Knowing The Customer Is More Crucial Than Implementing The Latest Technology
Customers nowadays like to have many options. It is important to have touchpoints where your customers are, says Edwin Octavana Mahaditya, Head of Growth & Performance Marketing at Erajaya Digital Group.
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The fundamental strategy for all marketing actions ultimately comes down to knowing who your customers are and understanding what they want. Whether you are working on acquiring new customers, or deciding on the best way your first party data can come to use, the future of marketing continues to stick to rather conventional wisdom – “the customer comes first.”
As marketing continues to evolve with new technologies, marketers must not forget that the root of every successful strategy lies in reaching the customer at the right time and with the right offer. Edwin Octavana Mahaditya, Head of Growth & Performance Marketing at Erajaya Digital Group, Indonesia, says marketers must take a step back and understand the fundamentals rather than focusing on implementing the latest technology.
“Our understanding of the omnichannel journey, how to be there for the consumers, and engage with them in real-time with personalised communication is the present-day challenge,” he adds. Martechvibe spoke to Mahaditya about the Southeast-Asian consumer landscape and the changing customer experience expectations.
Excerpts from the interview:
How can brands innovate to acquire new customers in a saturated market?
Strengthening first and second party data through partnership is key to this. For example, at Erajaya, we have a point coalition within all the group brands across different industries called MyEraspace. Being a solo membership across all brands, it is a joint effort, or alliance, to acquire new customers. Smaller brands can accomplish this with joint campaigns with brands within the same ecosystem or within different industries. This will expand the reach to new potential customers that were not even reachable before.
How have CX expectations changed in the telecom retail industry?
In consumer electronics retail, it’s interesting that in Indonesia and SEA in general, the majority of consumers still prefer to buy the product through offline channels. However, with the presence of digital and more conversion touchpoints, the consumer decision-making process is becoming more complicated than ever. The effort put into online channels will impact and drive offline transactions and sales. Data integration from online and offline POS, along with browser behaviour, is crucial now. Our understanding of this omnichannel journey, how to be there for the consumers, and engage with them in real-time with personalised communication is the present-day challenge.
What advice would you give to marketers to leverage first party data to its full potential?
I want us to take a step back because, most of the time, we focus on “implementing the latest technology” rather than understanding the fundamentals. Let’s start with understanding who our most valuable customers are with the highest CLV. From there, what are the data points we need to collect to define or to understand these customer segments? (e.g. behaviour, cookie, transactional, PII, media, etc.) Do we have the data? If yes, how do we combine and activate the data? If not, how do we collect it? These questions will help us define the ideal solution. We then define the journey, do A/B test campaign activations to see the effectiveness of leveraging the first party data, and keep on iterating.
We are seeing the retail industry moving towards a consolidation of services, products, channels and payments. What does the future look like?
What we see today, especially with brick-and-mortar companies, the biggest blocker is data silos. As customers demand personalised engagement and offers in an instant, having a unified source of data is very crucial. The second is the touchpoint. Customers nowadays like to have many options. It is also important to have touchpoints where your customers are. Two customers might have different touchpoints and expect different offerings. It is crucial to have a strong understanding of the customer and be able to engage with them in their preferred channel via a strong CDP and first party data. Lastly, marketers must focus on offering consistent, high-quality delivery across all touchpoints.
