library of pre-approved modular content, offers, copy, imagery, and templates that can be dynamically assembled to create highly relevant, personalized customer experiences. This allows us to maintain control over brand and compliance while scaling 1:1 communications efficiently.

We’re also actively experimenting with generative AI.

By training models on our brand voice, tone, and eligibility rules, and putting the right guardrails in place, we can safely generate personalized content that meets our standards; legal, creative, and strategic.

Done right, this allows us to combine precision and scale in ways that were simply not possible before.

8. What technologies or tools have you found most effective for gathering and analyzing customer engagement data?

To effectively understand customer engagement, we rely on a stack of technologies that work in concert. First, we use behavioral tracking platforms that capture event and attribute data across both web and app environments.

These tools give us deep visibility into session behavior, how customers navigate, what they engage with, and where friction points exist.

We also place a strong emphasis on our direct-to-consumer communication stack—covering in-app messaging, push notifications, SMS, and email.

Every touchpoint in that system generates interaction data, which becomes critical for understanding how customers respond to different types of messaging and timing strategies.

To unify all of this, we lean heavily on our composable customer data platform (CDP). The CDP is where everything comes together, behavioral signals, transactional data, engagement metrics.

It gives us that single, holistic view of the customer, which is foundational for personalized experiences at scale.

And finally, analytics. We approach this from two angles: data visualization and performance measurement.

Visualization helps us uncover patterns and insights quickly, while more traditional analytics allows us to evaluate effectiveness, whether in near real-time or through post-campaign analysis.

Together, this ecosystem allows us to move from reactive to predictive, and ultimately, to proactive engagement strategies.

9. How do you ensure data quality and consistency across multiple channels to make informed decisions?

Data quality starts upstream at the point of collection.

One of the most common mistakes organizations make is moving too quickly to define what data they want without spending enough time thinking about how that data is collected and structured. If we don’t get that part right, everything downstream analytics, personalization, reporting suffers.

Standardization is key.

We invest heavily in upfront schema design and data normalization, because consistent input leads to scalable and reliable analysis.

A simple example I often give is a date field. If a date is captured as a string instead of a proper date format, you lose the ability to apply even basic logic like filtering by time windows. Multiply that across dozens of fields and channels, and it becomes a serious liability.

We also build validation logic directly into our data entry and ingestion points.

Take email, for example. It’s surprising how many systems still allow invalid email formats into their databases. A basic syntax check ensuring the presence of an “@” symbol, a domain, and the absence of illegal characters.

So we can avoid collecting a bunch of garbage and then realize, “Oh well, only 90% or 80% of the email addresses we have are contactable.”

Ultimately, data quality isn’t a one-time fix. It requires a disciplined approach, embedded into both our technology stack and our operational culture. We think about data integrity from day one—because without it, we’re flying blind.

10. How do you see the role of customer engagement data evolving in shaping business strategies over the next five years?

Over the next five years, customer engagement data will move from being a supportive asset to a strategic cornerstone of business decision-making. The capabilities of technology platforms, especially in data processing and AI are evolving rapidly.

What’s lagging isn’t the tech, it’s organizational readiness, particularly with how teams, especially in marketing are structured and how they operate.

To truly leverage engagement data, we need to shift from a campaign-centric mindset to a decision-centric one.

Instead of asking, “What campaign should we send next?” The better question is, “What decision should we make for this customer, at this moment?” That’s the shift from broadcasting to orchestrating meaningful, contextual, one-to-one interactions.

But that level of personalization requires scale, and scale demands automation.

This is where AI becomes essential. We’re going to rely more heavily on AI to generate content dynamically within brand parameters, compliance rules, and contextual relevance so we can meet customers where they are, with messaging that actually matters.

What ties it all together is data.

Engagement data is what fuels both the decisioning logic and the AI models behind it. And as data becomes richer and more immediate, our ability to turn insight into action will define a competitive advantage.

The businesses that embrace that evolution not just in technology, but in mindset, will lead.

This interview Q&A was hosted with Vish Ramkissoon, Chief Technology and Data Officer at Publicis Groupe/Hawkeye, for Chapter 6 of The Customer Engagement Book: Adapt or Die.

Download the PDF or request a physical copy of the book here.

Reading Time: 9 minutes

In the ever-evolving landscape of customer engagement, businesses face a critical choice: adapt or die.

This principle forms the cornerstone of our recent publication, “The Customer Engagement Book: Adapt or Die,” and today, we’re diving deep into Chapter 5: Strategy.

To illuminate the practical side of omnichannel success, we sat down with Alex May, Director of Strategy for Travel, Hospitality, & Food Services at Movable Ink, for an insightful Q&A session.

Alex shares a compelling case study from the food services industry, demonstrating how targeted weather-based campaigns can significantly boost engagement and drive orders without resorting to discounts.

In this interview, Alex will unravel the intricacies of their data-driven approach, the challenges faced, and the invaluable lessons learned while executing a seamless omnichannel customer experience.

Alex May Q&A Interview

1. Can you share a specific omnichannel campaign that you’ve executed that you consider to be particularly successful?

One that comes to mind is from the food services space.

We had a client who was looking to grow their engagement with some of their less engaged customer base, and they wanted to do so in a way that drove orders without having to require a monetary type of discount.

They wanted to avoid discounting their products and cutting into their margins.

We took a look at some of their customer purchase behavior and customer lifetime value behavior to analyze what are the right folks who have an opportunity to grow some of their frequency.

Frequency was a big problem for them. It’s a big problem in the food service industry in general.

We looked into that customer’s subset, we looked at their preference data and their location, and we decided to deliver a weather-targeting strategy where, via email and rich push, we delivered a campaign for customers who are in an area that was experiencing inclement weather to display preferred products that they’ve ordered in the past and pair that up with the weather, temperature, and precipitation.

Research shows that the demand for delivery significantly increases when there’s inclement weather. So when we deployed the email campaign in pair with rich push, we displayed that module, encouraging folks to order their favorites and get it delivered.

That campaign drove a huge lift in engagement compared to the control group that we included within the test who did not receive any weather-related targeting.

It really proved out that the value prop of getting your food delivered was just as, or even more, valuable to customers than a monetary discount.

2. What was the overarching goal of this campaign, and how did it align with your broader business objectives?

The goal was to drive engagement and orders from a less engaged customer group, a group that this particular brand thought had opportunity to re-engage and get some incremental orders out of.

As for objectives, the company has a big focus on frequency.

That’s huge within the food services space in general, especially with inflation and other economic conditions. People just aren’t dining out as frequently, so it’s a very common problem.

Because weather does drive demand, it was an opportunity to gain share of wallet and steal some incremental purchases from customers that may otherwise go somewhere else to order their food.

3. How did you come up with the idea for this campaign and what kinds of trends influenced this approach?

We really worked with the client to have some insight into their data.

We always want to take a very data-driven approach to these strategies. So we wanted to dive deep into their insights around not only what is a group of less engaged customers, but dive a few layers deep to understand their preferences, what channels they engage with, and their frequency score.

This particular client had pretty strong CLV numbers associated with individual customer records.

So we could understand not only what their current value is, but they had some predictive data that could show what their future value could be if they were to increase their frequency.

We were able to work with them to understand their overarching goal of driving frequency.

I then took our technology at Movable Inc., leveraged our capability to display personalized images based on past purchase behavior and also utilized contextual data, such as local weather, to develop this strategy of leveraging weather as a way to drive value prop for this particular customer base and ultimately use it to drive up demand and boost frequency.

4. What role did customer engagement data play in shaping your strategy?

First, again, understanding where the opportunities are with what customers.

We determined what channels they engage with most, then we leveraged that data to develop a module and a strategy that would then target folks on the right channel, showing a personalized piece of content for them to drive that engagement.

Ultimately, we were able to track over time using purchase behavior to see that, not only did we capture that incremental order, but then how that was going to boost their CLV over time to help prove that future value.

5. How did you decide which channels to include?

It was twofold. First and foremost, we wanted to look at what channels folks were engaging with.

It was also just channel availability, frankly. The client didn’t have as much exposure to in-app type of messaging. So we looked at what channels we did have exposure to.

In terms of targeting, again, just use that customer behavioral data to determine when and how to target each individual customer.

6. What were the key steps required to execute this campaign successfully?

It was a systematic approach.

We first wanted to understand the problem, and the problem was driving customer frequency.

We then needed to partner with our client to gather available data and use that as the foundation to develop the overall strategy.

We then paired that with market research, knowing that weather is going to drive up demand, and working with their creative partners to develop the look and feel of the campaign. And then we were able to execute.

In terms of measurement, we partnered with the client as well.

Measurement was on their end, so they helped us track progress and success that went along so that we could continue to iterate this strategy over time to make sure that first time we launched it, there was some success.

But how can we make this even better? So we leveraged that data to help optimize the campaign moving forward.

7. How did you find what worked and what didn’t? How did you optimize the campaign?

A lot of it involved the visual element of the creative.

We were able to A/B test how and where we displayed the weather. Our first attempt was more text-based, displaying things like the temperature and precipitation.

What we found is that icon-based creative performed even better.

8. Which specific teams and stakeholders did you have to collaborate with, and how did you ensure alignment across the functions?

We worked first and foremost with the channel marketers on the client side.

We also had to partner with their products implementation team to ensure all of the pipes were connected between our platform, which sits on top of their marketing stack, and make sure that we had the correct API set up not only to their ESP, but also to their customer data platform or CDP.

We also collaborated a little bit with their partner network for some of these other tools to connect to ours.

Then eventually, working with their analytics team to better understand the results and gather the applicable data.

9. What steps did you take to ensure alignment across these functions?

We have a central point of contact on the client side who helps as the middleman between us and all of the teams I mentioned previously.

Then also providing very clear information in a presentation format that could be shared of what the goal is or what the problem is that we’re trying to solve, what data we need to execute it.

Once we had that data, we created some visualizations of to make it easier to see and make it more shareable as to why we decided to approach this particular problem with the weather strategy in a multi-channel approach, and then clearly defining not only how we were going to measure it, but how we defined success so that we knew exactly whether or not the strategy was a success or a failure.

10. What kind of tools and platforms and technologies did you use to deliver this seamless omnichannel experience?

We partnered and utilized their customer data platform.

It was effectively the tool that helped us consolidate engagement across channels and also the decisioning tool on when to deliver a rich push versus an email campaign.

There are some multi-channel analytics tools on their side to help track behaviors across their email and push and effectively attribute the results of the campaign to the given channel.

And of course we leveraged a personalization tool to make sure we were delivering the personalized content to each individual customer at the moment of open.

11. What were the biggest challenges you faced during the execution of this campaign, and how did you overcome them?

First was cross-channel communication.

We put together a process that works very well, but having a lot of cooks in the kitchen can make things a little difficult. So making sure all the teams are aligned not only to the overarching goal, but to each of their pieces of the execution in the timeframe.

Attributing data to the channels can be tricky.

I think attribution is tricky in general for marketers, it’s hard to accurately determine which channels drove the right results. But leveraging their CDP, we got a pretty good idea of how each channel was working together.

It took a lot. It was a large Martech stack, as I mentioned, that was utilized in order to execute this one single campaign.

12. Were there any unexpected obstacles or opportunities that emerged, and how did you address them?

We did naturally see opportunities in terms of iteration as we continued to analyze the data as the campaign was sent more frequently over time.

We didn’t know exactly what enhancements would need to be made at the moment of deployment.

So we really focused on the opportunities to optimize that content and utilized our own A/B testing tool to test those hypotheses and move forward with the correct changes.

13. Were there any other examples from this that you could share? Was there anything else interesting that came out of it?

Different product types in different weather can make a big difference.

It could be the difference of showing a soup if the weather was cold, but raining. It could have been a salad if it was hot and raining.

So regionalization and the given temperature of that specific location played a role into us testing what different products would make the most sense at the given time.

14. What were the measurable results of the campaign? How did it impact business goals?

The initial campaign had a really strong lift in engagement.

We continued to see a pretty steady and consistent lift in terms of click-through rate on email and open rate and push. But we also drew some measurable lift in conversion as well.

15. What advice would you give to marketers who want to execute successful omnichannel campaigns?

I think it all comes down to putting together a consistent formula when you approach different projects.

