Articles | August 22, 2018 | 4 min read

How to Choose the Best CRM Solution for Your Enterprise

When it comes to customer relationship management, not all technology is created equal—especially when operating on an enterprise scale. The solution you ultimately choose will provide the foundation for understanding your customers and meeting their growing expectations. That, in turn, will determine the ROI of your marketing and success of your brand for years to come.

Choose wisely.

Diamonds in the Digital Rough

The marketing technology landscape is expanding at a terrific pace. Thousands of solutions provided by no fewer than 6,242 different vendors are available to today’s CMO—27% YoY that’s likely to continue.

Included in the flood of evolving technology are at least 200 customer relationship management solutions, including established providers and disruptive new startups. How does a marketing leader at a large business with an enormous audience chose the right one?

Key Considerations for Choosing an Enterprise CRM

Enterprises have some unique challenges in meeting the ever-changing expectations of today’s connected consumer. It’s one thing to recognize the value of personalized, relevant experiences—but delivering them to hundreds of thousands ,or even millions, of individuals around the world is a daunting task for the most capable CMO.

Choosing an enterprise CRM that enables you to serve 1:1 experiences on a massive scale can mean the difference between earning loyalty and being forgotten. When comparing your options, take special care to consider the following factors:

Data Treatment

The key to understanding your customers as individuals, anticipating their needs, and engaging them in real-time lies in data.

Big data has been at CMOs’ top-of-mind for years now; finding ways to organize, interpret and act on the mountains of consumer information now available remains a high priority.

Almost every CRM has some amount of data analytics capabilities. But that can range from rudimentary web analytics to sophisticated deterministic data science.

Ideally, an enterprise CRM will provide access to a large pool of proprietary data that can be used to supplement and enhance your own first-party customer data. Enterprises often struggle with large silos of disparate data—a good CRM option also will be able to flexibly adapt and unify those scattered resources into a single view of your customers.

Today’s consumers are active on a broad selection of channels and devices at any given time. An effective enterprise CRM must be able to accumulate real-time signals from any input and translate them into thoughtful omnichannel responses.

Finally, a great enterprise CRM needs to be extremely secure when it comes to data and align to quickly-evolving social and regulatory privacy standards. Given the sheer volume of data a large organization handles and the sensitivity of the information within, enterprises can’t afford to take chances. Recent history is full of high-profile breaches that compromised corporate and customer data and tarnished brands—don’t let your marketing technology platform be your biggest vulnerability!

Automation Capabilities

Automation is what enables an enterprise to take a powerful, relevant, personalized customer experience and scale it up to thousands or even millions of individuals around the world.

Most CRMs have some automation capability, many of them lack the capacity to constantly process and manage a compelling relationship with every customer. Seek out a provider that has the sophisticated AI technology needed to capture and interpret a flood of real-time customer signals and decide when, why and how to respond.

Flexibility

Most enterprises have an enormous tech environment that includes legacy systems, scattered databases, and third-party vendors. Even large organizations with robust IT teams find integrating new tools and platforms into their stack to be incredibly difficult.

An ideal CRM tool for enterprises is one that can flexibly adapt to your existing technology and data infrastructure. A quick onboarding process and the ability to unify customer data all in one place is a huge advantage in the perpetual battle for consumer attention and loyalty.

What the Experts Say

Shopping for the best CRM for your enterprise is an arduous process, but choosing the right one can quite literally determine the success of your company for the indefinite future. Fortunately, there’s no shortage of resources and expertise to pull from when selecting a solution that will bring the most value to your customers.

One such authority is the prestigious MarTech Breakthrough Awards, which recognizes leaders and innovators in the diverse and ever-changing world of marketing and advertising technology. This year, Zeta Global’s technology platform ZetaHub was awarded ‘Best CRM Solution for Enterprise’—standing out in a pool of over 2,000 nominees.

marktech breakthrough best CRM for enterprise

“The days of linear marketing are long gone, and multichannel marketing is now a necessity, but we find that many enterprise organizations are struggling with the challenge of managing this more complex customer journey,” said James Johnson, Managing Director at MarTech Breakthrough. “Zeta Global’s ZetaHub shines when it comes to enabling multichannel dialogue, empowering global brands to engage with customers and prospects across email, mobile, social, direct, and web. Congratulations to Zeta Global on its 2018 MarTech Breakthrough Award!”

Read the complete press release from MarTech Breakthrough here.

Click here to see Zeta’s announcement of the award.

Every day we work closely with our enterprise clients in Retail, Travel, Finance, Insurance, Media and beyond to better understand their customers and develop lasting 1:1 relationships. It’s not hyperbole: to see for yourself how our solution makes people-based marketing at scale possible, request a demo today.

Articles | February 21, 2018 | 2 min read

Are Misaligned Priorities and Organizational Silos Blocking Your Customer-Focused Marketing Strategies?

If you answered “Yes” to our title question, you are not alone. In a recent online survey of over 300 B2C marketing and IT professionals we conducted with Forrester Consulting, “misaligned priorities” and “organizational silos” topped the list of reasons why true customer-focused strategies could not be achieved.

Key findings from the “Utilize a Change Agent to Become Customer Focused” research survey of VPs, managers, and directors uncovered several key areas that marketers and IT professionals need to focus on to make their organizations more customer focused. Organizational readiness, alignment of internal priorities and technology advancement led the list of concerns for achieving a customer-obsessed organization.

Readiness Must be Tested & Customer-Focused Structures Need to be Implemented

All levels of leadership at B2C organizations, from managers to the C-level executives agree they must test their readiness and implement/expand their customer-focused marketing structures.

Alignment doesn’t exist for the majority of the B2C organizations we surveyed. No one level is to blame. Organizations struggle at all levels to meet their marketing objectives. One third of the organizations surveyed said they don’t have internal agreement on who their target is. In addition, nearly 40% said they lacked understanding from upper management about priorities, needs and goals.

