Why Brands Must Back Up Their Digital Efforts 

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Brands must invest in an integrated martech stack that blends tools to create customer segments based on behaviour and engage with them accordingly.

The Middle East market is rapidly becoming one of the hottest regions for eCommerce in the world. Several quantitative indicators and anecdotal evidence point to a future where online retail will become the mainstay of the region’s retail landscape, driven by smartphones and internet penetration.

In a market where convenience scores over other factors, online retail sales are steadily outpacing brick-and-mortar sales. However, to thrive in the dynamic new market, having an online presence and engaging in digital marketing alone will not do. These efforts have to be directed towards meaningful engagement with customers, providing delight and hyper-personalisation at every step of the way.

Consumer brands must build a deep engagement with consumers characterised by continuous, consistent and relevant communication across all digital touchpoints. For this to happen, brands must invest in an innovative, intelligent, and integrated martech stack that blends various tools to create customer segments based on customers’ behaviour and engage with them accordingly.

Here are some tools that will help brands in this journey.

Customer Engagement Platform (CEP): With CEP, a brand can provide a delightful and personalised experience to the user by deducing patterns from behavioural insights, figure out relevant engagement opportunities, deliver targeted communication, and monitoring the customer journey. CEP creates smart and relevant user segments to provide a personalised experience for each of them. It also aids in setting up goals and metrics for customer engagement campaigns and subsequently measures the results as well.

Customer Data Platform (CDP): This helps brands gather insights about customers and their behaviour and leverage these insights to create personalised experiences, both on and off the platform. CDP ensures that the data is consistent, unified, centralised, and easily accessible to every team and function across the organisation.

Analytics Platform: The analytics platform helps brands analyse how and why consumers engage with a brand and predict their behaviour based on previous interactions. This intelligence helps brands improve experiences for consumers by setting up customised promotions or retention campaigns for specific consumer cohorts identified by the analytics platform.

Attribution Platform: This tool analyses the performance of acquisition sources on engagement, retention, and revenue metrics (for example, which social media ad campaign led to the highest LTV or resulted in higher customer activity). It helps build relevant onboarding journeys for different customer types, deliver personalised and contextual messages based on the acquisition channel, and measure campaign results in real-time and their long-term impact on key business metrics.

Optimisation Platform: An optimisation platform can run experiments on product experiences, build customer cohorts based on recency, frequency, and monetary scores, implement hyper-personalisation techniques and orchestrate different customer journeys. Optimising customer experience allows brands to significantly improve metrics such as click-through rates, conversion rates, customer LTV, loyalty, and retention.  Constant testing and experimentation of these metrics will give brands an edge over the competition.

AI Platform: AI and Machine Learning (ML) are the new tools that brands can use to gather the most important insight – customer intent. It can be used to keep a check on each customer’s experience on your platform and predict what engagement they would need to move to the next stage in the funnel. AI can not only bucket customers into different segments and create personalised journeys, but also build relevant nudges and move customers down the funnel thus reducing drop-offs. It also enables cross-sell and upsell opportunities.

Loyalty Platform: An efficient loyalty platform can help create incentive programs for loyal customers, apart from driving repeat purchases and identifying the right cohorts for cross-selling and upselling.

Integrated is the way to go ahead

All these advanced tools must be present in an integrated ecosystem and not in silos for brands to innovate and adapt to the changing market trends.

An integrated martech stack not only gives a simplified approach to cross-channel reporting and analysis, but it is also a low-maintenance system because it has a single technology stack for all kinds of troubleshooting. It gives a 360-degree view of customers and promotions on an interconnected platform across channels. It creates avenues for multiple teams to interact with one another and engage in up-sell and cross-sell opportunities.

Multiple point solutions are passé

As the number of silos increases, access to customer profiles and channel-wide processes becomes difficult, leading to inefficient customer engagement. Single point solutions are more campaign-centric rather than being ‘customer-centric’. Thus, multiple entities end up communicating with the customer in different voices, instead of presenting the brand as a unified entity.

Move towards North Star with integrated solutions

Today’s consumers want a cohesive and connected experience across all touchpoints of the brand, especially digital points of contact. The siloed approach spells a marketing disaster for the brand, while an integrated platform enables seamless data sharing and optimises organisation-wide omnichannel efforts, thus helping the company achieve the North Star metrics of revenue, customer value, and business progress.

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