I think ultimately you want to start with: “What is the problem we’re trying to solve?” Figure out the omnichannel analytics KPIs that ladder up to that overarching goal, and determine what pieces of the funnel you want to influence to drive those behaviors. Starting at the top and working your way more granular can help formulate your strategy.

Look at things like click-through rate to help provide some general insights into customer interests and engagement patterns. Then look at purchase behavior and customer lifetime value data.

Then you can use those data sets to indicate the most profitable segments and segments that have the most opportunity. Then you can start to look at lifecycle data to determine where customers are at in their individual journeys.

And then I would look at channel engagement again to understand trends across multiple channels, to inform where to target these different customers.

Ultimately, you need to work with what you have and put trust into the data and the tools you have at your exposure and make the most informed decisions that you can, but not let perfection hold you back from executing, because then you’ll never get anything done.

The final piece is keeping key stakeholders involved. Each stakeholder will have a different level of involvement.

Make sure that they’re well aware of everything that’s going on, and deliver those results in a way that ladders up to the overall goal, but that’s very digestible and clear of how your strategy was able to impact the results.

This interview Q&A was hosted with Alex May, Director of Strategy for Travel, Hospitality, & Food Services at Movable Ink, for Chapter 5 of The Customer Engagement Book: Adapt or Die.

Download the PDF or request a physical copy of the book here.

Reading Time: 10 minutes

Businesses must meet customers where they are across multiple channels to be successful.

That’s why, for Chapter 5 of our “Customer Engagement Book: Adapt or Die,” focusing on omnichannel strategy, we sat down with Jennifer Finn, Senior Manager, Lifecycle at Wealthsimple.

In this insightful Q&A, Jen shares invaluable lessons from a successful Bitcoin giveaway campaign.

She delves into how Wealthsimple leveraged various channels, including email, push notifications, and in-app surfaces, to drive both top-of-funnel and bottom-of-funnel engagement.

Get ready to learn about the critical role of customer data, how to adapt strategies mid-campaign, and why being part of the conversation in a trending market is essential.

Jennifer Finn Q&A Interview

1. Can you share a specific omnichannel campaign that you’ve executed that you consider to be particularly successful?

All of our campaigns these days are more often omnichannel.

In order to get the most reach and ultimately drive more results, Wealthsimple needs to meet our clients where they are, which is ultimately across different channels when you’re trying to serve Canadians across the board, regardless of their net worth, age, demographic, etc.

We know based on email preferences alone, if we chose to do a single email channel-only campaign, we could be losing 10% of our base right off the top, and then filtering down from there based on open rates. So it’s really limiting.

In more recent campaigns, we’ve been leveraging our in-app surfaces as a way to unlock new channels and extend reach.

In this particular example, I’ll dig into a Bitcoin giveaway that we chose to run. We know based on our segments we have cohorts that are more interested in crypto and cohorts that are not so interested, or not “crypto-curious,” as I’ll call them. In order to maximize our reach and personalize the experience to be more passive for those that tend to be less engaged, we employ different omnichannel tactics.

The campaign leveraged owned channels: email, push, multiple combinations of in-app surfaces paired with social and user acquisition efforts to drive top-of-funnel engagement in addition to bottom-of-funnel engagement like referrals with our current base of clients.

2. What was the overarching goal of this campaign, and how did it align with your broader business objectives?

The overarching goal was to be a part of the momentum crypto was experiencing and acquire new crypto clients and referrals. 

One of the strengths we have at Wealthsimple: We’re able to be really scrappy.

This campaign is helping us understand how we might continue to move the needle into 2025, and how each of our products can play a part in helping us achieve broader company goals.

Campaigns like this move the needle in a big way but also help inform ways that we can continue to iterate and improve year over year.

3. How did you come up with the idea for this campaign and what kinds of trends influenced this approach?

It stemmed from having awareness on what was happening in the markets. Bitcoin in particular was projected to surpass its all-time high. There was a lot of noise.

What ultimately influenced and helped us build toward what we ended up launching was that we know crypto sees a lot of seasonality and is also cyclical with very long cycles.

That combined with the organic spikes we were seeing across the product motivated us to incentivize the referrals to double that growth.

At a very high level, it was great minds coming together, talking about what we were seeing in the market, talking about what we were seeing internally with the product, and having strong decision-makers in the room that said, “Let’s go for it.”

We’re still a very flat organization, but we’ve grown quickly and we’ve attracted some incredible experts in their own fields and functions.

Everybody comes together with industry and functional experience.

There’s a lot of passion and knowledge in the room when we start to see opportunities like this build: folks across lifecycle and growth, but also folks across our product and our legal and regulatory teams that can help us make decisions and move quickly in the right direction.

4. What role did customer engagement data play in shaping your strategy?

We have a solid base of clients.

Whether it’s via age, net worth, or assets under management, we’ve been able to identify cohorts of clients that tend to respond positively, at least at first, to our messaging surrounding crypto.

That customer engagement data allows us to be thoughtful with the channel and messaging combinations that we choose to send.

We also took information from previous experiments where we knew our crypto enthusiasts responded to particular messaging more than other clients, leveraging that to inform what channels have previously worked for us to help build that playbook when speaking to that particular segment of clients.

5. How did you decide which channels to include?

It’s really about leveraging previous experimentation and different channel combinations that we’ve used in the past, while not being afraid to outline any new channel combinations, given we’re constantly iterating and improving on those channels.

In this case, we have various surfaces within our app that we’ve been unlocking through our tooling over the past year.

One experiment might be seeing how much incremental new referrals or account openings we could drive via a new surface and comparing it to an old surface or a previously used surface.

A surface is just a new placement where we can start building marketing messaging and where marketing has the freedom or ownership to use it for various messaging.

One example might be targeting folks that we tend to see are less engaged and interested in crypto messaging and seeing how they might engage with a new channel like our notification center in the app, and comparing that to a global holdout for the campaign to see if that channel can drive incremental account opening.

6. What were the key steps required to execute this campaign successfully?

Crowdsourcing the idea has proven to be one of the best ways to build great products, ship effective product improvements, and run some of the most successful experiments and incentives we think in the industry.

What was great about this one is things really came together asynchronously.

It was a great way to leverage tooling that we use in-house like Slack to speed up the conversation and drill right down to the next steps and commit.

Being able to move quickly and ship something that we think is 90% good enough tends to help us move faster and steer the decision.

Perfection isn’t always attainable, whether it’s differences of opinions steering messaging and tactical execution. Finding a way to come together and find that direction ultimately helped us move forward.

Once in market, there’s a constant view on performance updates and even tweaks to optimize further. This is where we might see that an experiment is performing poorly.

We might have to quickly pivot or shift, or even just make slight channel updates based on client feedback.

7. Which specific teams and stakeholders did you have to collaborate with, and how did you ensure alignment across the functions?

It truly is a team effort across marketing and also product – touching creative, copy, lifecycle, product marketing, user acquisition, brand, etc.

And then working with our product leads to make sure that we’re using and talking about the product accurately, legal, regulatory operations, finance to make sure that we can pay out when it comes time to end and wrap up the contest, and then our engineering teams supporting to make sure that they can handle the volume we’ll hopefully be driving.

In ensuring alignment, at Wealthsimple, there’s generally this expectation to debate and then ultimately commit.

It’s a process that allows for all perspectives really early on but results in really clear next steps.

Slack and a combination of asynchronous, in-person, and online meetings tend to be the quickest and most effective way to get everybody on the same page and ultimately build toward how it comes to life more quickly.

8. What tools, platforms, technologies were critical in delivering a seamless omnichannel experience?

We use tooling like Slack internally that allows for remote working and messaging.

As a remote-first company, it’s a big part of how we crowdsource ideas, debate and commit, and move forward. When you put everything in writing, it’s the most effective way to move things forward.

We leverage our Lifecycle CRM tool, which is the biggest support for launching an omnichannel cross-channel campaign like this one. It allows us to build and execute these omnichannel marketing campaigns fairly seamlessly in terms of ensuring that we have the right segmentation, we’re leveraging the right channel mix, and being able to do so in a way that’s fairly automated. Once things are built and launched, it allows for pretty seamless QA.

We have various data analytics tools that allow us to determine the right path for the experiment. Identifying those external and internal market moments definitely comes down to having really great data visualization for what’s going on within your organization and across a specific product like crypto.

Then we leverage a number of platforms for both user acquisition and paid ads, as well as tooling to support social channels. Making sure that all these channels speak together and map into our data visualization tools allows us to look at channel success, channel performance, and ultimate campaign incrementality as well.

9. What were some of the biggest challenges you faced during the execution of this campaign, and how did you overcome them?

Time and having stakeholders and leads willing to chase down the right people and resources and then finding the capacity to bring it all together — time being the biggest challenge.

With a product in financial services, navigating legal and regulatory concerns or risk can also be time-consuming.

In this case, we have a bunch of incredible stakeholders and decision-makers that are willing to make those decisions really quickly to help steer us the right way from day one.

10. What were some unexpected obstacles or opportunities that emerged, and how did you address those?

Throughout 2024, we had been exploring and building out more in-app surfaces, trying to more effectively reach our clients where they are and when they’re engaging with the app, with the right messaging to have the most effect.

We always have to navigate challenges around having multiple app versions.

That’s a blocker and sometimes a speed bump for us, in terms of trying to make sure that as we continue to move quickly and build out these new surfaces, we’re thinking about our clients that are both on older app versions and newer app versions, and trying to build the most effective customer experience regardless can be really challenging.

Also, campaigns like this one, where folks can enter in a number of different ways — we were allowing folks to refer their friends, open new crypto accounts on our platform, but also enter via our social channels on Instagram and X — can be confusing in terms of giving different steps to follow to effectively enter and have their entrance counted toward the final draw.

We tend to drive a lot of client toil straight to our support team if this is done poorly.

Getting ahead and arming our social and support teams with the top FAQs always helps mitigate this.

But it was definitely a rocky start in terms of making sure that we’re really clear, at least on social channels, on what steps folks need to take in order to be counted.

11. What were some of the measurable results of this campaign, and how did it impact your overarching business goals?

Right off the bat, Lifecycle channels saw millions of impressions, which we know directly impacts the overall effectiveness of a big campaign like this one.

Giving away one whole Bitcoin at its high was the first time that we’ve done anything this big and noisy, at least with our crypto product. Millions of impressions across our in-app, email, and push channels was a really great way to make sure that we saw the reach that we needed for this campaign to be successful.

We know that number of impressions ladders right up to the frequency of the messaging that we’re hitting clients with. Within the three-week campaign, we quickly surpassed our goals for the campaign and ended the year off strong. So it was incredibly impactful in terms of driving the product growth that we were looking for.

Ultimately, this campaign drove a large portion of the total new product clients for 2024. It’s been really valuable for us to connect the dots to see what we need to do in 2025 to help meet overall product goals.

Something that is generally undervalued here too, because it’s not quantitative, is the general brand play.

At a time when the market is hot and competitors are making noise, ensuring that you’re part of that noise and part of the conversation when your clients and potential clients start thinking and talking about what actions they might make is really invaluable.

Being part of that narrative at a time when crypto was seeing this big market moment was key.

12. What advice would you give marketers in financial services who want to execute successful omnichannel campaigns?

Don’t be afraid to shift or pivot on a strategy mid-campaign if it’s not working for you.

Try to build for faster feedback loops. If you have KPIs and find that your results are soft partway through a campaign, being built so that you can shift or pivot mid-campaign is invaluable.

Run small experiments to start understanding your client base and how they react to different types of content channels.

Make sure that you’re set up to test, whether that’s as an A/B variant or against a control group. You need to use tooling that allows for quick experiment execution and analysis.

Define success at the beginning of an experiment or campaign to ensure that you understand what you’re left with at the end of the campaign.

Did you see what you were looking for? If you had to iterate and run the same thing over again, would you? Or did the campaign not perform as well as you had expected it to?

Ensure you’re set up with a global or campaign-level control to identify incremental messaging impact.

Having that global or campaign-level control set up from the beginning allows you to ensure that you’re looking at the right things and drilling down into the right results.

That would be rooted in ensuring that your campaign is set up from the start and that you’re getting the correct details throughout and after so that you can learn quickly.

I find that many companies, and we’re definitely at fault for it at Wealthsimple, move so quickly that if we’re not immediately reporting on results or learnings, they can often get left behind, and then we’ve never done a proper retrospective.