Technology — A Mixed Blessing

Alignment alone isn’t the only reason why companies are struggling. Many are also saying that technology is moving way too fast to keep up. Thirty-four percent of respondents felt technology is moving faster than they can keep pace. Marketers and IT professionals need to ensure that new, advanced technology solutions will integrate with data and legacy systems. Over one third of respondents said they have legacy systems that are not integrated to share data.

What Do Marketers Need to Get Closer to Customers?

Achieving complete alignment and true customer obsession requires overcoming significant organizational, process, and technology challenges at all levels and across teams and departments. VPs, managers and directors we surveyed agreed that siloed organizational structures were a key barrier to marketing in a more customer-focused manner.

How can marketers overcome this struggle? Today’s marketers need to centralize not only the data, but the people, processes and platforms, to close the gap between insight and activation. Only then will marketers be able to link this data together at the individual customer level, in real-time, across all channels to proactively address the Connected Customers expectations for an experience that is unique to them — a Journey of One.

Here’s a brief summary of the survey results

To learn more, please contact your account representative or email us at: [email protected].

Marketing Automation | August 2, 2017 | 5 min read

How to Use Data Backed Marketing Automation to Earn Customer Loyalty

There was a time when most businesses just focused on customer acquisition in their marketing efforts. Brand loyalty was just a byproduct of the scheme of things. Today’s businesses however have to deal with a lot more competition and customers who are always ready to switch to a better brand; a brand that gives them products and services of better quality. That’s why, customer loyalty marketing has become an important piece of the marketing puzzle these days. Maintaining a steady customer base has become more important than ever to survive in a fiercely competitive marketplace.

Providing offers and discounts to customers is arguably the easiest way to build customer loyalty. But that’s not enough to convince the savvy customers of the internet age. They know that there is always a better bargain around just a click away. Brands need to do a lot more to keep them hooked and engaged. And the key to building such a strong engagement with the customers is data. Data that can tell the brand a lot more than just the name, email and location of the customers. When the marketing efforts are tuned to collect vital data signals, marketing automation can kick in and do wonders. In this article we’re going to look at how marketing automation can help brands earn the much needed brand loyalty from its customers:

The Importance of Customer Retention

If you have a great product/service, customers will develop a brand loyalty on their own. That’s the belief that most people had before the marketing world started to take customer retention strategies seriously. While it is absolutely true that loyalty follows great products and services; one should also remember that this only works in short term today. The market is so competitive that your customers will eventually find a brand that is better or cheaper than you. The only way to build brand loyalty is to make them feel that you care about them and listen to them; apart from providing a great product/service.

According to a research conducted by Harvard Business School, increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases the overall profits of a business by 25% to 95%! No wonder data oriented marketers take customer retention seriously! It has become an important metric to measure the effectiveness of their marketing strategies. Most companies however measure the opposite of retention rate, i.e., churn rate (Percentage of customers who decide to quit using the products/services of the company). Both of these metrics have gained high importance even for investors while they study the viability of a business.

How Marketing Automation Helps

Marketing automation allows businesses to better understand their customers’ preferences and desires. When marketers use this information strategically, it translates into a stronger relationship between the customers and the brand. Let’s discuss this in detail:

Event Based Automation

Imagine this scenario: You’re planning a trip to Agra to catch a glimpse of the Taj Mahal. You want to check out multiple travel deals and booking sites before you make up your mind about a place to stay. You search Airbnb, Trivago, Kayak and a bunch of other booking sites but still aren’t sure. After a while you’re tired and are in no mood to do all the searching again. But you still want to book your stay because the travel is already planned.

Just when you’re about to throw up your hands in exasperation, you get an email notification! Airbnb has sent you a pick of places that you can choose from in Agra! Wouldn’t that be awesome?! That’s the power of event based automation. You realize that the brand that you wanted to try out actually knows your needs and is ready to make the experience smoother for you.

(Image Source)

Sending cart abandonment emails, discount emails based on your previous purchase are a couple of other examples for event based automation aimed at building brand loyalty.

Useful read: Marketing Automation Mistakes that You Should Avoid

Customer Data is a Goldmine

When thinking about data signals related to automation, marketers usually think about activities and behaviors of the customers. They forget that some of the most basic information that the customer provides during his/her interaction with different touch points of the brand can also be really useful. Check out how popular fashion brand Macy’s does it effectively, by sending out emails to customers on their birthdays:

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Likes and dislikes of the customers

It’s a hot day and one of your close friends comes to visit your place. When you’re busy cursing the temperature, he takes out a pack of your favourite beer and gives it to you! Won’t you feel ecstatic? The fact that he went out of his way to buy a pack of beer proves that he is your friend. But the fact that he knew which brand of beer to choose, proves that he is one of your closer friends who knows what your likes and dislikes are.

That’s exactly how it works in a customer-brand relationship as well. When the brand sends messages or emails to the customer about things that he/she cares about, the customer feels closer to the brand. Internet’s foremost fact checking website Snopes does it really well with its customized newsletters. All of its emails are one-to-one personalized. The articles mentioned in the email are all placed there based on the reader’s’ topic preferences.

Check out this interesting article to know how Snopes does it.

Customer opinion matters the most

Feedback emails is one of the most effective forms of communication that a brand can send to its customers during their lifecycle. Feedback emails not only give valuable insights that can help improve the products/services, they also show your customers that you genuinely care about doing things better. And that has a major impact on brand loyalty. Gifting platform Artifact Uprising does it really well in this feedback email:

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But care should be taken to ensure that feedback emails are only sent to customers who have tried the products/services for a good amount of time. There is no point sending a feedback email to a customer about a phone that was bought just one day ago! Marketing automation can help you set the feedback emails to go exactly when they’re supposed to go.

Wrapping it up

Have you tried leveraging Marketing Automation and user data to build brand loyalty in your customers? If you have, how was the experience? Please share it with us in the comments below. You can also share some of the other ways of building customer loyalty to help us enhance and improve this article.

