1customerStrategically designed contact management nowadays affects the entire Customer Journey - from the initial contact with a product through purchase to sales and delivery, support and maintenance.

No matter whether it is a website or a flyer, TV or smartphone, it's a matter of creating a consistently positive customer experience at all touchpoints and on or via all channels, to turn customers into brand ambassadors.

Some figures underpin why companies should focus more on content marketing and less on outbound marketing. For instance, the conversion rates of websites with factual content are six times higher than for websites with advertising product information, according to experts.

Furthermore, eight out of ten decision-makers in the B2B environment explicitly prefer information in the form of specialist articles than pure advertising. And contacts gained through inbound measures can be converted ten times faster to qualified leads than contacts gained through banner advertising.

People have always wanted experiences…

The times are over when it was enough to start marketing campaigns with email lists. Today, personalized digital marketing strategies are needed that require more and more accurate and detailed information about customers and prospects. Therefore, marketers have to make use of a consumer’s demographic background, behavior on the respective website, contacts with hotlines and support centers, social media habits, but also eCommerce and financial systems used for a purchase, to get a picture of the person and provide an outstanding service.

All of these interrelated and successive experiences are commonly referred to as customer experiences, which can be called successful only if the customers feel connected. That’s why it is currently on every marketer’s priority list.

…which must be just much more data-driven and personalized today!

As Hybris SAP explained it in one of its whitepapers: “We’re at the dawning of a new kind of experience, one that capitalizes on the best of the mass media and merchant marketplace models, one that consciously puts the experience first”.

Indeed, thanks to seemingly endless computing capacities and new technologies, our industry has the amazing ability to create truly engaging and personal experiences even for millions of clients across every touchpoint.
Technology allows us to craft a larger ongoing experience, one that “communicates dynamically and systematically with a consumer using timely data as input and a personalized message as an output”, Hybris SAP states.
Of course, to bridle critics, we have to consider that embracing opportunities usually means facing challenges as well. In our case, hitting all the channels to create dynamic and systematically consistent experiences isn’t easy due to its complexity and the vast number of touchpoints, but unfortunately crucial to succeed.

Just look at the explosion of channel diversity in the so-called Internet of Things (IoT), where literally anything can become a channel or a connection. What I mean is that the purchasing journey, the customer experience, and the brand will be directly impacted by the adoption of Internet of Things devices and technology and that the impact still has to be foreseen.

What’s for sure is that IoT will continue to push the limits of today’s customer experiences and raise the bar higher and higher.

By Daniela La Marca