Document your channel conversion rates in one place so that you can start to identify content-level and channel-level conversion rates. This can help build a stronger growth model for larger campaigns, which ultimately ladder up to your quarterly, annual, or team goals.

Having it all in one place helps drive the story that you can share when you’re building the strategy for those campaigns in the future.

This interview Q&A was hosted with Jennifer Finn, Senior Manager, Lifecycle at Wealthsimple, for Chapter 5 of The Customer Engagement Book: Adapt or Die.

Download the PDF or request a physical copy of the book here.

Reading Time: 10 minutes

To get what you want as a marketer, building influence and internal credibility is crucial.

It’s a topic we delve into deeply in Chapter 4 of our recently published book, “The Customer Engagement: Adapt or Die,” where we explore the art of navigating organizational dynamics and gaining stakeholder buy-in.

To bring this chapter to life, we sat down with Meta’s Director of Business Marketing Technology, Angela Rueda, for an insightful Q&A session.

In this interview, Angela shares her wealth of experience on establishing credibility, showcasing the value of new ideas, and aligning marketing goals with broader business objectives.

Get ready to learn practical strategies on how to pitch innovative concepts, handle differing priorities across departments, and ultimately, drive impactful change within your organization. Angela’s insights are a must-read for any marketer looking to enhance their influence and become a true catalyst for success.

Angela Rueda Q&A Interview

1. Early in your marketing career, what steps did you take to establish credibility when proposing new campaigns, tools, or strategies?

I think that at the beginning of my career it really all focused on execution, on having very tangible wins with rigorous execution and increasing the complexity of projects.

Unless you have that solid base of proving to be a skilled project manager, executor of complex cross-functional initiatives, layering different aspects of technology, operation and cross-functional alignment, you won’t get that much farther in telling your story.

As I evolved my career, it became more about storytelling of that execution.

While initially I was very much heads down making sure that we were solving through the issues and challenges, you have to lift up your head and think about: “What is the impact of this?” That’s where you shift to storytelling.

This was really critical because as you evolve in your career, you start needing to get more buy-in. You need to socialize your results so you can evolve the programs and articulate the “so what”.

2. How do you showcase the value of a new marketing idea or tool to stakeholders who might not fully understand its importance?

There are a few aspects here.

First is making sure the problem statements are customer-centric. 

Then, defining metrics that are business value-driven and measurable.

Lastly, it is great to use analogies that can help people visualize the magnitude or significance of a complex concept so they can empathize with it.

That’s how I capture stakeholders’ attention and make sure that I continue to update people in that same framework so they are reminded that we’re talking about and connect to their frame of reference.

3. What role does industry knowledge or competitor benchmarking play in building credibility as a marketer?

It’s absolutely key. Particularly at large companies, it’s very easy to stay within and completely lose sight of the outside world, quickly falling behind.

Sometimes we’re building things internally, things are moving so fast, and you don’t see a need to go to the outside world. This is such a risk from multiple aspects.

The first one is for your career. If you don’t stay in tune with the market and benchmark yourself with the industry, you’re going to become irrelevant very soon, no matter how good you are within the company you’re in.

The second reason is the development of your products. I have worked multiple times building solutions internally and getting stuck.

Then, as I went to assess the solutions in the marketplace, I realized, “Wow, the things that are actually off the shelf could speed us up and free us to focus on higher value development.”

The third one is around building thought leadership. The way you build thought leadership is by piecing together multiple perspectives in a fast-evolving space.

This requires you to bring perspectives from industry.

Most of the time, the CMO will rely on you to provide that perspective, and you need to have a well-rounded view.

4. How do you identify the most influential stakeholders when introducing new marketing programs or technologies?

I like to bucket my thoughts, so again, there are three approaches.

The first one is organizational—the more political lens of looking across your organizational chart and seeing who are the leaders that are going to be sponsors and why they would care about this particular initiative.

Organizational mapping is one really important way of identifying your first set of stakeholders.

The second one is your go-to-market approach.

Whether you need your content stakeholders, your data stakeholders, your product stakeholders—you build your flow of go-to-market and make sure that you have representatives across all of those functions in the process so that you don’t run into barriers later on to deliver.

The third lens is from a platform approach.

What are the technology layers that you are dependent on to be able to get this product out?

You don’t want hidden surprises because you did not assess tech stack dependencies that were not properly prioritized by those teams.

5. What strategies do you use to align marketing goals with broader business objectives to gain leadership buy-in?

From the vantage point of launching new marketing capabilities, I like to align with the broader objectives of the business by delivering ROI through tangible outcomes.

To do this, I like to run pilots that showcase new strategies and capabilities and that have revenue goals attached to them.

Through a focused pilot strategy, we can dedicate resources and attention to unlocking the most value-driving capabilities and show leadership that they’re getting the return on their investment as soon as possible.

Then they can have the credibility to continue investing or the patience for the full rollout of longer-term strategies or implementations. 

To me, the pilot approach is one of the most important strategies to align marketing goals with broader business objectives because revenue is the common language we’re speaking.

The moment you’re able to give that direct output, you’re speaking the same language, and you will have buy-in with results that you can deliver early on.

6. Can you share an example of how you navigated differing priorities between marketing and another department, such as sales or product, to secure approval for a campaign or tool?

One of the significant challenges organizations face is unifying sales, marketing, and product data.

This is a crucial but difficult task because these teams often operate in silos, making it hard to align goals.

To overcome this hurdle, senior leadership buy-in is essential to bring these three groups together.

The most effective way to achieve this is by articulating customer-centric problem statements that resonate with the customer’s language.

If we started leading with the message of “We need to overhaul our data infrastructure and create a data warehouse…” you’re done—you’ve lost them.

But if you provide examples of how these data gaps are impacting the customer experience and how you’re potentially missing out on 30% of your marketable universe because you are not aligning across all of your pillars, you’ll get their attention.

For example, highlight issues like, “We’re sending emails with incorrect names due to outdated contact data,” or “We’re providing inaccurate metrics that confuse customers instead of helping them.”

By presenting concrete examples of how customers are impacted by these data issues, you can grab the attention of leadership and create a sense of urgency, prompting them to unite against this challenge.

To get leadership, you need to tell a story that matters to them. Then, once that’s prioritized, build collective goals for teams that usually have siloed goals and get them to work together and let go of the ownership of their tools, and think about an ecosystem.

Once you get people thinking about an ecosystem and they have a collective goal, you’ve broken through—you’re creating new things, and that’s when the really good stuff happens.

7. When pitching a new marketing strategy or technology, how do you structure your presentation to resonate with both creative and data-driven stakeholders?

One of the things that’s super important is the problem statements.

I had many presentations in the past where the first question I got was, “What are we trying to solve here?” I realized this is where you start—with the problem.

The second thing is the visualization of the space. One of the things that has worked really well for me in multiple instances is showing the journey of the customer.

I draw this journey showing the actual marketing messages that customers are getting. Then I call out the technology that will power either the personalization or the channel or the data input that we’re using there.

The third piece for more data-driven stakeholders is the rigor behind a business case.

This might not apply to every single thing, but when we are driving a new tool that requires investment, going through the effort of doing the full business case and showing what the potential ROI is going to be and how you’re going to get there is key.

The last piece, which I really love, is the architectural map.

How does everything come together? I usually do a level-up view of what a typical technical architecture diagram would be so that it’s more business-friendly.

This one is really a hit with technical stakeholders, but will also get the attention of business stakeholders once you get into more granular conversations.

8. What role does customer engagement data or campaign performance metrics play in convincing stakeholders to adopt a new idea?

This plays a pivotal role in our strategy.

In fact, when I discussed our pilot approach, it’s closely tied to this concept because it’s not just about revenue growth, but also about demonstrating engagement and proving that we can drive higher levels of interaction.

By doing so, we can secure buy-in for further rollouts or continued investment.

Moreover, the discipline of ongoing customer engagement tracking and measurement is crucial.

We’ve identified significant issues by monitoring these customer engagement metrics and digging deeper when they drop. This process not only helps us secure buy-in and investment but also informs our platform’s performance strategy.

When presenting these metrics, it’s essential to build a framework that tells a complete story.

Rather than looking at data in isolation, we aim to create a funnel view that showcases the entire customer journey. Key questions to answer include:

• Are we reaching more audiences?
• Are our communications effectively engaging them across various channels (e.g., on-platform, email)?
• Are they taking the desired actions?
• Do we have sales leads as a result?

By examining campaign performance metrics holistically, we move beyond typical open and click-through rates to gain a more comprehensive understanding of our efforts.

9. How do you demonstrate the long-term impact of a marketing investment, such as new technology, on business outcomes like customer retention or revenue growth?

I employ two primary methods to demonstrate the long-term impact of our investments.

First, when introducing new technology, we develop a comprehensive business case that outlines expected efficiency and effectiveness gains. This case serves as a benchmark against which we track our progress.

Then, we measure the performance of our campaigns to assess their effectiveness at scale.

By analyzing campaign metrics, we can determine whether the introduction of additional data and capabilities leads to improved outcomes.

This ongoing evaluation enables us to refine our strategies and optimize results.

To maintain momentum and build a compelling narrative, it is key to remain disciplined in tracking progress.

While developing a business case is crucial, it’s only a theoretical framework. To validate its effectiveness, we rigorously measure our performance against the established benchmarks. This diligence helps us demonstrate tangible results and secure continued investment.

We establish dashboards from the outset as they’re vital for effective tracking. Attempting to retroactively gather data can be challenging and may lead to incomplete or inaccurate information.

By building our measurement framework from the beginning, we’re able to monitor progress, report on successes, and craft a compelling story of our achievements.

10. How do you prioritize which marketing programs or tools to advocate for when faced with limited budgets or competing initiatives?

When faced with limited budgets or competing initiatives, I prioritize marketing programs and tools by focusing on two key areas: reliability and optimization.

First, I ensure that our foundation is solid by investing in reliable execution. This means addressing any operational gaps or inefficiencies to get the business running smoothly.

By doing so, we can establish a strong baseline for future growth.

Next, I focus on optimizing marketing performance through data-driven insights. A well-structured data foundation is crucial, as it enables us to make informed decisions about which tools and initiatives to prioritize.

With a solid data infrastructure in place, we can then evaluate the need for additional solutions, such as a Customer Data Platform (CDP), and assess their potential impact on our marketing performance.

By following this framework, we can effectively allocate resources, maximize ROI, and drive business growth.

11. What techniques have worked for you to gain support from cross-functional teams for an omnichannel marketing program or new martech investment?

Gaining support from cross-functional teams for an omnichannel marketing program or new martech investment requires a strategic approach.

For me, it starts with inspiring and motivating leadership to champion the initiative.

When leaders are invested in a project that’s innovative, transformative, and tangible, they’re more likely to rally their teams behind it.

To build momentum, I focus on creating projects that can be career-defining for team members.

This involves a bold vision, ambitious goals, and exemplary execution standards. By inspiring, recognizing and rewarding individual and team contributions, we can maintain enthusiasm and motivation throughout the project.

Another key technique is to establish a cross-functional core working team.

By involving leaders from dependent areas, we ensure that every stakeholder has skin in the game and a vested interest in the project’s success.

This collaborative approach not only fosters buy-in but also encourages shared ownership and accountability.

12. What advice would you give to younger marketers about building influence and trust when proposing innovative, and sometimes risky, marketing strategies?

Ideas alone are not enough. A lot of times, young people have ideas and they raise their hand, and that’s great. Bring the plan along with the idea.

Because innovation is nothing without execution.

If you bring an idea and you bring a plan on how it would be possible and you bring some key measurable outcomes from it, it’s going to go much farther than if you just bring the idea.

The second thing is to build a sponsor in the organization.

Before you raise your hand for ideas, find a leader or trusted set of team members who can help validate your idea, help plug in additional details that you might need, and connect you to other people so that you can really validate it before you expose it to others.

The last piece is if you’re bringing a risky idea, come with the risk mitigation plan as well.

Not just with the execution plan, but what is the risk mitigation, what is the worst that can happen, how you can scope down the risk, and that will also make it more manageable.

This interview Q&A was hosted with Angela Rueda, Director of Business Marketing Technology at Meta, for Chapter 4 of The Customer Engagement Book: Adapt or Die.