Customer Retention | July 18, 2017 | 5 min read

The Art of Customer Onboarding using Email Nurturing

Get more customers to buy your product. Bring in more users for your app. That’s the primary goal that most brands work towards when they start off. Some of them succeed in reeling in tons of customers while others achieve a modest success or fail miserably. But is that where it all ends? The brand that got a lot of customers lives happily ever after while the others fade into oblivion? The answer is a resounding NO! Many startups shut shop despite spectacular early success because of this skewed perception. They focus all their time and energy into acquiring new leads and prospects while forgetting the importance of customer retention. A customer is truly acquired when he/she actually uses the product and achieves their first success. And that’s the goal of customer onboarding.

It is however difficult to pinpoint a particular onboarding strategy that would work for every business. Those that have enterprise customers usually allot dedicated account managers who take care of onboarding, whereas companies that follow the SaaS model go for low touch onboarding (handholding through automated tools, email nurturing etc) Some might even opt for a hybrid approach where the account managers only assist during the initial onboarding process with automation kicking in after. Whatever the case, it is highly advisable to always have a low touch strategy in place even if it is not elaborate. This would ensure that the brand has a constant touch point with the customer who won’t feel abandoned.

In this article, I’m going to talk about email nurturing, one of the most effective forms of low touch onboarding. I’ll list down some of the best practices, along with some real world examples. Here we go:

1. Acknowledge the importance of users

It is a no brainer that users should get a welcome email as soon as they signup for your product/service. But who sends it to them plays a subtle but vital role in setting up the tone of your email nurture series. Always setup the welcome email to go in the name of someone important in your organization. It can be the founder or anyone who is higher up in the ladder and is relevant to the customer’s interest.

The content of the email doesn’t have to be jazzy but should set the right expectations about the product. It is all the more better if it has a dash of personality to it. The welcome email by Best Made is a great example:

2. Relevance is everything!

You’ve sent an awesome welcome email that has piqued the interest of the customer. Now what next? Should you keep sending emails that are awesomer? Should every email outdo the previous one when it comes to creativity in visuals and content? Well, not necessarily. After you set the tone, it is all about sending useful, relevant content that can aid the customer to do what he or she set out to do by signing up with you. Your focus should be on sending emails that are relevant to the customer’s journey with you.

Here’s a great example of such an email by email marketing brand Litmus:

Must read: 9 Ways to segment your customer list

3. Send them at the right time

According to a report by Radicati, an incredible 126 emails will be sent and received per business user per day, by the end of 2019! That’s a lot of emails! Unless the user is really looking forward to your email or your subject line is super enticing, it is difficult to expect them to open and read your message. The solution – send the emails at the right time, when the users are active on their phones or have a history of opening emails. This feature is called Send time optimization and is available in many next generation marketing automation tools like Boomtrain.

4. Make it a two-way street

Don’t just bombard the customers with educational emails that harp about your products and services. Give them a chance to talk back to you. Setup feedback emails based on behavior triggers like not being able to complete a step or not using the product for a long time etc. This will give the customer an assurance that you are always there to help them out. It can also give you valuable inputs about issues in the product that need to be fixed.

Zapier does it really well in this email:

5. Make learning easier through Product webinars

You might be sending beautifully crafted emails with elaborate explanations about different features of your product. But it is all in vain if the customers don’t feel like reading them. Studies have revealed that the attention span of human beings has seen a drastic fall ever since we became slaves of our smartphones. When most of your customers have short attention spans, you can’t expect them to read and understand your product feature explanation. The better ways is to show it to them! Hold periodic product webinars that they can attend and watch the product in action. They’ll not only understand the product and its features better, they’ll regard you as a brand that cares for its customers.

Check out this example by popular mobile and web analytics tool Mixpanel:

6. Let the customer be in the driving seat

Some products can be inherently complex. Complex enough to break the explanation into multiple pieces of educational emails. In such cases, it is always a good practice to put the content of all the emails in a single landing page, and include its link in all the emails for easy access to the customers. Afterall, the customer should always be in the driving seat and have the option to choose when to read what.

Website optimization tool Hotjar does it perfect in its onboarding emails.

What’s your favorite email nurturing campaign?

All said and done, there are no hard and fast rules that define a good customer onboarding email campaign. The tone and content of the emails that work for one kind of business might not work in another. That’s why you need to iterate your nurturing campaigns and come up with the best mix based on their results. Do you have a brand in mind that has a kickass onboarding email series? If yes, do let us know in the comments below.

Articles | March 31, 2017 | 5 min read

The Science Behind Starbucks’ Massively Successful Customer Loyalty Program

Starbucks has completely revolutionized the coffee business. It took on something that existed from ages and completely overhauled it from its core. Today, Starbucks is regarded as the world’s largest coffee house with high regards for its customers.

The Starbucks success is a story of taking every business aspect differently. They have time and again challenged conventional business methods in the food and beverage industry. And, today we are going to discuss one of the aspects that they completely revolutionized, Customer Loyalty.

Since it’s inception, the Starbucks Rewards Customer loyalty program has taken the market by storm. It has become a leading example, of how a customer loyalty program should be implemented.

A little history of the Starbucks loyalty program

Starbucks entered the customer loyalty space with its Gold program, where customers paid an annual fee of $25 and got 10% off on all offerings throughout the year. But as time proceeded, the program started fading away. So, Starbucks had to come up with a new program .

Enter today’s Starbucks Rewards, a free, 3 tier loyalty program. Here’s what you are offered, if you choose to enroll for the program –

Customers earn “Stars” by paying with a registered Starbucks card or the Starbucks mobile app, or by entering Star codes, one transaction equals one Star.

Welcome level — just register your card and get a free birthday drink, plus a free customization for your first drink.

Green level — earn five stars to add free in-store refills to your Welcome perks, and 2 customization to your drink instead of one.

