Marketing commentators often attribute the success of Amazon to its advanced personalisation strategy. And with good reason.
The ecommerce giant’s approach goes way beyond the basics. Machine learning helps the brand predict and shape consumer behaviour in real time. Each customer experiences contextually relevant messages that maximise conversions at every stage of their journey.
A great customer experience is defined by its relevance and timely availability to the customer.
I’ve been reading Jay Baer’s treaty on the topic (Winning Hearts in Real-Time), the first in a series extravagantly titled ‘Masters of CX‘.
What sticks out is the importance of mobile. Indeed, Econsultancy’s Skills of the Modern Marketer report, compiled from interviews and an online survey, shows respondents to value CX and mobile as the most important broad and hard skills respectively (incidentally, if you fancy assessing your own digital skills, try sitting our Digital Skills Index test).
I thought I’d highlight some of Jay’s thoughts on what makes great CX and include a few examples. Let us know what you think.
Ask your average person born around the turn of the century, meaning this one, about ‘real time marketing’ and you’re likely to get a moralistic ear-raid.
They’ll talk about the theoretical evils of the NSA, randomly but comprehensively gathering personal data about any number of individuals supposedly in the name of our collective well being.
Even though almost everyone with a smartphone makes tracking their every move relatively easy with constant check-ins and status updates, there remains a deeply entrenched paranoia when it comes to any organization ‘spying’ on us citizens, even if we’re part of the problem by being so carefree in our digital communications.
‘We’ don’t want ‘them’ to be intrusive, but ‘they’ don’t want ‘us’ to remain elusive. Therein lies the philosophical paradox.
In short: How can an honest marketing scheme be pervasive without being invasive?
That is the rub, of course and it’s a sea of gray area that marketers must learn to navigate..
Real-time retailing means being able to detect, understand, communicate with and serve your customers at every point in the purchase lifecycle.
So how can online retailers react responsively to customer needs when they visit their websites?
Here are my seven top tips for how you can become a real-time retailer today.
For decades the mantra of getting the right message, to the right person, at the right time has echoed down the halls of marketing agencies and clients alike. Are we now closer than ever to turning this honourable goal into a reality?
In this series of four posts, we explore the reality behind real time customer intelligence and what it actually means for businesses struggling to keep up with today’s ‘Smart Customers’.
Are you using video in your business content and SEO strategy? If not, you may be missing out on organic search, as well as ecommerce ROI.
Luckily startup 87 seconds is here to help you inform, pitch, sell, and explain your business through video.
As content marketing and SEO grow in importance for all sorts of online business, so does the need for real-time keyword analysis.
Rankinity allows you to check positions of a website for certain keywords in all popular search engines in real time.
The founders of Rankinity are hoping that flexible reports and wide means for joint operation (it can take a lot of cross-department teamwork to successfully manage SEO) will make their service “an irreplaceable assistant both for a SEO savvy and a website owner”.
Can we really access of all data we have on customers and make decisions on the fly?
Here, I discuss the types of data which is available and describes how the single individual view is emerging as the way forward, not the ever dependant single customer view.
For most publishers and businesses operating online, analytics has become an indispensible tool for understanding the audiences that keep the bills paid.
But in some instances, analytics is limited in that it generally provides a better view of the audience as it existed in the past (yesterday, a week ago, a month ago, etc.). For Google Analytics users, however, that is changing.
Here at Econsultancy we’re big on data, and we believe that the best way for publishers to monetise their online audience is to properly evaluate visitors, just like the smarter retailers do. We’ve created a tool to show you how we’re trying to do this.
Called ‘Project Arachnid’, the tool is essentially a real-time visualisation of our website traffic. You can see new visitors arriving at the different sections of our website, represented by dots.
The future of television may be digital, but if you’re a player in the
digital space looking at the meetings and parties taking place as
television networks wrap up their annual upfront sales efforts, it’s
hard not to be a little bit jealous at all the money that still gets
lavished at broadcast and cable ad inventory.
So this year, some digital players are hosting their own “upfronts” in
an effort to get advertisers thinking about the commitments they should
be making to digital ads.