Download the PDF or request a physical copy of the book here.

Reading Time: 8 minutes

While moving quickly and keeping up with the pace of innovation is key for today’s marketing teams, it’s critical to gain stakeholder buy-in and establish internal credibility first.

That’s why we sat down with Phil Gamache, Co-Founder of Humans of Martech, for an insightful Q&A session.

As part of Chapter 4 in “The Customer Engagement Book: Adapt or Die,” we wanted to delve into the strategies and tactics that can help marketers successfully pitch new ideas, tools, and campaigns within their organizations.

Phil, with his extensive experience, shares invaluable insights on everything from building early credibility with small wins to showcasing the value of marketing initiatives to diverse stakeholders.

In this interview, Phil unpacks the nuances of aligning marketing goals with broader business objectives, navigating departmental priorities, and effectively communicating the long-term impact of marketing investments.

Get ready to learn how to leverage data, understand your audience, and master the art of stakeholder mapping to drive successful marketing outcomes. Whether you’re a seasoned marketer or just starting out, Phil’s advice offers a roadmap for building influence and trust, and for pushing innovative ideas forward.

Phil Gamache Q&A Interview

1. Early in your marketing career, what steps did you take to establish credibility when proposing new campaigns, tools, or strategies?

The first thing that comes to mind is getting results, doing the work, keeping your head down, showing the results (good and bad), and communicating that to multiple different stakeholders.

I did a lot of unsexy things that many team members didn’t want to do.

Like fixing URL parameters, standardizing campaign naming conventions, and building proper tracking documentation.

I made friends with key teams. One of my biggest allies early on was Sales. I think marketing loves to live in their own bubble and it’s easy to get caught in the motion and not spend the right amount of time showing how your campaigns directly impact sales performance. That was a fast track to credibility for me.

Something else that helped was focusing on small projects vs making huge swings and taking on massive projects. I learned to pitch tiny optimizations that could be measured in days.

When I noticed our form completion rates were really low, I didn’t propose a complete redesign. Instead, I tested progressive profiling on our highest-traffic form.

We saw big improvements really quickly. That single win got me the green light for bigger changes.

2. How do you showcase the value of a new marketing idea or tool to stakeholders who might not fully understand its importance?

There’s an art to knowing your audience and tailoring that pitch, just like you would for external prospects.

Chat with all your stakeholders and make sure you understand what their OKRs/KPIs are so you can tailor your pitch to show how the impact will ladder up to the metrics they need to improve.

Ultimately though: “How does this make us money?” is the fundamental thing that most senior leaders care about. Your goal is to translate the technical problem into business impact.

I like the “Problem-Impact-Solution” storytelling framework. For example, when pitching a new customer engagement platform, you could:

• Problem: “We’re wasting tons of hours manually sending broadcasts when 70% of these could be drip campaigns”
• Impact: “Our team spends 25 hours per week on manual sends, and we’re missing prime engagement windows for international customers”
• Solution: “This tool can automate these workflows and hit customers in their time zones, which similar companies have seen increase engagement by 40%”

I also like to hit my network and chat with folks that have recently completed similar implementations so you can add to your deck things like “Company X implemented this and saw a 3x increase in qualified leads within 60 days” hits different than “this could improve our efficiency.”

Also, always run a POC first.

Stakeholders don’t care about tools – they care about outcomes.

They don’t need to understand the technical details of how your new CDP works. They need to understand that it’ll help them hit their numbers.

3. What role does industry knowledge or competitor benchmarking play in building credibility as a marketer?

The value of industry knowledge is in the nuance of differing opinions. There isn’t a perfect answer to any problem.

Two leading experts could disagree on the right approach. All you can do is gather data and have a more informed opinion to bring back to your company’s problems.

Industry knowledge should inform your decisions, not make them for you. That’s what builds real credibility.

Competitor benchmarking is a different animal.

I love looking at what competitors are doing, to make sure we’re doing something different. Drastically different.

Competitors shouldn’t decide your strategy, I don’t really care what tool they use, what their H1 is or what their welcome emails say.

4. How do you identify the most influential stakeholders when introducing new marketing programs or technologies?

Stakeholder mapping is one of the most underrated parts of many jobs. Sounds boring, but it’s so key.

One of my favorite bosses had a motto of doing “coffee tests” to find influential stakeholders.

Like mapping out the decision chain is part of it, but the next step is figuring out who each person in that chain goes to for coffee chats before making decisions.

Sometimes it’s not super obvious. Your CMO might be really tight with a senior product manager and run a lot of decisions by them because they fit the company’s ICP.

From a purchasing/budget perspective, I’d chat with internal folks who recently secured new programs or tools and then walk me through the list of decision-making processes and who was the hardest to get buy-in from.

But can’t ignore the internal end users, ultimately they play a big role in championing certain things internally.

One last tip: Always look for the people who’ve been at the company the longest, those tenured folks.

They often have hidden influence networks or secrets about processes or insider info that aren’t obvious on any org chart.

I once saw a 15-year veteran HR person who had more real influence than some VPs because everyone trusted their judgment.

5. What strategies do you use to align marketing goals with broader business objectives to gain leadership buy-in?

I’m a big fan of KPI software when you have a PM on each team responsible for keeping it updated and neatly organized.

Usually best if it’s an org-wide tool that starts with company top line objectives, then you pick the most relevant objectives, and you build key results from marketing that will directly contribute to those objectives.

It’s basically creating objective chains that ladder down to projects and marketing goals. Then you list projects with milestones related to those KRs.

Link out to a deeper dive on “how does this project impact that metric” and go into use cases and predictions.

6. Can you share an example of how you navigated differing priorities between marketing and another department, such as sales or product, to secure approval for a campaign or tool?

Roadmap planning and debate meetings help you get alignment with other teams on the road ahead so there’s fewer surprises and less pushback.

Building allies within other departments and making sure they understand how your projects also contribute to their KPIs.

I like spending time getting to know the day-to-day pains of other departments that compete with my priorities and try to identify overlaps where we could both benefit from something I’m pitching.

7. When pitching a new marketing strategy or technology, how do you structure your presentation to resonate with both creative and data-driven stakeholders?

Part of what makes martech pros and marketing ops pros’ jobs really hard is the variety of stakeholders, creative and technical.

You have to wow a CMO with unique ideas, but you also need to impress a CTO with infrastructure considerations and documentation.

There’s an art to layering your pitch if you have to present in front of both audiences.

Like one slide with data and the next with a customer testimonial supporting the data type of thing.

Or showing visual mockups of the new customer flow and then showing how we’re going to design the A/B test.

8. What role does customer engagement data or campaign performance metrics play in convincing stakeholders to adopt a new idea?

Start with the money but show how customer engagement metrics ladder up to revenue.

I learned that raw engagement metrics mean nothing without context. Instead of saying “Our welcome email has a 15% open rate,” you could frame it as “We’re leaving $500K on the table annually because 85% of new customers never see our core value proposition.”

But the key is tying engagement metrics to revenue, like data echoes.

Low email engagement > leads to poor product activation > leads to higher churn or lower repeat purchase > total cost is approximately $X.

Doesn’t always need to be big flashy numbers as long as it’s something the stakeholder cares about.

9. How do you demonstrate the long-term impact of a marketing investment, such as new technology, on business outcomes like customer retention or revenue growth?

Similar thoughts as the last question, tying immediate metrics impacted by the new investment to lagging indicators all the way to revenue.

It doesn’t always have to be metrics and revenue though, especially for big, hairy implementations. I like setting up implementation milestones, realistic and time-bound.

Long-term impact implementations are really hard to measure. Focus on showing a clear path to value and having enough early indicators to prove you’re on the right track.

10. How do you prioritize which marketing programs or tools to advocate for when faced with limited budgets or competing initiatives?

I’m a fan of assessing impact, alignment, and lift.

Operational Impact: Current, measurable pain points and inefficiencies.

For example, “Our team spends 15 hours per week manually updating spreadsheets” or “Our current email system has a 10% failure rate in delivery.” These are tangible, immediate costs we can quantify.

• Strategic Alignment: How well the initiative aligns with broader company goals.
• Lift: Implementation, including team time, technical resources, and organizational change management.

11. What techniques have worked for you to gain support from cross-functional teams for an omnichannel marketing program or new martech investment?

Make time for a workshop with as many people as possible. Let each team define what failure looks like and bring ideas to the table ahead of time.

Break those up into quick wins and longer-term wins. Make everyone feel like a co-creator.

Your goal isn’t to convince everyone or persuade people, you want to create a shared vision that everyone feels ownership of. That’s alignment.

12. What advice would you give to younger marketers about building influence and trust when proposing innovative, and sometimes risky, marketing strategies?

Different folks have different risk tolerance. And it’s a wide spectrum.

Experimentation is a secret weapon to proving incremental impact of your ideas but also de-risking big bets.

Revamping new onboarding experience? Let’s test it on 10% of traffic first. Want to invest in a new channel? Let’s test it on a subset of our audience first.

Highlight things like manual override and risk buffers and rollback plans to make people feel safer. Show folks that you’ll be on top of what could go wrong and how you’ll detect it right away.

Always run a proof of concept when possible. Run a pilot on a subset of audiences on a small budget and walk into your meeting with results from that.

Also sometimes folks aren’t resistant to risk but resistant to change. Have 1:1s with those folks and find solutions and listen to them closely.

This interview Q&A was hosted with Phil Gamache, Co-Founder of Humans of Martech, for Chapter 4 of The Customer Engagement Book: Adapt or Die.

Download the PDF or request a physical copy of the book here.

Reading Time: 11 minutes

The Martech landscape is evolving at breakneck speed, and to help us navigate this complex terrain, we’ve turned to none other than Scott Brinker, VP Platform Ecosystem at HubSpot & Editor at chiefmartec.com (AKA “the Godfather of Martech”), to help us understand how technology fuels customer engagement.

As part of “The Customer Engagement Book: Adapt or Die,” Chapter 3 focuses on technology’s pivotal role, and this interview with Scott delves into how customer engagement campaign strategies have fundamentally transformed.

We discuss the critical tools and technologies driving this change, and what marketers must understand to leverage Martech effectively.

Scott provides essential insights into building a robust campaign foundation, understanding the modern customer journey, and the vital skills marketers need to succeed in today’s tech-driven environment, including in-depth perspectives on AI and automation.

Scott Brinker Q&A Interview

1. How has customer engagement campaign strategy evolved over the past five years as a result of the evolving Martech landscape?

I think there are two things that are really at the heart of driving these more advanced campaigns and programs that we’re running. First of all, there is a heck of a lot more data.

We’re getting data from different marketing touchpoints, and so there is a lot of technology to power that.

And then the other side of it is we continue to see an expansion of engagement channels and engagement tactics. Some very interesting things are starting to happen here around AI and AI agents.

So, when you think about trying to put together comprehensive campaigns and programs here, you’re looking at the Martech capabilities.

2. What are some of the critical modern-day tools and technologies for customer engagement, and how has the Martech stack changed over the last few years?

There’s typically a data layer.

Historically, that was things like CRMs. Over time it also became Customer Data Platforms (CDPs). And even more recently you have folks who are using things like their cloud data warehouses as their CDP.

That’s where the foundation is, the source managing this data about our audience and who we’re engaging with.

On top of that, you typically see a platform being used for orchestration, particularly through email campaigns or personalization sent to websites or push channels.

The label here has changed over the years. Now, they’re more commonly called customer engagement platforms, CEPs.

Those are your two foundations: the data layer and the orchestration layer.

And then, very often, there are complementary things: What are you doing to actually run your web experience and your web apps? Whether this is a DXP or something like that, if you’re an e-commerce business, it might be an e-commerce platform.

Those are the three core things from a Martech perspective.

And then you have a large number of things that surround it. In Martech, you might have platforms that you’re using specifically for social media management and marketing.

If you’re doing content marketing, there’s the distribution of the content, which typically happens through customer engagement platforms or your DXP.

And there’s a bunch of even further niche solutions that revolve around those core three platforms.

3. What foundational elements must marketers have in place to make Martech an effective precursor to campaign success?

Again, there’s infrastructure-level capabilities that you need in place. Once you’ve got that, then it becomes a little bit more tailoring the capabilities you develop in your stack to the particular strategies that you want to execute.