Gold level — earn 25 stars in 12 months to get all of the above benefits, plus a free drink or food item after every 10 Stars, special email or text offers, and a Starbucks gold card.

This reform made the program an instant hit and today it’s regarded as one of the best in class, customer loyalty program ever to be offered.

So let’s dive deeper and see what makes the Starbucks Rewards program so successful. Let’s begin.

Starbucks Rewards Customer loyalty program

Upon implementation of the Starbucks Rewards customer loyalty program, Starbucks reported an increased revenue of shocking $2.65 billion, with brand executives pointing towards their reward program as one of the major enabler for such an increase.

We are going to discuss 3 factors that we think made their customer loyalty program one of a kind.

Superb Mobile experience

Consistent customer interaction is very crucial for any customer loyalty strategy. If the interaction is of low quality, there’s a high chance of customers never discovering the program, let alone using it. Starbucks knew this and therefore targeted devices that are most used by its customers, apart from targeting just email or their website, they aggressively went after the mobile ecosystem.

The Starbucks app puts the power and comfort in the user’s pocket. The app is available for all major mobile operating systems around.

Since the adoption of smartphone in the last decade, Starbucks gradually shifted every aspect of their loyalty program to the mobile platform. The app can be completely linked with your loyalty program. This allows a lot of Starbucks Rewards members to use their account to full potential. Even if they forget to carry their membership cards with them, they can easily use their app to make a purchase without losing on any reward points.

Go beyond the retail outlets – Collect points for Starbuck’s products at grocery stores

Starbucks even expanded their customer loyalty program beyond their retail stores. You can purchase their assorted coffee bean collection from any grocery store around US and other countries. Not just that, but you purchase tea, K cups, ready to enjoy drinks, etc and make points of it as well.

A shopper just needs to look for a star code on the participating product and enter the code into the app. This really makes me fall in love with their loyalty program, because no matter where you are, if you’re buying a Starbucks Rewards product, you can redeem bonus points from their app or their web portal.

Exclusive Gold Card status

When I first got my starbucks membership, one true motivation behind getting a membership was getting hold of that elusive gold card, which you can earn after earning 30 stars ( 5 stars to reach green level, then another 25 to reach gold level).

And why not?

A Gold card level member is entitled to a lot of perks at any Starbucks retail outlet. A few perks that a Starbucks gold member gets is –

Free Beverage customizations on all your drinks – Up to 2 customization per drink for free.

Free tall drink on purchase of 250gram of whole bean coffee.

Free size upgrades for featured beverage during the first 2 weeks of its launch.

Free drink after every 10 stars you earn.

A personalized one-of-a-kind Gold Card.

And more seasonal special offers.

I feel this is the true motivation behind Starbucks Reward program offering. If you’re frequenting a Starbucks store, then earning your way to gold card is a no brainer. There is so many things on the table for free that you just can’t let it go.

Another factor is the brand value that Starbucks emanates off. Starbucks loyal customers shares a lot of their experiences over social media. This is something that you don’t find with other coffee house loyalist. They feel a sense of pride when they move to a higher level and when they compare it to other coffee houses. And that’s why the Gold card is so effective. It hits 2 targets with one arrow, first one being, keeping the customers happy and the other increasing brand value via word of mouth and social media.

The gold card, simply put, is a way to state that you are a Starbucks elite and you have a status symbol to uphold now. And, that is the true motivation behind why one should get enrolled into the Starbucks rewards program.

Many marketing and business experts rank Starbucks reward program as one of the best customer loyalty program, ever to be executed by a brand. It’s a great strategy from a business standpoint as well as a very attractive offering for customers as well.

Digital Marketing | March 22, 2017 | 5 min read

How AI Builds a Canvas for Customer Loyalty

2017, is the year where AI has finally become a mainstream business platform. Many of the services, apps and products, that we use on a daily basis are being powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning platforms.

AI is directly shaping how our future will look in the coming years. The 2 gadgets that we are heavily dependent on today, our computer and our phones have AI assistants and machine learning tech built in. People are buying AI assistant based product for their home automation systems like Google home, Amazon echo etc.

Evidently, it was just a matter of time when Artificial intelligence became a household product. But before this happened, the AI and machine learning wave had already hit the business sector.

Accenture forecasted that the impact of AI technologies on business will increase productivity by up to 40 percent and enable people to make more efficient use of their time.

What general marketers forget is that, AI will eventually provide a canvas for improving customer loyalty too, by providing a seamless and customer centric experience.

How does AI improve customer Loyalty?

Here are 3 ways by which artificial intelligence would contribute to better customer loyalty and retention rates. Today, we will discuss each one in detail –

AI will make it easier for you to find flaws in your product

With the use of AI and Machine learning technologies, finding flaws in your own product became easier. AI can monitor customer behavior and engagement with every feature that your product has to offer. And it could provide you useful insights about your product’s features.

Using the data that AI will mine out for you, you can thoroughly understand what features of your product makes it a high-seller and which features make it a deal-breaker for users. By refining your product’s features and offerings, you can really make your product stand out and provide your users a customer-centric experience.

Hence preparing a canvas to improve customer loyalty by providing better iteration of your product.

AI will personalize customer experience on 1:1 level

Personalization and segmentation are every marketer’s nightmare. Before AI came into the picture, a lot of companies tried to emulate 1:1 personalization for customers and failed miserably.

As their user-base expanded, marketers found out that it’s nearly impossible to personalize user communication on a 1:1 basis. Instead, they come out with a make-do technique, which was named segmentation. Segmentation is a marketing tactic, where similar users are grouped together, and then the communication is tailored accordingly to the group’s trait.

In simple words, segmentation meant having a set of communication rules, based on the group of customers a user falls into. A One-to-many approach to user communication. Here is a detailed discussion of why personalization is a much better approach than segmentation for user engagement.

