Driving Wantedness

With the expansion of global internet access, the maturation of communication technologies, and advancement in the collection, storage, and visualization of data, an ‘Engagement Economy’ has emerged — where everyone and everything is connected and marketing faces disruption and transformation due to really big data.

Connectivity continues to permeate all metacultures, subcultures, and countercultures under the sun; modern audiences are digitally savvy, mobile-oriented, predominantly free-thinking and prone to conducting research before making purchases. Since new technologies yield both new behaviours and new opportunities, businesses must embrace a culture of agility, learning, and big data prowess to take advantage of this positive feedback loop. Success in creating brand loyalty among volumes of media-inundated customers will depend on an organization’s ability to create experiences as diverse and unique as each individual in their collective audience.

In this ‘Engagement Economy’, relationship nurturing is paramount — according to Marketo’s CMO Chandar Pattabhiram, businesses wishing to perform a cut above the rest will:

1. Adopt a ‘listen and learn’ attitude across all channels.
2. Remain a step ahead, automate without sounding robotic and anticipate various conversations.
3. Translate data into meaningful interactions (i.e. experiences).
4. Be ready to communicate personably at scale (i.e. billions of people and devices every day).

Crafting a best-in-class customer journey is both a daunting and a rewarding endeavor. Wunderman (a digital agency leading in creative insights) recently commissioned a study which found that: 89% of consumer respondents expect brands to go ‘above and beyond’ to set new standards for customer-facing experiences, 55% feel more loyal to brands that show deeper understanding of their priorities and preferences, and 58% expect not just the given product, but the experiences across an entire customer journey to exceed expectations. With these findings in mind, are you doing all you can to prove to your customers you are willing to go the distance? Specifically, how’s your email looking these days?

At sendwithus, we are dedicated to empowering marketers to use live data to create more meaningful customer experiences, by way of optimizing marketing and transactional emails. Our feature Connect allows marketers to pull live data from the data warehouse themselves by using queries to build multi-dimensional and continuous segments. Growth marketers can now reach audience members with high degrees of personalization and accuracy since all the data being used to inform templates and perform sends is fresh and up-to-date (zero lag-time waiting for engineering to pull lists together, zero stale CSV uploads).

The ability to deliver the right message at the right time has never been more valuable. In fact, AdWeek recently polled prominent minds in marketing at the Marketing Nation Summit 2017 on what they believed will most impact the success of brands in the Engagement Economy… several key takeaways sprang forth which we believe have notable congruence to our mission:

1. Engagement is being transformed by the merger of ad-tech and mar-tech — all touch points along the customer journey must be considered; it’s no longer about one great ad, it’s about the complete lifecycle.

Helping businesses email better: the creation of seamless, compatible, and timely communications is our bread and butter. We consider each email (from welcome, to re-engagement, to *gasp* unsubscribe) an important touch point along a customer’s online journey. Our platform was designed so that marketers can easily build advanced segments (pinpointing users with high degrees of specificity) and then A/B test within segments to identify sweet spots in messaging and beyond.

2. The only way to ‘win’ is to use a comprehensive view of ‘the customer’ to inform decision-making — it’s important to understand who each customer is in order to create the kinds of experiences that are meaningful and relevant to them.

Within your data warehouse lies a dazzling and ever-evolving picture of each of your customers (as they subscribe, buy, return, click, like, share, visit, and so on and so forth). Segmenting your audience on a single behavioral criterion would be a folly when you can segment on multiple data points, thereby, providing the nuanced and personalized email experience that is so sought after in the developing ME-conomy.

3. Various platforms are integrating but people are not — diverse and stratified teams must work more closely together to succeed, collaboration is key.

We enjoy the relentless pursuit of forging a synergy between marketers, designers, and developers within organizations — specifically in regards to the teamwork required to create emails which delight and engage customers. Our template system is built so that marketing can control email content (i.e. an easy editor for non-techies to make simple changes outside of source code), and engineering can trust that important transactional email is never broken.

To learn more about sendwithus and how our platform can help you surpass all of your email marketing goals, please drop us a note at sales@sendwithus.com … or if you’re the shy type, lurk our website at www.sendwithus.com