I always highly recommend that you start by mapping your customer journey.

We know the customer journey, in reality, is never as clean and as linear as we make it look like when we’re mapping this stuff out. But mapping it out, even if it’s a bit of a decision tree, is still really useful to understand.

As people come to us through different mechanisms or through different intents, what tends to be their process? What are the things that they’re trying to overcome to make decisions as to whether or not we’re the right product or service for them?

And so, as you map that out and you understand who those audiences are and how they reach you and what they’re looking for, that allows you to start to plan the sorts of capabilities you need to have to be able to deliver terrific experience at each of those points.

4. How can marketers get the customer journey map to be as close to what is actually happening as possible?

This is one of the wonderful things about the state of analytics technology here in marketing: It is able to now get beyond a single universal journey path and start to look at different cohorts, how they’re changing over time, and what those journeys look like.

We’re at this really interesting inflection point where fundamental behaviors of how people find and engage with businesses is starting to change.

Right now, with AI and AI tools, you’re starting to see some of these shifts.

Before, we had this very clean pattern of how things worked with classic Google search, and now that you’ve got things like Gemini giving you the answers rather than the links, and you have people going to other agents like ChatGPT or Anthropic.

Companies need to experiment with these changes and closely monitor who in their customer base is starting to shift their patterns of discovery and engagement.

5. How can marketers use Martech to ensure they are interpreting data in a way that aligns with customer expectations and behaviors?

The first thing is you need to make sure you are actually getting the data on the different touchpoints that you have with customers. There are so many touchpoints that customers have with us digitally that it’s not unusual for a lot of companies to have gaps in visibility.

There’s also very often just the challenge of alignment.

We might tag things a certain way in this channel, and then we tag things differently in this other channel. And so when we start to aggregate that data to try and get a more holistic view of customer behaviors and patterns, things don’t always line up perfectly.

This becomes one of the primary jobs, like a great marketing ops team is making sure we’re getting the instrumentation, we’re getting the data into the right place, and that we’re coming up with a taxonomy and a schema to make sure this data aligns in a way that now we can actually start to run reporting and start to drive insights off of things that span that journey rather than being isolated in individual silos.

6. What new skills do customer marketers need to have to be successful in today’s landscape, particularly when it comes to leveraging Martech for campaign planning and execution?

You need to be able to think like a software developer a bit.

And I’m not saying everyone in marketing needs to go out and become a software developer, but “programming” these customer journeys and experiences, designing them, deciding how they’re going to work, deciding what capabilities we need to make them work that way.

I think honestly, the more marketers have a good understanding of thinking about that in a programmatic mindset, the more valuable it is because they can have much more concrete ideas of the flow or the experience they want to create.

Data skills are super useful. You don’t have to be a data engineer, you don’t have to be a data scientist, but being more and more comfortable spelunking with this data because the tools now make it easier than ever to get access, to ask questions, but you have to be a savvy consumer of this data to know the right questions to ask what the signs are that the data is actually trustworthy?

And then I’d say the creative or implementation side of this. There are so many amazing tools coming out on the market that can empower marketers to create more ambitious content and experiences, to do it faster and cheaper.

But you have to engage with these tools and learn them, to have that regimen of constantly experimenting with these new tools, expanding your toolbox.

7. What are some recommendations for how marketers can upskill themselves to stay ahead of technological advancements and evolving customer expectations?

First and foremost, accept that it’s an infinite challenge.

This is one of these things where none of us ever again in our lifetime will ever be done learning whatever we’ve learned today. There’s something new that’s just on the horizon we’re gonna have to look at tomorrow. So part of my advice is: pace yourself.

That being said, when you start to look at building these systematic ways of doing training and enablement into the marketing organization, are you empowering people to have the money to go and try new tools?

Are you providing them guardrails for how they can experiment with new tools to learn how they work?

Do you have a mechanism for peer-to-peer learning depending on the size of your organization? As people experiment and learn things, are they encouraged to turn around and teach others? Is there an exchange of ideas for that? Do you look at ways in which you are able to systematize some of that enablement capability?

It’s funny, marketers, we think a tremendous amount about sales enablement.

A lot of marketing teams think far less about marketing enablement. Some of these stats that you’ve seen over the years, often the Gartner one is probably the most cited one where they talk about “What’s been the utilization of your Martech stack over the years?” It’s been dropping from 60 to 50 to 40 to 30%.

What that data is saying is we’ve got so many marketing departments out there that have very sophisticated tech stacks, but they don’t yet have either the talent, people skills, processes, or structural frameworks in place to let those teams harness that capability.

I think getting really serious about investing in that learning and development programs for the marketing team is probably one of the best investments you could make given how fast all this technology keeps evolving.

8. How can marketers address the challenge of integrating Martech tools with existing systems and workflows?

It’s funny: on all these surveys for marketers over the years about Martech and what’s either their biggest pain point or one of their biggest things that’s important to them when buying technology, integrations is almost always in the top three.

It’s like if it doesn’t integrate, it doesn’t matter.

This really does need to be one of your top three requirements in evaluating any new technology that you’re going to bring into your Martech stack: how well does it integrate with the things I already have?

It’s an important enough issue because the tech stack isn’t static. It’s changing. There’s going to be other new tools you’re going to want to bring in over time.

A little bit of it’s just sort of like understanding their philosophy on integrations.

How much coverage does their API have? How many people in their partner ecosystem are either building integrations to them or to those other companies? Are those integrations up to date? What are the ratings and reviews like? If they have a marketplace, it’s like all these things.

9. How would you recommend effectively vetting whether or not a new tool is going to work?

The easiest level is you have a set of existing products in your tech stack that you want to keep, or you at least need to keep in the short term.

The first thing is a very easy thing to evaluate. Does this company even have an integration available out of the box for it?

If they do, then the next question is digging into, okay, well, what use cases does it support?

What data are they sharing? Do they have the ability to trigger workflow sequences from one to another? Is there any sort of user interface integration?

If you have your core platform and you’re integrating this other product, does it actually appear in the user experience for people who are working in that platform on a day-by-day basis?

What about governance? What governance framework is there if I’m integrating these products with my platform?

This sounds like a lot of work because it is a lot of work.

You really do want to have a good framework that evaluates each one of these integrations on data, workflow, user experience and governance, and make sure that the use cases you have in mind are actually going to be covered by it.

10. What are the current shortcuts where AI and automation can significantly streamline the campaign planning and execution process?

I think the two use cases where we’re seeing AI be effectively applied today are, one, the brainstorming and creative process, people working with some of these LLMs as brainstorming partners.

I can say this, having done this myself: It’s actually surprising how powerful that creative back and forth can go in ideation and digging deeper into it.

The second place where we’re seeing very concrete adoption of AI is in that production process. I would say most of the cases are not about just letting AI loose to create something on its own and then go off to the world with no human intervention.

It’s actually much more about, okay, we have a certain production process of what it took to write this piece of content, how long does it take to get to first draft?

How quickly can we edit it down? Are we going to turn it into video? Are we going to turn it into audio? If we’ve recorded a podcast and video, how do we edit that?

All these things that previously took a tremendous amount of manual work or required skills that people had to be very specifically trained in, you’re seeing more and more AI products that reduce the amount of manual work in that production process and also make it more accessible.

11. On the flip side, where is human-level strategy still required to ensure campaigns are creative, effective and aligned with customer expectations?

I think where AI isn’t yet showing up, but I expect it will, is in the evaluation of what’s working.

If you’ve come up with a great idea, you’ve produced it, you’ve got it out into the world, now you’re wanting to look at the data to get impact and insights. A lot of that is still the sort of analytics work that we’ve been doing in marketing for these past five, ten years, anyway.

I think what’s exciting is we’re starting to see some of these AI tools that are going to be able to connect to more data, particularly unstructured data.

So getting access to things like phone calls or emails or longer reviews that people wrote or things like that, and letting AI synthesize insights from that, as well as the more quantitative data.

That will be able to help inform marketers as they bring new programs and campaigns online.

12. How can marketers strike the right balance between relying on AI-driven tools and then applying their own strategic insights?

This is where the marketer is still the driver of the strategy.

Ultimately, what insights do they consider to be valuable? The marketer is still in control.

They’re going to make the decision of, okay, which of these things do I want to embrace? But they’re leaning on the AI to broaden the horizon of things that they’re willing to consider.

The second thing about making production faster and cheaper and more democratized is it allows us to go from a conceptual idea to at the very least a prototype, if not something actually out in production in the field, much more quickly, much less expensively.

And then based on the reactions we get, we can accelerate the speed by which we might iterate changes based on the feedback we’re getting.

13. With technology evolving rapidly, how can marketers future-proof their Martech investments to remain effective long term?

That comes back to integration. Because your Martech stack is going to change.

You’re going to have new requirements, you’re going to have new needs, you’re going to have new things you want to plug in.

And the only problem is today you don’t know exactly what those things are going to be next year or the year after that, so what you’re trying to do in designing the modern Martech stack make sure that the architecture and all the pieces that you’re bringing into that, they’re designed for change.

Anything that you have in your stack, I think you want to be asking the question of “How do I bring new things into it, how do I remove things from it?

If I actually want to remove this thing and replace it with something else, how easy or hard is that going to be and why? Where are those dependencies?”

This interview Q&A was hosted with Scott Brinker, VP Platform Ecosystem at HubSpot & Editor at chiefmartec.com for Chapter 3 of The Customer Engagement Book: Adapt or Die.

Download the PDF or request a physical copy of the book here.

Reading Time: 9 minutes

For Chapter 3 of “The Customer Engagement Book: Adapt or Die,” our exploration of customer engagement in the evolving Martech landscape led us to an insightful interview with Movable Ink’s Director, Strategy, Media and Technology, Tiffany Fitzgerald.

This discussion delves into the significant shifts in campaign strategy over the past five years, driven by a more dynamic and data-centric digital ecosystem. Tiffany highlights the move from linear, company-driven paths to fluid, individualized customer experiences, enabled by the abundance of new data.

She also discusses the critical modern-day tools and technologies for customer engagement, including AI and deep learning in analytics, voice-of-customer tools, and personalization tools.

Read the full interview below to discover the foundational elements for effective Martech use, how marketers can align data interpretation with customer behavior, and the new skills required for customer marketers today.

Tiffany Fitzgerald Q&A Interview

1. How has customer engagement campaign strategy evolved over the past five years as a result of the evolving Martech landscape?

In the last five years, we’ve evolved to be a more complete digital omnichannel ecosystem. Campaign strategy stopped being thought of as a linear experience, and instead a more fluid, individualized experience.

Five years ago, the happy path would have been dictated by us, and we would have been leading users and customers. Now it’s led by our customers and users. This shift has been largely enabled by data.

The emergence of all this new data has shifted the way we think of the customer journey. The marketing funnel is useful in a lot of ways, but as our world has become increasingly more intricate, the funnel doesn’t work as well as it used to.

One of the things that I heard this year was an interview with Ashley Faus, who’s the head of Lifecycle Marketing at Atlassian. She described the modern-day campaign engagement strategy as a playground.

Thinking of the customer journey in a non-linear way helps us answer common challenge statements: How do we meet customers exactly where they are and lead them to their next step? How do we create environments that lead to higher retention and referrals?

If you start to think of your campaign experience as a playground instead of a funnel or an hourglass, you start to focus on creating points in time that are personalized, engaging, formative, and beautiful.

And these, of course, are just the foundational tenets of good marketing. They always have been. But in a digital-first environment, we have to help our customers to navigate information and channels that otherwise can be overwhelming

2: What do you think are some critical modern-day tools and technologies for customer engagement? And how has the Martech stack changed over the last few years?

There’s been a ton of change in the last few years, obviously due to the public eye really understanding what AI and generative AI can do. Some of the ways AI has been impactful is through deep learning in analytics.

Having a deep learning tool, something embedded in your analytics and data platform that goes beyond robotic processing or machine learning to help your team identify interesting trends and anomalies.

Five years ago, data analytics teams were left on their own to do all this work manually… Now there are a lot of great tools that do this computation and analysis, often better than we’re able to with the time and people resources we have.

Having a strong voice-of-customer tool, focusing on collecting real-time feedback from your users and customers at all points of your experience journey—has really gone from being a nice-to-have to table stakes. Having a strong mobile service provider is another one, enhancing and easily bringing SMS and mobile into your campaign repertoire.