But with the combination of AI, machine learning, and automation, Personalization could be easily implemented. And there are several instances where personalization has helped brands retain customers. A 1:1 experience has always been one of the major factors when it comes to driving higher user engagement and optimizing conversion rates.

How you ask?

AI and machine learning product and platforms are integrated with your product in a tightly-knit environment. Once the integration is complete, AI engine starts monitoring all kinds of user activity and interaction on-site (website, mobile app, etc) and off-site (transactional emails, push notifications, promotional emails etc). Utilizing the continuous stream of data, it starts optimizing your on-site and off-site messaging and makes a better recommendation on a personal level. This pushes out a better overall user experience, which is a key factor in boosting customer loyalty in the longer run.

Here is our story on how we worked with She Finds to personalize 30 million customer facing emails.

AI understands Omnichannel engagement

AI systems are smart enough to understand any user’s behavior. Using this data, AI will always target devices and channels where the user is most likely to engage with your brand.

Apart from that AI will also segregate users based on their liking, their activity time-frame, when they are most likely to buy from you, etc. Combined with multiple devices, this data would allow AI engines to push messages when your customers are most likely to open and read these message.

You might also like – Omnichannel vs Multichannel marketing – which is better?

2 real-life examples of AI boosting customer loyalty

By now, you must have got the idea that AI increases customer loyalty by providing them useful information at the right time. We will show you 2 superb examples, where successful brand have used AI customization to increase their customer loyalty.

Spotify’s music recommendation engine – Spotify have built their own AI and machine learning engine, whose sole purpose is monitor a user’s listening preferences and tailor the whole product around it. In the first 2-3 weeks Spotify’s AI engine would have understood what you like, which artists are your favorite, what are the genre’s you are most interested in, to minute details like, when do you listen most often, your average listening period, etc. Using all these data, the AI engine will recommend music that you are most likely to favorite or save to your own collection. Apart from that, it will automatically send you communication about new releases from your favorite artists, how your favorite music charts are shaping up, etc. Streaming industry experts, credit Spotify’s AI engine for their massive growth in last 6 years and also how easily they have fended off bigger companies like Apple, Google, etc in the same industry to keep the top player title for themselves.

Under Armour’s Fitness App – Under Armour, the leading american brand for sports and Fitness have a highly successful fitness app. The best part about the app is AI engine that supports it. As a result each individual’s routine are informed by personal, physiological and behavioral factors. They integrate machine learning technology to understand everything about their users. The app analyses personal food, exercise and sleep data in combination with insights from other anonymized members of the community, providing real-time advice and motivation.

So these are the few ways in which brands can approach AI and machine learning and build a platform for improving customer loyalty. Our mission at Boomtrain is to help brands excel at providing stellar user experience regardless of the nature of the users (whether the user is just a reader or the user is your customer). If you liked this article, be sure to check out our blog for more on AI, user engagement, and personalized marketing.

Artificial Intelligence | January 27, 2017 | 5 min read

Why You Should Use AI to Capture the Voice of Customer and Grow Engagement

In marketing, one of the most common mantras is that you should be listening to your customer. Thinking of customer listening and the voice of customer may prompt you to think about surveys and feedback forms.

The voice of customer has gone beyond its traditional definition and become a process that captures in-depth a range of customer likes, dislikes, wants and needs.

Many brands assume that growing revenue means happy customers. This simple equation isn’t always correct. Customers may be giving you signs and information of being discontent with something even though they still pay for your service. In fact, some articles suggest that only 1 out of 26 unhappy customers complain, while the rest churn. Churn isn’t always the first step. Churn is, however, a scream of anguish from your customers. Far before customers churn, they are already giving you signs and hints on how they feel about your service, whether they complain or not. The question is whether you have the tools to listen and act on what is revealed. This article will break down how artificial intelligence technologies can help you capture the voice of customer and grow engagement.

Where Is Your Customer Talking To You?

Every interaction that customers have with the communication you send to them is a form of feedback.

Open and Click rates in emails, Read or Replied rates for In-App Messages and Open rated for Push notifications are all good measures. They are of course, just the beginning. They are also the most common factors that marketers today rate and measure the success of campaigns around. This isn’t the best way to look at your campaigns. Just because your campaigns have great open rates or click rates – that doesn’t mean they are effective.

What are the goals of your campaigns?

Are they bringing in the right kind of revenue?

How can you use ‘open’ rates to delve further into a campaign with an engaged customer?

These are the questions that marketers need to drill down into to honestly see the kind of response customers give you, and understand the voice of customer better.

Beyond email campaigns, websites and mobile phones are two other spaces where capturing the voice of customer is becoming more possible. Capturing user actions on websites and filtering through them is one of the most efficient ways to listen to your customers. Some of the most common activities that marketers should be tracking are

signed_in – How often do your customers sign in to your website or app? If they don’t in over 30 days, you need to be seeing them as ‘slipping away’ with the potential to churn.

shared_article – When customers share an article from your platform, it is a sign that they like your content and feel it is worthy of sharing with their peers. This is a positive sign from a customer, and you can engage them with more related, shareable content using this basic activity.

added_to_cart – When a customer on your ecommerce platform have added items into their cart, that’s great – but to find out whether they are going to actually buy the product is the next step. This is where you can use behavioral targeting to reach out to your customers contextually.

While these activities need to be set up manually, once they are set up and enough data is collected – you are going to need a way to sort through all of it and act on it. This is where AI comes in.

AI and Personalization: New ways to hear the voice of customer

Artificial intelligence technologies offer you a new way to hear the voice of customer. These technologies can sort large amounts of information based on customer activities and behaviors and create a user persona for your customers. This persona is a mix of everything your customer likes, dislikes, wants or needs from your brand. With artificial intelligence you can make recommendations of contents and products to customers based on their personas. You can also personalize content for them based on their activities, behaviors, demographics and a whole lot more.

