One of my friends was planning a vacation and he started his search for best packages online as well as through emails and apps of several travel companies. He enquired by sending a request for specific packages and shared his email and mobile number. Finally, after thorough research he purchased a package from one of the travel companies and was delighted that he got the best package at the cheapest possible rate.
Surprisingly a day later, he received an SMS from the same travel company offering 10% discount on the same package. Oops! That made him feel cheated and forced him to enter in an argument with the travel company who, at the end had to give in to his demands.
But all this resulted in to a bad customer experience and ultimately loss to the brand.
Are you, as a brand, facing similar challenges?
In many organisations, multiple channels of marketing are still operating in silo form of departments resulting in inconsistency in messaging. This was fine earlier when customers were accessing messages mostly on a single channel e.g. desktop. But in today’s connected age, where consumers interact with brands using multiple touch-points across multiple channels, it is essential for the brand to maintain continuity and consistency in messaging.
To address this issue, brands need to have a centralised and unified view of the customers, which track their activity across all digital channels.
In most of the companies, a CRM software manages this. It is integrated with the website to track customer’s website activity. But today’s marketing demands it to be integrated not only with the website, but also with other outbound channels like email, SMS, push notifications, social media and re-targeting ads. The actions on these outbound channels also need to be recorded in the CRM to understand the customer journey and their preferences to these channels.
Now, this customer data should guide your marketing programs across all channels. That’s data-driven personalised marketing at scale.
So if the travel company had a unified view of the customer, it would have known that this customer has already purchased the package and could have avoided sending him the discounted offer. In fact, they could have grabbed this opportunity to increase the lifetime value by cross-selling and up-selling complementary offerings.
Netcore Smartech, our full-stack omni-channel marketing automation platform, offers expert services to help you deal with such challenges.
Want to get started? Talk to our Marketing Technology experts today!
What are the other strategies you would use to avoid such problems? Let me know in the comments section below!