And a strong digital analytics platform also allows you to track attribution, see what’s working in real time, and iteratively and nimbly test different ideas and approaches. This is so important because it helps to prove ROI for tech investments.

Last but not least is a personalization tool that allows you to take those insights and data and activate them to create one-to-one experiences across all of your segmentations and campaigns.

3: What foundational elements must marketers have in place to make Martech an effective precursor to campaign success?

A marketer should have a strong data strategy, and the best data strategy is usually co-created and embedded with their data team and their upstream executives.

It should ladder up directly to organizational KPIs so the team is able to consistently prove their technology investments’ worth year over year.

Another foundational element is strong relationships across their entire marketing and brand department. Creative and brand approaches need to be aligned.

That’s important for customer trust, that there’s a cohesive experience across all the channels and touchpoints.

Creative investment is necessary to give you that edge out there in the market.

4: How can marketers use Martech to ensure they are interpreting data in ways that align with customer expectations and behaviors?

There are four ways that marketers can use Martech to ensure they’re interpreting their data the correct way.

One, it’s really important to have a smart customer insight tool in your back pocket because it can be really difficult to do this on your own.

A good tool will do a lot of this interpretation for you, so you’re able to quickly iterate on the insights.

We all know what it’s like to have to iterate on stale data that’s six months, a year, or even two years old. And at that point, everything, the whole world, has changed.

You should have a tool—and it can be the same tool—that helps you visualize your data and analytical interpretations in a way that you can show your executives exactly what’s happening in your customer experience playground.

A lot of tools have great dashboards that can lend themselves easily to you being able to take a couple images off this dashboard or create a custom dashboard for your decision makers and allow them to see what you’re learning from your data analytics so that you can be quick and iterative in your decision making and testing.

If you’re able to layer in deep learning, as we talked about previously, or even an LLM-based query tool, this layering will allow you to query with natural language and get back plain-spoken answers to your questions.

It’s really important to tell a story with the data. Oftentimes I’ll see teams, they’re presenting loads of data to their leaders and even though that raw data may have really interesting insights, decision makers and teams don’t need to know every single insight.

Instead, bring two or three top-level actions to your decision-makers and your executive team, support those actions with the data you found, tell a very clear and consistent story, and then have a communications plan to back it up.

5: What new skills do customer marketers need to be successful in today’s landscape, particularly when it comes to leveraging Martech for campaign planning and execution?

Testing strategy and execution. And strong analysis and reporting skills. You have to be able to understand, interpret, and tell a story with your own data.

We need to do this quickly so we’re not waiting, and then by the time we respond, we’re putting out something that doesn’t resonate anymore.

You need to have a high-level understanding of AI models. The different types of AI — generative AI, deep learning and machine learning — and how to leverage them at a basic level.

You need to have a good omnichannel strategic perspective.

How do you think about the omnichannel environment, and where does mobile come in for you? How do you leverage social? Have an idea of how each channel is working and needs to evolve.

6: How can marketers upskill themselves to stay ahead of technological advancements and evolving customer expectations?

First, you can follow marketers you admire on social, and I’m sure most of us already do.

This is a great opportunity to see how they’re thinking across verticals globally and technological advancements and evolving consumer expectations.

Second, you can attend conferences hosted by brands you trust and attended by peers you want to connect with. You should also be receiving a lot of rich education from the brands and vendors you’re in partnership with.

Have your playlist updated with podcasts that fill your knowledge cup. Take advantage of free courses. 

Last, learn from your team, especially as you continue to rise up in your career.

You should be learning from those who are working under you on your team as well as above you. You have fresh folks coming in, people who are straight out of college? These are great folks to learn from — you’ll get a lot of new perspectives and ideas.

7: How can marketers address the challenges of integrating Martech tools with existing systems and workflows?

Leverage your partners to help you problem-solve. Your vendor partners want you to succeed. Often, they have relationships and partnerships with each other that you can benefit from.

Engage them in helping you integrate your Martech tools with what you already had existing with your systems and your workflows.

Don’t do it alone. Include your tech team so you can have a design-first approach to integrations and upgrades and all of the teams that are going to be involved in the change.

8: Can you tell me a little bit more about what a design-first approach means?

A design-first approach will take the processes and workflows you have internally and map those to your customer experience.

However your customer interacts with your brand, what are the tech stack components that are laddering up to that experience? And then internally, who’s powering those different tech stack experiences?

So once you’re centering on that design, you can plan your processes, systems and workflows around what your customer needs for their journey to be successful.

Likely there are already artifacts that exist and have led you in the past to understand your customer experiences, your people, and your tech. These need to be updated regularly, including when you’re integrating new parts of your Martech stack.

9: What are the current shortcuts where AI and automation can significantly streamline the campaign planning and execution process?

The biggest place you can have AI help you immediately is data analytics.

I think this is one of the places where it’s strongest right now. The large language models are helping query our large data sets using language, and we can also leverage deep learning to find insights we wouldn’t have known.

Instead of just seeing a historical view of your data and analytics and then being able to decision based on what customers have always done, it’s using deep learning to teach itself patterns and be able to predict what could happen in the future and action off of what might be the next step.

10: On the flip side, where is human-level strategy still required to ensure campaigns are creative, effective and aligned with customer expectations?

AI has in no way replaced the human mind and we still need creativity, we still need innovation. Good marketing has always broken the mold. It’s always subverted expectations.

That has always been what makes a leader in good marketing as opposed to a laggard. Are you thinking of the next great thing? Or are you replicating what you’ve already seen?

Original ideation and creativity are squarely in the human brain realm for the foreseeable future.

So however you’re using AI, make sure that you’re still leveraging yourself, your team, your workshops, your brainstorming to come up with the higher level creative, innovative approaches.

11: How can marketers strike the right balance between relying on AI-driven tools and applying their own strategic insights?

Use AI to do what it’s really strong at and your brain isn’t right off the bat.

So in the areas of machine and deep learning, this is an area where most brains don’t just naturally look at a large group of numbers and can say, “Oh my gosh, I’ve already figured out what the algorithm is and I have an idea where this customer is going to go next.

And I think you should serve this customer X.” So, in this data-first marketing world, leverage AI there right away.

Next, leverage AI and automation in insights reporting.

When you get all those insights, when you have an idea, it can really help you test and automate so that your team can be working on what it works on best, which is the creative approach, the way your brand connects with your customers, continuing to learn how that works and continuing to evolve.

12: With technology evolving rapidly, how can marketers future-proof their Martech investments to remain effective long-term?

Evaluate your stack and investments to ensure you’re set up for success, and be flexible about what that stack looks like.

A part of that is testing to understand a baseline for what’s working and what we should expect out of our tech stack. And then expect to move the needle year over year. Set up data and analytics, whatever’s required to know how much ROI you bring the organization from your Martech investments.

Then make sure you’re loud about what you achieve and clearly illustrate your wins, your learnings, your growth opportunities to your executive leadership team.

If you’re bringing them in and you’re loudly saying, “Hey, we tested this, we found it wasn’t as effective as this, but that means we know why,” that will build you credibility when you’re ready to share great results.

When it comes to your renewal cycles, you’re not asking for the investment without your team understanding exactly what they were getting out of it all year.

You want them to be like, “Oh, yeah, of course, I think we’ve gotten a lot from your Martech investment this year. So of course you can have that budget and maybe even more for the next year.”

And then, even though it’s tempting to look for a one-tool-for-everything solution, there are smaller applications that are often the answer to creating whatever bespoke tech solution that really works for your organization and team.

You can definitely start with those larger tools that get a lot done, but be open to bolting on smaller applications that do exactly what your team needs to do to have that creative and innovative edge.

This interview Q&A was hosted with Tiffany Fitzgerald, Director, Strategy, Media and Technology at Movable Ink for Chapter 3 of The Customer Engagement Book: Adapt or Die.

Download the PDF or request a physical copy of the book here.

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Understanding and mastering customer engagement is a necessity for today’s B2C marketers.

That’s why we sat down with Stacey Hunsdon, a seasoned lifecycle marketing professional, to delve into the nuances of customer engagement within the modern business context as part of our recently published book on customer engagement. 

Stacey brings a unique perspective to “Chapter 2: Impact,” and shares how customer engagement is measured and optimized in the fast-paced world of streaming, where watch hours reign supreme.

In this interview, she unpacks strategies for demonstrating the financial value of retention, how to balance acquisition with loyalty, and the pivotal role data plays in driving successful engagement initiatives.

Join us as we uncover Stacey’s expertise and glean actionable advice that can transform how you approach customer engagement in your organization.

Stacey Hunsdon Q&A Interview

1. How do you define the impact of customer engagement on a company’s bottom line?

At the company I work for—a leading streaming service—customer engagement is evaluated differently from traditional retail or B2B models. Our primary metric is viewer watch hours.

When assessing the performance of email and push campaigns, we measure success by the incremental lift in watch hours attributable to users who received the campaigns. These watch hours directly translate to monetized ad revenue.

We leverage randomized control testing by assigning a portion of users to receive the campaign (test group), while another segment does not (control group). This approach allows us to accurately isolate and quantify the incremental impact of our messaging efforts.

2. How can marketers demonstrate the financial value of retaining customers versus acquiring new ones?

Customer acquisition is often driven by incentives such as discounts or time-sensitive offers designed to prompt an initial purchase or signup. These promotions, while effective, are typically short-term plays.

In my opinion, customer retention needs to start from day one. A well-designed onboarding or welcome series is critical to setting the tone for long-term engagement and maximizing lifetime value. 

I recommend implementing a structured engagement program—for example, over a 45-day period—that educates users, encourages usage, and drives deeper product interaction (or in our case, more viewing hours). Ongoing communication is critical. Many customers drop off shortly after the initial interaction simply due to a lack of follow-up.

A well-paced messaging cadence is essential to maintaining their interest and guiding them toward loyalty.

3. Why do you believe retention should take precedence over acquisition in a company’s strategy?

Retention is rooted in brand loyalty.

When customers consistently experience value and positive interactions with a brand, they’re more likely to stay engaged and become advocates. Some brands stand out in my inbox (I open every email they send) because I associate them with quality, relevance, or exceptional service.

That emotional connection transforms occasional customers into long-term loyalists. The key is to nurture that connection without overwhelming them.

It’s important to strike a balance—keeping customers feeling appreciated and engaged without oversaturating them with offers or constant outreach.

4. How do you balance the need to retain existing customers with the pressure to grow through new customer acquisition?

While I’m not directly responsible for new acquisitions, I do manage initiatives around reacquisitions, particularly targeting lapsed or cancelled customers.

Reacquisition efforts are typically driven by promotional offers. For example, our largest win-back campaign of the year occurs during Black Friday.

We identify former subscribers and reach out with compelling promotional messaging, which consistently proves effective in bringing many of them back. 

Often, these customers initially joined through a promotion, left when it expired, and then return once a new offer becomes available. We understand these behavioral patterns and plan accordingly.

5. How can companies effectively leverage data to measure the success of customer engagement initiatives?

Data tools like Tableau are invaluable for building interactive dashboards that track performance metrics.

In our case, we measure key data points such as total watch hours generated, viewing behaviors by genre or title, and engagement duration. This backend data allows us to make informed decisions on audience segmentation and campaign targeting. 

We also integrate CRM tools to centralize and visualize campaign performance. Many of these platforms offer robust, out-of-the-box analytics capabilities that are essential for anyone running a scaled CRM program.

Having access to these insights is critical for strategic decision-making.

6. How do you tie customer engagement data to broader business KPIs like revenue and customer lifetime value or profitability?

For our business, the primary KPI is watch hours, as those directly correlate to ad revenue. Users on ad-supported plans generate revenue based on the volume of ads served during their viewing sessions.

In a retail setting, the same principle applies: engagement data—such as site visits, product views, or abandoned carts—can inform personalized messaging that ultimately drives conversions.

It’s all about aligning behavioral data with business outcomes.

7. What strategies have you used to prove the ROI of customer engagement programs to key stakeholders?

At a previous role in the banking industry, I developed a 45-day onboarding program for new checking account holders. We tracked downstream engagement such as credit card adoption, mortgage applications, or overdraft enrollments.