Hearing the Voice of Customer with AI

When customers interact with content on your website, in the emails you send them or respond to content that you have personalized for them with AI, they are speaking directly to you. High levels of engagement suggest that they enjoy content that is personalized to suit their tastes, interests and needs. Lower levels of engagement suggest that they may be looking for something less customized to their tastes. (Yes, that may actually be a possibility.) Conversions based on personalized content are a clear way of understanding what works for the customers.

Measure the effectiveness of dynamic product and content recommendations

Marketers need to begin to capture data points such as

Onsite Recommendation Clicks

Reading time for personalized content vs. popular content

Clicks on Dynamic Images in emails vs. Static.

Close rates and customers reactions to website popups and lightboxes

Conversion rates from personalized website popups

Conversion rates on emails with personalized content or product recommendations (See how our customer Brenthaven did this here.)

Once you listen to the voice of customer, what next?

Listening to the voice of customer is just one part of the puzzle. Artificial Intelligence powered technologies can also help you measure the results, compute the data you’ve collected and implement a solution. Examining data, creating new hypotheses, and testing to make improvements are now essential to creating a great customer experience. This is extremely relevant in a time where customer experience is one of the primary areas where customers are competing. Gartner predicted that in 2016, 89% of companies competed on their customer experience alone.

Making improvements to your customer experience requires putting in place an actionable plan based on your findings and measuring the results based on the next round of customer interactions and data. With Boomtrain, customers like Gamerant have tested personalized content on website lightboxes and seen results like

4X increase in signups – from 30 a day to 120 a day.

Improved Customer Experience: Decreased instances of lightbox onsite as it was only displayed to customers most likely to be interested.

Another customer, SheFinds used Boomtrain to send a staggering 79 million emails in a span of around 3 months. Out of all these emails, a whopping 30 million were personalized.

SHEfinds also managed to improve its email open rate to over 20 percent. Something that seems almost impossible, given the size of their mailing list.

Start Listening Smart, and you won’t get left behind

If you’re a marketer, waiting too long to get the right tools to hear the voice of customer and respond, like artificial intelligence and personalization tools could be costing you millions in revenue. You need to be following in the footsteps of brands like Game Rant and SheFinds. Apart from using Boomtrain technology, their eye for details, effective tracking mechanisms, and experimentation keeps them truly tuned in to the voice of customer and thus ahead of the game.

Articles | December 16, 2016 | 4 min read

Stay On Point: eCommerce Awards in 2016 & Takeaways for Marketers

What are the brands that are really winning at building great eCommerce experiences? What are good indicators of brands that stand out this way? We looked at the categories and results of three major eCommerce awards to understand who is doing what right and what marketers can takeaway from the year 2016 and keep in mind for the next.

Mobile Is The Way of The Future

When it comes to building an epic mobile retail campaign, this year’s undoubted winners are Oasis. With the assistance from the agency Merkle / Periscopix, the mobile retailer managed to grow their conversion optimization on mobile by 255% (YOY)

Their mobile revenue increased by 270%. As more transactions and online shopping continue to move to mobile, creating experiences that convert and great user interfaces (Shopify design awards had a category for best Mobile UX this year) is essential.

Takeaway: Build your Mobile Strategy with clear conversion goals, target keywords for the right devices and measure everything.

UX and Design for Brand Recall and Conversions

With Shopify now creating a whole eCommerce award dedicated to design, it’s clear that their years of hosting and setting up online stores has taught them to value the potential and results that great design brings. Luxury Farms, the winners of Shopify’s mobile UX category stood out from the rest because of good optimization. The fine tweaks really make a difference to your final app experience.

“The mobile experience is cleverly optimized for smaller screens and quick inputs, making the shopping experience elegant and efficient.” -Aarron Walter, VP of Design Education at InVision

Shopify recognised the best overall design – Opus Grows by Herman Scheer – for their sheer approachability and discoverability. They also recognized Dixon’s carphone in the ‘new design or re-design’ category.

The Takeaway: Don’t compromise on design. Stay responsive. If you messed up the first time, It’s never too late to redesign.

Delivery and Logistics are a big part of eCommerce

We often underestimate the importance of Delivery and Logistics in our eCommerce experience. So do eCommerce retailers. In fact, the effort is often outsourced and forgotten about – with no follow up what so ever. But the takeaway from the Northern eCommerce Awards and the Ecommerce Awards London are that delivery and logistics are important. Not just important but something that can complete the customer experience – which is why 3P Logistics and Parcelly won big time.

The Takeaway: Get your logistics right, make customers happy. Now you can win awards for your excellence too.

Large and Small eCommerce Market Very Differently

Examining three different eCommerce awards in 2016 showed that there were separate awards in two out of the three had separate categories for large and small eCommerce. Space 48 and Green Man Gaming were winners in the ‘Large’ category while ‘Allies’ and ‘Home Leisure Direct’ were winners in the ‘Small’ category. Space 48 are a fast paced agency, helping other retailers establish their online stores better and faster.

Green man gaming is now one of the UK’s biggest online game retailers. The difference in the way these two websites are built from the ‘Allies’ and ‘Home Leisure Direct’ website are stark. The number of calls to action, categories, lightboxes and info are all much more, and optimized to fit

The Takeaway: Marketing for a small eCommerce and larger eCommerce venture has and will continue to be different according to the niche or audience. The ability of an agency or eCommerce entrepreneur to identify their niche correctly will go a long way in helping them design a site with the right size and inventory to cater to this audience.

Conversion Optimization: It’s more Important than you think

Any digital marketer has come across the (in?)famous conversion optimization experts around the web. The guys that promise to make you money like you never imagined. The guys who can understand exactly what is going on on your website and fix it. The conversion optimization experts. Well, if you were always suspicious about their claims earlier, the Northern eCommerce awards have officially legitimized conversion optimization. Endless Gain won in 2016, but all signs point to more agencies handling this task and more brands outsourcing this to get great results for their brands. Understanding your data and using AI and communicating with Personalization can be great ways to drive conversions for your brand.

