Creating and Measuring Customer Engagement Online -The Four Rs of Marketing

OPINION ARTICLE – OPINION ARTICLE – OPINION ARTICLE – OPINION ARTICLE The Four Rs of Marketing Creating and Measuring Customer Engagement Online Conrad Bennett, Technical Services Director, WebTrends. As business owners and operators deal with shrinking operating budgets, reduced staff numbers and increased competition, it is important to ensure that all of the marketing activities that they do undertake are as effective as possible in engaging with current and potential consumers. Now is the time for businesses to adopt new concepts to help them participate in conversations with customers that are taking place across the internet and deliver truly relevant messages and offers. Web analytics can guide your customer engagement strategies and help you understand your customers’ interests by motivating them to act with targeted campaigns. It is becoming increasingly challenging every day to effectively connect with customers. We are bombarded constantly with messages via email, billboards, web surfing, radio, television and so much more. Many of these messages are unsolicited and frankly irrelevant. The magnitude of this ‘Push’ marketing is becoming more obvious all the time. Recent research shows that the average consumer receives more than 3000 messages every day. Each message is part of somebody’s marketing program and represents a significant investment. Unfortunately most will fail to connect in any meaningful way. The problem is not only the sheer quantity but also the quality. People are getting quick on the draw with the delete key. You have to work smarter to make it through their filters. But you are not alone. According to The Economist Intelligence Unit1 the need to engage customers is seen as a critical requirement for survival, in what is now an extremely competitive online marketplace. More than 80% of businesspeople surveyed believe their company loses sales each year because of their failure to engage customers. Most organisations are using new media, like video-enriched internet applications to create engaging experiences. But one of the biggest barriers remains the inability to effectively measure how these isolated interactions impact the overall experience a visitor has online. 47 % of business people surveyed said that the difficulty of measuring customer engagement is the biggest barrier to achieving greater levels of engagement. Part of the challenge is how we get out of this ‘Catch 22’ situation. Frankly, marketing used to be a lot simpler. In the good old days you wrote an ad, you got a celebrity to endorse your product and you blasted it to the widest possible audience over one of three TV networks and across radio, bought space in magazines etc. Nowadays, people seem to trust each other more than they do a celebrity spokesperson. Consumers are turning to each other for advice, reviews and help making decisions. Now your customers and prospects are talking to each other about your products and brands. The old model of push marketing is no longer effective in today’s highly-connected market place. The four Ps of push marketing; Product, Price, Place and Promotion, were used to move people through the buying cycle of awareness, interest, desire and action, targeting customers in mass via television, magazines and radio. This was the one- to-many marketing model. Now that consumers are listening to each other and not us, and being bombarded with too many mass messages to make sense of, marketing is transforming from the four Ps of push marketing to the four Rs of consumer-centric marketing; Reveal, Reward, Respect and Retain. 1 The Economist Intelligence Unit: Beyond Loyalty: Meeting the Challenge of Customer Engagement, 2007 With the four Ps model, businesses knew which messages they were delivering and they also knew the general size of the audience, but they knew little about who was reading the ads or what specific interests they had. The idea was to deliver the four Ps and hope the audience responded appropriately. In the new world of electronic communications, there is no longer a homogenous audience to target. Consumers are connected with each other and getting information through blogs, forums, social networks etc. Now the power has shifted to the consumer. Anyone with an internet connection can find almost anything, compare prices, ask for opinions and much more. In fact, nearly 80% of consumers trust word of mouth more than any other source according to numerous studies recently published by eMarketer. This is a mixed blessing. Businesses have access to a much larger pool of potential customers, but they have essentially lost control of their own messages. In this new environment, the four Ps are still a key part of the marketing strategy, but pushing the four Ps alone is not effective enough to connect with each consumer. It doesn’t allow the organisation to join into the conversations as many of the consumers are conversing directly with each other. A new way of working with this audience is needed. One that listens and participates, not dictates. This is where a new language is needed to describe how to effectively participate in this new conversation. Now, businesses need to connect more directly with individuals who in turn are talking with each other and reflecting back to the organisation. This is where the four Rs become important. This new language reflects the way companies need to evolve and act to enter into an ongoing and meaningful relationship with their customers. The key ingredients for this are Reveal, Reward, Respect and Retain. So what does it mean to Reveal? Revealing is about taking the information you already have, that you collect over time, to gain a deeper understanding about your consumers. It is about identifying the people that matter the most to you, learning about their preferences and then finding more people (potentially thousands or hundreds of thousands) like them. When you ask customers to give up valuable information about themselves, you have to give them something in return. While a generic offer like a free shipping coupon may be a start, it is even more important to listen and react to what your customers are telling you. If they tell you they are allergic to nuts but you keep sending them coupons for almonds, that means they go unrewarded and proves you aren’t listening. Highly relevant, targeted offers result in increased trust and respect towards the brand. By increasing the relevancy and timeliness of the interactions with your consumers, the level at which they trust and respect your organisation will also increase. It also means you respect their time; don’t waste it with irrelevant messages. Retention of customers, especially online, is more than simply sending out e-coupons at certain times of the year. It is about understanding the behaviour and interests of your consumers to encourage an ongoing dialogue, one that is beneficial to the consumer and on their terms. How do you get the kind of insight that you need to Reveal, Reward, Respect and Retain your own customers? What are some of the solutions you need to consider to establish this type of relationship with your customers and ultimately measure success in enabling this? Most web analytics solutions can offer some insight, but it often requires time and resources to piece it all together. You have to sift through online interactions, page views and visits to pull together a complete view. In today’s mature market place, this approach is not enough for most organisations. You need to be able to respond quickly when your customers interact with you and measure engagement on an ongoing basis. By putting the customer at the centre of your universe, WebTrends give you the ability to listen, learn and take action on the insights you have so you can understand the people behind your website visits. Listen. You can gain an understanding of how individuals interact with your business over the lifetime of that relationship. Learn. Score the potential value of each visitor based on the actions they take online and integrate that with information from offline data sources. Act. Ongoing marketing communications and online interactions are based on recent activity relevant to the activity. The result puts the individual at the centre of your marketing to build engagement and drive targeted actions that maximise business results. Activity is the key here – if you aren’t taking any actions based on your analysis, you aren’t getting full value from that analysis. When you consider the amount of time consumers spend online, this gives you an opportunity to know your audience like never before. There are many traits that you can uncover about the customer based on their online actions, even if they are just browsing, as well as from offline consumer data such as demographics or CRM data. You can use this information to develop a complete, 360-degree view of your customers. Activities are combined into an interest profile that builds over time, giving you insight into how the customer speaks, thinks and acts. This interest profile starts building the minute someone comes to your website, regardless of when they identify themselves though registration ID or some other conversion event. You can certainly learn a lot by combining offline information, such as demographic or geographical location, with CRM data such as loyalty programme memberships or purchasing history, with attitudinal data such as surveys. The big opportunity is to bring online behaviour into the picture. This is where consumers are telling you minute-by-minute what they are interested in. Now, real drivers of intent such as recency and frequency, can be used to drive targeted marketing.