Every 90 days, I produced a report summarizing the program’s performance—highlighting both the conversion metrics and unsubscribe behavior. This helped us understand not only what was working, but also where we could reduce unnecessary touchpoints.

It’s important to measure both engagement and disengagement to maximize ROI.

8. How can marketers overcome challenges in attributing revenue or profitability to their customer engagement efforts?

Attribution starts with tracking. Whether through campaign identifiers, direct response codes, or digital tracking pixels, it’s essential to tag each touchpoint. For email, attribution is straightforward thanks to built-in analytics.

With offline channels like direct mail, attribution is more complex—but still possible through control groups and unique offer codes.

Using test vs. holdout methodologies allows us to gauge the true incremental impact of a campaign, even when exact attribution is difficult.

9. What advice would you give to marketers trying to build a business case for investing in customer engagement technology?

I think it’s a no-brainer to have a customer engagement technology platform. I wouldn’t even imagine not having one if I had my own business.

For companies just getting started, I recommend piloting a lower-cost solution for a limited time, say six months, to test its impact.

From there, you can scale up to more advanced tools as your needs evolve. Many platforms now offer intuitive automation features, making it easier than ever to experiment with cadence, segmentation, and messaging strategy.

The results speak for themselves once testing is in motion.

This interview Q&A was hosted with Stacey Hunsdon, Senior CRM / Lifecycle Manager at a leading streaming service for Chapter 2 of The Customer Engagement Book: Adapt or Die.

Download the PDF or request a physical copy of the book here.

Reading Time: 8 minutes

We sat down with Natalie Miles, Grammarly’s Staff Product Manager, to discuss this crucial aspect of business strategy.

As part of our research for the recently published “Customer Engagement Book: Adapt or Die,” we wanted to gain insights from an expert who navigates these challenges daily.

Natalie brings a wealth of experience in understanding customer behavior and leveraging data to drive meaningful engagement. In this interview, she shares her perspective on the true impact of customer engagement on a company’s bottom line, the key metrics for measuring ROI, and why retention should often take precedence over acquisition.

She also provides valuable insights on how to leverage technology and data to personalize customer experiences and prove the value of engagement programs to stakeholders.

Natalie Miles Q&A Interview

1. How do you define the impact of customer engagement on a company’s bottom line?

To me, defining the impact of customer engagement on a bottom line is all about how our engagement efforts can ultimately connect to lifetime value or, depending on your business model, Average Revenue Per User (ARPU).

When we talk about engagement, what we’re really talking about is the health of our long-term customer relationships, making sure they’re nurtured by consistent engagement touchpoints and helping to drive predictable revenue and reducing risks associated with high churn.

2. What are the most important metrics for measuring the ROI of customer engagement programs?

It really depends on your business, your business model, and the natural frequency of your product.

This is one of the first things companies need to figure out: what is your customer engagement strategy and what is that hierarchy of metrics? How do you actually influence customer lifetime value?

The problem with lifetime value is it’s not a great KPI or benchmark to anchor your product and marketing efforts around because it’s such a lagging indicator. You need to figure out what are those proxy metrics or behaviors or actions that tell you whether someone is likely to retain for a longer period of time and increase their LTV.

Companies need to figure out how to create engagement metrics that can be influenced by growth, product, and marketing efforts.

3. Everyone has heard that customer retention is more important than acquisition and costs less. How can marketers demonstrate the financial value of retention versus acquiring new customers?

Hopefully, you can compare your acquisition costs versus retention costs. Especially if you’re running paid marketing, there’s often a pretty large expense associated with that versus potentially smaller costs with retention efforts, where you might be running some targeted incentives or discounts to keep your existing users.

I think especially measuring incremental value is important—showing how when we keep users for an additional month or year, what is the additional average revenue from that retention period? How much incremental LTV do we get?

Then of course, running a cohort analysis. Hopefully, you can create some sort of holdout group where you can look at users where you’re creating more retention-type interventions versus the holdout, where you’re excluding them from those retention interventions.

This helps you understand how much higher value the users with retention treatments are in the long run.

4. Why do you believe retention should take precedence over acquisition in a company’s strategy?

All things being equal, if you take Company A and Company B—where Company A does acquisition better and Company B does retention better—I would always bet on Company B.

One reason is cost-effectiveness.

We just talked about how retaining customers is much cheaper in the long run than acquiring new ones. It also creates predictable revenue, where your loyal customers give you stable recurring revenue streams, especially in the SaaS or subscription business model space.

And as we discussed, good retention should be a flywheel for your acquisition efforts. Your engaged customers are going to be your best brand promoters.

If you can leverage a referral channel, that’s lower acquisition costs over time as well. Ultimately, happy customers are going to be your best marketers in the end.

5. How do you balance the need to retain existing customers with the pressure to grow through new customer acquisition?

It’s going to depend on how mature your business is and how mature your marketing channels are. It makes a lot of sense as a new company to invest a lot of time and energy on your acquisition efforts.

Typically though, what you see is over time, as your churn portfolio gets bigger, there’s suddenly this realization of “Wow, we have this massive churn population—we need to do something about that.”

Which means you should be focusing on retention, because the best churn or resurrection strategy is actually a customer retention strategy.

Usually when we start to see churn numbers grow to a significant volume, that’s one piece. The other piece is, especially if you’re running paid acquisition efforts, you start to hit your TAM on some of these paid channels.

Over time, you start to see spend efficiency decrease as you’ve captured all the low-hanging fruit on these ad networks. So it’s usually a combination of those two things.

6. Do you have any specific examples of where focusing on retention drove measurable business success?

At Credit Karma, we had a very robust lifecycle and email program.

If you think about the core product of Credit Karma, which is checking credit scores—the natural frequency of that product isn’t a daily habit. It’s not something people check regularly unless they have a specific problem or use case to solve, like buying a new car.

We had been very thoughtful about making sure we didn’t oversaturate our customers in this email channel.

We had a very rules-based model on how frequently we could email users with offers and upsell opportunities, but we were probably a little conservative in how frequently we would reach out to people via email.

What we did was introduce a machine learning frequency model that was personalized at a one-to-one user level based on users’ historical engagement patterns with email. Everyone has a different tolerance for email frequency and content.

We found value pockets of users who we were either over-emailing, in which case we would programmatically send fewer emails to those buckets of users.

But the real value was finding large pockets of people we were under-emailing.

That opened up opportunities to send additional offers and upsell opportunities to those users, which ended up driving substantial uplift in site-wide revenue just from sending certain users more offers more frequently.

7. How can companies effectively leverage data to measure the success of customer engagement initiatives?

I very much believe in having a centralized source of truth of your users where you collect your event and behavioral data.

It should also be stored in a way that you can activate it across your other marketing tools, like in your CRM or email service provider tools for lifecycle marketing, or potentially using those user features or attributes to send signals to ad networks to help build lookalike models.

Having that centralized source of truth where everyone across marketing and product is using the same definitions and metrics is very valuable because a lot of these metrics or KPIs can change.

When that underlying business logic of what an active user or what retention is changes, you want to make sure all the teams that are downstream consumers of that data are still using that same definition or metric.

8. What role does technology play in tracking and improving customer engagement outcomes?

You want a robust tech stack that unifies customer data—behavioral data, demographic data, transactional data—to get that complete view of your customers and the customer journey.

The other piece in terms of technology is personalization at scale.

There is no personalization without that first-party data—otherwise, there’s no way you can understand someone’s intent, their needs, what problems they need to solve. And there’s no way to design relevant experiences without that.

9. What strategies have you used to prove the ROI of customer engagement programs to key stakeholders?

If you think about retention in terms of the growth funnel, retention usually ends up being the biggest black box in terms of different growth states. Where I think there’s a lot of value is running long-term holdouts to understand that impact, especially for marketing channels and interventions.

Hopefully, after someone has onboarded and activated, you’ve got a long-term holdout to understand when we don’t run any marketing interventions or emails, what does that do to someone’s average LTV?

Then you can start to get a picture of the subscriber LTV for users who do receive marketing communications and put a value on your lifecycle or marketing programs.

10. How do you think marketers can overcome challenges in attributing revenue or profitability to their customer engagement efforts?

What you want is triangulation between attribution, maybe you’re also running some sort of MMM model or media-mix modeling to measure brand uplift, and long-term holdouts.

Somewhere in the middle of all those three is the truth of what channel is driving what impact to revenue.

The difficult answer is that it’s hard. These channels don’t operate in isolation.

There are halo effects, and channels can amplify each other. So you really need to be looking at all three to start to understand the impact of an individual channel and then the impact of these channels on each other.

I do see a lot of value in sometimes comparing two different attribution methodologies.

Maybe you look at a channel in both the first touch and last touch lens, and if you see a big delta in terms of that channel’s contribution when looking at two different attribution methodologies, that’s often a flag that maybe you need to run a platform holdout test to get to the real truth.

The holdout test is the only way you’re going to understand a channel’s true incrementality or lift. That said, there’s a huge opportunity cost to running these platform holdout tests, so you want to use them selectively.

Q: What advice would you give to marketers trying to build a business case for investing in customer engagement technology?

Always start with the problem. You need to clearly articulate the challenges.

Do we see churn as too high?

Have you gotten to the point where most of your efforts historically have been focused on just acquiring users at the expense of retaining your existing users, and now suddenly you’ve got a churn problem?

Are customers not adopting new features or not responding to upsell opportunities?

Then you need to quantify that problem or opportunity cost. What is the potential ROI if you reduce churn by X percent and you get users to stick around an extra X months or years? What does that ultimately do to LTV?

Gather data and success stories, showing benchmarks. There are a lot of great public benchmarks for engagement and retention for best-in-class companies in certain industries. Find those from your peers and use them to strengthen your argument.

Ultimately, you need to highlight long-term value and frame the investment in the context of using engagement as building a competitive advantage. Strong engagement fuels retention, which fuels LTV, which creates additional growth levers for you.

Making sure you’re connecting technology and tooling investments to metrics like cost savings and revenue growth, but starting small and having a good pilot program can pave the way for company-wide rollout.

This interview Q&A was hosted with Natalie Miles, Staff Product Manager, Martech at Grammarly for Chapter 2 of The Customer Engagement Book: Adapt or Die.

Download the PDF or request a physical copy of the book here.

Reading Time: 12 minutes

In today’s rapidly evolving landscape, understanding the forces that shape consumer decisions is not only important but essential. We sat down with Juan Mendoza, CEO of The Martech Weekly, for an in-depth Q&A session to explore these forces and shape Chapter 1 of “The Customer Engagement Book: Adapt or Die.”

This conversation provides critical insights into how technology, culture, and economics are reshaping the consumer experience, and why marketers must stay agile to remain relevant. Whether you’re a seasoned marketer or just beginning your journey, Juan’s perspectives offer invaluable guidance on navigating the complexities of modern consumer engagement.

Juan Mendoza Q&A Interview

1. What do you believe are the most significant forces driving changes in consumer behavior today?

There are quite a few forces happening right now. Think about how consumer behavior has changed overall in the past 30 years. So many shifts — the internet, personal computing, smartphones, social media, E-commerce — have really scaled the ability for brands to impact their customer experience in ways that were just not possible before.

But now we have this post-Covid hangover still hanging over things. That famous McKinsey chart showed how 10 years’ worth of e-commerce adoption happened in just three months during the early days of the pandemic.

Because of that, most people were forced for almost two years to primarily engage with products, do commerce, and get information online.

Now we’re four or five years out of that process, and the expectations from consumers has elevated to the point where brands are still keeping up and still trying to make sure they can actually deliver.

We’re seeing brand-new social media platforms come to market. Think of TikTok over 2020, and more recently Temu and Shein, both very focused on the Chinese supply chain and both doing something most retail platforms cannot do, which is change products by the dozens or hundreds or thousands every single day to meet consumer demand.

Another significant force right now is data privacy. The Pew Research Center consistently puts out reports saying that 70-80-90% of consumers are worried about the data being collected about them, shared, and used across the internet.

That value exchange between brands and consumers and what they’re getting for what they share about themselves is one of those significant driving forces as well.

The last one, which is the most exciting, is the advent of large language models (LLMs). This sort of tipping point from back in 2022 to 2023 where we started to see these incredibly sophisticated chatbots embrace the ability for consumers to get more information about products and services.