The Takeaway: If you’re feeling a little overwhelmed by going Digital, understanding your data and what really brings in money you might want to turn to a conversion optimization specialist. Make sure they are legit though, or you may be spending a lot of money with very little gains.

Articles | December 7, 2016 | 3 min read

4 Brands That Use Ecommerce Analytics To Make Conversions Happen

So you have an ecommerce store or even an ecommerce platform. Customers seem to like what you have on offer. So your website grows and grows and suddenly you have a whole lot more data than you ever dreamed you would. It’s difficult enough handling sourcing and distribution, building an online strategy and marketing. So when you begin notice that you aren’t getting the most out of the data you have – what do you do? Hand it over to the pros, of course.

We picked out 4 brands that work with ecommerce companies and platforms on ecommerce analytics and make a real difference to ROI. Presenting, drumroll please, the pros that help you grow conversions like never before.

TrueFit

The most annoying thing about buying shoes and clothes online is fit. There’s only one way to describe that moment when you receive the order you’ve been waiting for and realize your were totally deceived when it came to the fit. It sucks.

Truefit’s Customized Fit Builder

TrueFit is a really forward thinking company that is dedicated to helping ecommerce platforms is the footwear and apparel space to make the best of their ecommerce analytics data. Their one-of-a-kind Genome platform boasts of a great ‘confidence engine’ that understands users’ past purchases or accepts the information they input and begins making size predictions based on their unmatched database of body styles. TrueFit aims to provide retailers and brands with unparalleled insights to optimize marketing, merchandising, and product development. With customers like Macy’s, Lord and Taylor, Nordstrom, Levis, TopShop and whole lot more, they must be getting something right.

Etilize

As an ecommerce company grows, the challenge of producing contextual descriptions and text as your product inventory grows is difficult to meet in-house, especially if you haven’t had time to grow your content and product marketing teams until then.

Etilize has a product database for more than 1.8 million products in North America alone – helping online sellers, retailers, resellers all provide the right descriptions to customers. Elitize also provides in-depth descriptions with context, the right keyword optimization, spelling, grammar and make sure that your website and products get found by the people that are looking for them most actively online.

CNET Content Services

The popular content website CNET’s Content Services division, offers great content for your entire website. The CNET content solution helps you build a foundation for your website with parametric search and accurate product data. That’s not all. With your ecommerce analytics, they recommend and drive the right changes on your website. They can employ a virtual sales associate to help your team, automate your sales cycle or help you with custom offerings that you may be interested in.

Boomtrain Managed Services

Boomtrain’s primary product is an AI powered marketing platform that can help an ecommerce brand send out targeted, activity driven or behavior based communication to customers. You can use their platform to send Emails, SMS, push notifications, in-app messages and lightboxes all to help reach your engaged customers at the right time to drive conversions. With managed services, Boomtrain now uses your ecommerce analytics to help you clean up your data lists, create intelligent segments, performance audits and create custom solutions to grow your conversions and ROI.

Customer Retention | December 2, 2016 | 8 min read

Actionable Examples of Customer Retention Strategies Across Industries

I’m not going to start with that statistic.

The one where I tell you how much more lucrative it is for your business to keep your older customers than get new ones. (5 times is the answer) or where I tell you that a 5% increase in retention can increase profits up to 125%

If you’ve been reading about business development customer retention for a while now, chances are you know this stuff already.

What Can I Tell You That You Don’t Already Know?

I’m Still Confused: Why Is Customer Retention Important Again?

What Makes a Customer Stick with you?

Measuring Retention Right

So what can I tell you that you don’t already know about customer retention?

The fact is that you need various examples of customer retention to be inspired. You need to see actionable examples of customer retention strategies across industries because these strategies aren’t one size fits all.

They change depending on the resources that you have, how well you know and understand your customers and which industry you’re in.

So we made it simpler.

We broke down the basics of measuring customer retention. Next, we put together examples of customer retention strategies across industries like eCommerce, Publishing and Travel. We also sources some of the best pieces across the interwebz on this for you to read and get a better understanding of, and put together any great tools that could help you here.

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I’m still confused. Why is customer retention so important again?

Happy customers are your primary source of income. When customers decide not to use your product, when they stop signing in to your website or buying your services (this is also called ‘churn’) chances are, you make a lot less money. You may have partnerships and other streams of income, but keeping your customers happy brings more to your organisation than income alone. When your customer retention rate is high, customers form longer term bonds with you and you also receive

Unpaid Evangelising

A great group of people who get your offerings to ask for feedback and make improvements

Testimonials and Case Studies to build your brand

Validation that your existence on this planet actually makes a difference to people

Need I say more?

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What makes a customer stick with you?

To show you what makes a customer stick with a brand, let me give you an example.

I started using a service called This Is My Jam back in 2010 to share new songs I found that became earworms I simply had to spread. I found their value proposition simple, I could share songs I loved and see what other people were binge-listening. I found this a unique, sticky experience: engaging with a small group of customers. I stuck on.

Alas! It was not meant to be

So when This Is My Jam shut down in 2015, I was genuinely sad to see my weekly jam posting routine die. Yet, they probably did something wrong. They didn’t do enough to engage customers, they didn’t set themselves apart from other sites like SoundCloud and Spotify where you could also share and see what others liked, they didn’t build a good paid model or create a USP – and hence had to shut down. Sad Story.

The moral? Customers stick on because…

You offer something unique that they love, a product that is easy to get the hang of.

They like your payment model (or lack of it)

They like your user interface

They see others like them getting value out of what you offer

Your customer service is good (71% of consumers have ended their relationship with a company due to poor customer service.)

They don’t like change.

Is there anything as annoying as getting used to a brand or service then and needing to move away from it because it shuts down or you can’t afford it anymore?