That’s transforming AI large language models into significant consumer channels where they’re getting products, services, information directly in a way we haven’t seen before.

That’s something a lot of marketers should stand up and say, “How is this large language model consumer channel going to affect our business and impact our visibility, our brand, and our ability to drive revenue?”

2. How do cultural, societal, and economic factors intersect with technology to shape the way consumers behave?

The Internet has its own culture, and because it’s distributed globally, cultural norms have changed in ways most people aren’t used to. You’ve got memes, shared norms, viral movements, influencers — all these cultural things are changing perceptions.

Marketers in the old days used to target a certain demographic in a certain location, but beliefs, attitudes, and cultural norms are no longer constrained to geographic location. That’s important when it comes to marketing and customer experience — you’re dealing with a much more diverse range of cultural mindsets and people when you do it via the Internet.

The intersection with technology, the Internet, social media in particular has shifted cultural norms away from geographical locale to almost an ideological or social connection, a network-based cultural phenomenon.

You’ve got a lot different ways of thinking about society. Even recently, social media networks have announced they’re going to reduce the amount of fact checking and allow more people to openly express themselves on social media. This will only add fuel to the fire of the dislocation of cultural norms, values and how people talk about the products and services they receive. 

Why is that important to consumer behavior? We’re shifting to a more open, free-form Internet, which is less regulated and more of a canvas for free expression. But because of that, we’re also going to have issues around hate speech and content that is not brand-safe.

For marketers, as more people share online and engage with each other, there’s going to be more divisiveness and information you probably don’t want associated with your brand. Brand trust and the ability to protect your brand regarding what new conversations are happening online is going to be quite important.

As for economic factors, we’re seeing record levels of inflation.

Interest rates have declined significantly, so investment in tech has reduced significantly, but cost of living is a huge pressure in Western countries, and most consumers are pulling back on spending and being more deliberate about what they spend.

If you’re in that sort of non-essential category, if you’re selling products that are adjacent or not really in that commodity set, it’s going to be much harder for you to sell. The experience has to be much better. There has to be a greater value proposition. And marketers, because of the inflation rate and the economy, are still struggling to get enough budget to drive consumer demand.

I would say right now the biggest differentiator for marketers when it comes to behavior change is understanding price sensitivity and how to compete on price, but do it in a way that’s not just discounting, but elevating the value that a customer gets and really focusing on giving that message to the consumer.

3. Do you think consumer behavior changes in cycles or are we entering just a completely new paradigm of engagement?

When it comes to “above the line” — how consumers get information, how they make decisions on products — there’s a lot of change out in the media world and marketplace because of large language models.

You can’t really pattern-match most customer experiences. You might go to a shop, see something in the window, then six months later search for it because you’re interested.

Or maybe a friend bought that product and you check it out at their house. There are millions of scenarios influencing buying decisions. That’s just reality — most customer journeys are unknowable “above the line” before they actually purchase or start engagement.

But with large language models, I think it changes that paradigm significantly because consumers will be finding information, learning, and talking with an AI agent that allows them to get information in ways they haven’t been able to before.

And all of that is not visible to marketers today, simply because the LLM platforms like ChatGPT don’t expose their data to brands like Google Search has done in the past. 

If you’re a marketer doing search or social media, you can see brand impressions, conversations on social media, searches, click-throughs, and engagement rates.

But with large language models, if you search for something in ChatGPT, marketers don’t have any data.

Customers will have more private conversations that aren’t tracked, and marketers will have less visibility and data to make decisions on what people are actually looking for.

4. Why is it important for marketers to understand not just how consumers are changing, but why they are changing?

There’s a difference between quantitative and qualitative.

Quantitative data is your Google Analytics dashboard, your email marketing report, your analytics showing what customers are actually doing — clicks, opens, conversions, sales. That gives you the “how” — what people are actually doing. But that is not enough for insight.

One thing I think about constantly in data-driven marketing is that marketers increasingly say, “Let’s just trust the data. The data has the answers and will tell us what we should do to fix our experiences.” But there’s an element of taste and genuine curious inquiry required for a marketer to talk to customers and understand what’s driving that behavior to get real insight.

There’s a massive difference, a chasm between the “how” and the “why.” But we need to jump over the chasm, and more marketers need to embrace the chaos of genuine intellectual inquiry and curiosity to figure out that “why” question.

5. What risks do marketers face when they resist or delay adapting to shifting consumer expectations?

I think relevance is the major risk. There are two sides to this coin.

One side is, if you’re adapting to consumer behaviors or shifting consumer expectations, you run the risk of just being like everyone else.

I’ll give you one example: TikTok in 2020 introduced a new paradigm for social media with the vertical scroll video. But then quickly every social media platform embraced it. In that example, there was a prime mover that triggered a major consumer change in content consumption, and then it quickly commoditized and everyone looked the same. 

If you try to embrace consumer shifts and trends, sometimes the risk is actually just looking like everyone else because the cycle in which trends influence consumer behavior and companies’ ability to pivot is getting faster.

Is that good for marketers? Absolutely not. Every marketer wants to differentiate, face customers directly, have a specific value proposition, and a unique experience. Nobody wants to look like everyone else.

If you just blindly follow consumer behavior trends without that genuine inspiration asking “why” and coming up with original ideas, you’re just going to look like everyone else.

The other side of the coin is that if you do not adapt to clear consumer preferences and expectations, you will be left behind. If you don’t embrace most models of personalization today, there will be challenges when a customer comes to your website.

There are minimum standards they expect: product recommendations, offers when you collect data, help with customer service complaints, easy returns.

Think about the core things that really matter to the customer, embrace those, invest in them, and make those changes.

6. How do you personally define the concept of embracing change as a marketer?

I think embracing change is actually the job. It’s not a component, not a department, not something you put on a PowerPoint slide or have a meeting about.

Marketers have to be masters of navigating change because customers, technology, and the marketplace are changing every single day.

Change is the job, but there are core things that never change with people. Everyone feels sad, everyone feels happy, everyone gets hungry, everyone needs to sleep. There are so many things that don’t change for people in general.

That’s your bedrock. But embracing change is definitely the job of marketing today. There’s no sticking your head in the sand and waiting for customers anymore.

You have to be at the forefront of change. There’s no way around it.

7. Can you share an example of a brand or marketing strategy that successfully adapted to major shifts in consumer behavior? And what can we learn from these approaches?

There’s one brand I worked with for quite a while — an airline. As an airline, they were one of the first to get into E-commerce. Over 20 years, they built one of the best yielding, high-conversion, high-upsell flows for booking flights.

In the early days they really embraced customer data, technology, personalization across channels — web, email, SMS. But then as we moved into the 2020s, they started thinking about post-Covid, how to revolutionize retailing and personalization across all channels.

One very successful thing they implemented was a predictive personalisation program that recommended destinations based on the customer’s travel profile. When a customer purchased a ticket, went on holiday, and returned home, they would have this personalized campaign that used machine learning to calculate which location the customer might go to next.

They were able to take that data and use it to give customers inspiration for their next flight or travel, and that was wildly successful — millions and millions of dollars of incremental revenue just by giving customers a little nudge toward their next holiday.

If you think about it over 30 years, airlines evolved from going to an agent who would book your flights, to going online and having a personalized experience with flights, deals, holidays relevant to you, helpful add-ons and products. That personalized experience is a huge shift, really leveraging convenience and scale.

Ironically, we’re now facing an era where another kind of agent will be the best way to book your next holiday which will force the travel industry to evolve again as consumer expectations change. 

What you can learn from their approach is that they went early, starting with an innovation story about leveraging the Internet to bring airline tickets at lower cost to as many customers as possible. They had a culture of “we started this innovation journey and we do not want to stop innovating for the customer, making this experience as convenient, personalized, and low-cost as possible.”

That focus from the executive level, plus the vision and culture of the team wanting to serve millions of customers every day — that’s a good example of a company that thinks clearly but also passionately about consumer change.

8. Are there any examples of brands or industries that failed to adapt to these changes and what were the consequences?

There are a lot. I think the classic ones are Blockbuster and Netflix.

It’s always a good story because Netflix did not start as a streaming service — they started as a mail-order DVD service.

An old story goes that Reed Hastings, the CEO, apparently had the idea for Netflix because he was at Blockbuster and rented Top Gun as a VHS. He forgot it and left it at home, then when he went to return it, Blockbuster tried to charge him for a late return fee.

He was like, “Why am I getting penalized for keeping this?” Blockbuster was punishing customers for behavior that he thought should be rewarded.

So he changed the business model upside down, to say, “You can take three DVDs or VHS tapes, they get delivered to your home, and you can keep them as long as you want. As long as you return them, you can rent another one.”

What’s fascinating is what he did in the early days. Blockbuster had limited capacity for products — only so many DVDs or VHS tapes you could put on a shelf. Netflix turned people’s homes into millions of little warehouses for DVDs because suddenly you didn’t need all this product stocked. People held it and paid a monthly subscription instead of late fees or individual rental fees. 

I use this as a famous example because it’s not just about technological change — it’s about business model change and finding better models that serve customers differently. 

Netflix turned the industry from one that punishes people for being late with returns or holding products too long, to an industry that rewards customers for holding onto products longer.

While the account may be a piece of marketing fiction, the lesson is clear: Brands that don’t respond as consumers adopt new habits and preferences risk becoming irrelevant — and disappearing completely.

That’s a fascinating inspiration for how you think about your business model, how you make money from customers, and how you punish or reward them.

9. What skills or mindsets are essential for marketers to thrive in an era of constant change?

You have to embrace risk. There’s no good work without an element of risk.

There has to be something on the line, an element of loss. You have to put your voice forward on what you think should change in a brand.

Marketers need to challenge their executives and their team, but based on the right principles — values like being customer-first, serving with empathy, care, consideration, genuine interest. So the first mindset is, you need to take risks. No risks, no rewards — that’s just the way it is.

The second one is genuine curiosity.

That’s where it starts — genuine interest in what the customer is doing, how they’re changing, what they’re saying. If you don’t have that curiosity, you’re not going to be interesting to your customers. Being curious and asking those “why” questions is extremely important.

Another mindset is to embrace the courage of not knowing. Sometimes to make a significant change in experience and have that big leapfrog moment, you have to literally just have the courage to say, “We’re going to try something and we don’t even know if it’s going to work.”

As I mentioned before, boiling everything down to data-driven numbers can be a blind alley, so embracing the unknown is extremely important.

And then I would say alignment. In large enterprise companies and big consumer brands, no single person makes decisions. It’s by community, by consensus.

Learning how to get buy-in, how to pitch a business case, how to get everyone to agree on the mindset — those leadership skills are extremely important.

For skills, I would say cultural reading, social listening — those types of skills are extremely important. Leadership skills matter in terms of knowing the data you’re collecting, data literacy around what’s actually being collected and used, understanding that, being able to interface with technology and data engineering teams, being able to have those conversations in the same language.

And then there’s the tactical skill set: how do we get an experiment out tomorrow, how do we build something we can learn from quickly?

That ability to align people, get your processes sorted, define a use case, define a blueprint — those are all incredibly important skills.

10. Looking ahead, how can marketers prepare for future shifts in consumer behavior when change is happening faster than ever?

Getting out on LinkedIn, meeting people at events, learning from high-quality research, editorial, and media products can help your perspective on how tech changes.

A lot in marketing technology is about the platforms and tech that are changing, and how you can best leverage or use that in your business.

It doesn’t take a lot — maybe sitting down on the weekend for an hour or two doing some reading can help a lot. 

Meeting and connecting with other folks in this space, learning what they’re doing in their companies is incredibly valuable, and more people should be doing that.

We see a lot of companies relying on consultants to tell them what is changing, but it should be the job of marketing technology leaders to do that themselves.

So some of the core things are getting out into the industry, making friends, building a network, learning from others. It’s an incredibly rewarding and valuable part of the job, and I think it’s absolutely necessary if you want to counteract and leverage change in your own company.

As an ending note, I would say think about the things that never change, that are so valuable they would last generations. Then how do you use that as your foundation to innovate with the constant cycle of consumer behavior change around the world?

This interview Q&A was hosted with Juan Mendoza, CEO of The Martech Weekly for Chapter 1 of The Customer Engagement Book: Adapt or Die.

Download the PDF or request a physical copy of the book here.