Luckily, I had SoundCloud to satisfy all my tune cravings (my new love) but that isn’t the case when you invest time, money and resources heavily in a sales automation platform or product management tool. You want it to work out. And the least you expect in return? Getting what you were promised.

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Measuring Retention Right

Measuring what your customer retention rate is and how well your customer retention strategies are working means having an understanding of exactly how your industry works and what your customers expect. Joseph Pigato, The CMO of retention platform Sparked.com in an article on how companies keep their customers explains

“No one likes to be dumped. But companies are blindsided every day by customers who leave them. Often, companies don’t see it coming: in fact, 91 percent of customers leave without any explicit warning.”

Some of the post prominent ways that companies already measure customer retention are by methods like

Snapshot Retention Analysis

Cohort Analysis

Survival Analysis

A combination of all of the above

Either way, if you aren’t doing it yet – a great place to start is using a simple tool like Google Analytics and beginning to understand your customer retention rate based on your most basic metrics like web traffic or sign up rate and then progress to implementing more complicated customer retention strategies.

Retention 101: A calculation as simple as dividing Returning Visitors/Total Visitors shows you the percentage of visitors who visited your site more than once in a period of time that you specify.

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eCommerce Retention Strategies

The eCommerce industry is unique because a website can’t always predict how often a customer will come back to buy a product. What they can do however, is make the experience of buying the product great. In eCommerce, the factors that go into retaining a customer are plenty. Examples of customer retention strategies in eCommerce are discounts to bring back older customers, exclusive previews to sales, great return policies, quality products, smooth payment and return experience and more!

Image: Sweet Tooth Rewards

The online eCommerce seller Zappos, developed a customer retention strategy where customer retention and success was measured based on the metrics that mattered to their customers. Tony Hsieh, the founder of Zappos explains

“Branding Through Customer Service Over the years, the number one driver of our growth at Zappos has been repeat customers and word of mouth. Our philosophy has been to take most of the money we would have spent on paid advertising and invest it into customer service and the customer experience instead, letting our customers do the marketing for us through word of mouth.”
― Tony Hsieh, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose

This way, Zappos changed their call centre customer service agenda to providing maximum value for customers by focusing not on ending calls quickly and measuring time per call, but by measuring total call time – and increasing that number.

A simple way to begin measuring your ecommerce retention rate is to find the number of customers who shopped with you 12-24 months ago who also shopped in the last six months and then divide that by the number of customers who shopped with you 12-24 months ago alone. This is a good measure to carry out monthly or quarterly to spot trends and changes in your numbers.

examples of customer retention strategies

Image: Ometria

Related Reading:

Shopify’s 7 Customer Retention Tactics to Get Current Ecommerce Customers to Purchase More

Prove.it’s article on How to leverage actionable ecommerce marketing initiatives from your customer retention rate

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Travel Industry

While in the eCommerce space, customer experience can be a great driving factor for retention, this is even more important in the travel industry. As globalization shrinks the world and customers no longer depend on travel agents or stay loyal to one airline – now is the time when airlines, travel companies, hotels and resorts must complete to stay relevant.

The rise of platforms like AirBnB have further ‘hipsterized’ the travel experience. The modern traveller is concerned about more than the cost of their travel and luxury quotient. They also care about

The quality of the experience.

The ecological impact

How immersed they can be in the local culture.

The amount of leisure and peace of mind the experience brings.

How good a deal they get.

Most examples of customer retention strategies revolve around the five figures above. Measuring how many customer look at your offerings vs how many actually book (look to book ratio) and how much revenue you receive as a travel marketer per search are ways to measure how effective your positioning and booking experience is. However, this is a poor benchmark to measure customer retention. Travel marketer’s now measure customer retention rate with

Average Spend

Repeat Rate and

Average Retention Time

Comparing look-to-book ratio and revenue per search figures against historical day and mapping changes over a period of time is a good way to understand if your business is growing.

To get the customer lifetime value for each of your segments, you’re going to multiply Average Order Value, Number of Repeat Sales and Average Retention Time.
(Average Order Value) × (Number of Repeat Sales) × (Average Retention Time) = (Customer Lifetime Value).

Offering NPS surveys exclusively to repeat customers can also help them feel valued and increase customer retention rate. Customer Referrals are another great way to retain and grow your customer base, something that AirBnB has revolutionised.

Related Reading

Roomstorm’s post on Measuring’s Customer Lifetime Value in the Travel Industry

Forbes’ post on Driving Customer Loyalty in a Commoditized Travel Space.

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Publishing, News and Media

The news, publishing and media space is another crowded avenue where retaining a customer is difficult. In the early days of the internet, it was easy to put out great content or offer a timely news service or daily bulletin and you could build your subscriber lists en-masse.

Image: Relevance.com/2015

Today, with email overload, content shock and the plethora of free content that you can find online, getting customers to pay for news and media content is increasingly difficult. Most examples of customer retention strategies are experimental, depending on the publication. Some publishers like Conde Nast and New York Magazine even collaborated with Jun Group to offer rewards to readers who visit their sites for timed sessions. The group even helped a national news publisher drive over 30MM page views over four quarters for the selected sections of the site. Mitchell Reichgut, Jun Group’s co-founder and chief executive explains

“This is the most powerful way to responsibly get people to a site, this delivers real people to sites in a way where they are much more open to advertising.”

Related Reading

Arkadium’s post on How Publishers are increasing user engagement and retention.

Service Source on Customer Churn and Retention in Information and Media.

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The Toolbox

Analytics for Airlines from Triometric

Solutions for Travel also from Triometrics

Loyalty Programs for your eCommerce by Sweet Tooth

Customer Support Software from Zendesk

Recommendation Engines for eCommerce and Publishers from Boomtrain

Engagement and Rewards for Publishers and Brands from Jun Group

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Let’s add to this list. Are you in an industry where you’ve developed your own customer retention strategies and a unique way to measure them? Let us know!