Author: Samantha Potts
Date: May 16th 2020
Whether the company is B2C or B2B, customers want to talk to and do business with people, not organizations or brands. Many buying decisions include a very important emotional component that is best influenced by interactions with the people in a company. Prioritizing the right human touch helps shape buying behavior and positive outcomes.
On the other hand, technologies like marketing automation are critical to sustaining that human touch, especially when trying to reach a multitude of diverse customers. These technologies can help nurture more salesready leads, and free up marketers for creative work and for working more effectively with customers as people. Humanized marketing focuses on establishing sincere relationships with customers and building the trust that can only come from person to person communication.
Customer Analytics Uncover the Human Factor
Marketers need to uncover who customers are and apply that customer intelligence to humanize marketing. Connecting meaningfully to customers requires engendering more individualized interactions and experiences. More attention should go into personalized communications with customers that work well for a particular channel of engagement.
Investing in the Right Resources for Customer Interactions
Customer communication across channels is imperative for success, so companies have to step up and invest wisely in all customer-facing functions, including marketing.
Humanizing customer interactions should be a strategic initiative for the entire company since engaged and happy customers benefit everyone. The costs should be shared across all functions that participate in and benefit from effective customer communications. This includes marketing, customer service, sales, IT, and corporate level customer initiatives. As with customer service, companies should cease to consider customer-facing functions as cost centers and should see them as important initiatives to engage, gain and retain customers that want the company’s products and services.
Protecting Customer Privacy:
Collecting customer interaction data, as well as asking customers for information, is important and necessary to build reliable customer intelligence. But a great responsibility comes with that customer information—protecting customer privacy and data security.
Human to Human Marketing in the Real World with Kentico:
Step1: Analytics Start the process:
The first step is capturing data. Your store needs to know who comes to the website and where they come from, be it from a Google search for screwdrivers, an email ad, referral site, social media campaign, or an organic visit. How much time are they spending on the site? What are they looking at? Are these visits converting to sales? What is the customer’s journey? With Kentico, your store can understand the type and behavior of their visitors. By using Kentico’s Web Analytics tools, you can capture data on visitors (countries, registered users, visitors, mobile devices, etc.), traffic sources (referrals, search engines, search keywords, etc.), content views (file downloads, landing pages, exit pages, page views, etc.), and browser capabilities (browser types, operating system, screen resolution, etc.) to manage campaigns clearly and easily. This information is captured in “real time”, and your store can track each of these individual statistics (and more) on an hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis. With this data, the store knows that certain visitors have come from certain campaigns, are following a particular customer journey, and can drilldown into the data to track them.
Step2: Data Segmentation:
This data (and there will be plenty of it) must now be narrowed down and organized into useful segments. The store knows which criteria matter to its sales structure, so they will need to set different values for each piece of data collected. Using Kentico’s Segmentation module, your store can efficiently break down this contact data into multiple groups that share the same value criteria based on several different factors. Let’s say, for example, that your store has two contact segments. One is spending less time on the site and puts more things in their e-shopping baskets (and either buys a few small items like paint brushes or pliers, or they leave the site and never complete the purchase). The other contact segment makes many trips to the site and spends several minutes each visit reading product descriptions and reviews. They don’t often put products into their basket, but when they do, these products are larger, like a vertical band saw, and they tend to complete the purchase.
Step3: Persons put a human face to those segments:
Even with clearly defined contact segments, it is still important to reach those different customers as people rather than give every visitor the same generic content. Included in Kentico’s Online Marketing solution, the Personas module allows our hardware store to take that information and develop a persona about who the customer is, asking and answering what drives them, how they got to where they are, and how we can reach them effectively. Through personas, the store can assign new and returning visitors to each persona based on criteria the store feels are key to that persona’s customer journey.
Step4: Marketing Automation Reaches the Right Personas the Right Way:
Marketing Automation allows the store to define and execute easily automated marketing campaigns to engage new customers, nurture leads, and maintain an ongoing conversation with the customer. Marketing Automation takes the best of Kentico’s Online Marketing tools, including Contact Management, Email Marketing, Segmentation, Personalization, Campaign Management, and Lead Scoring, and orchestrates them into a manageable process to automate lead nurturing and drip marketing while also cultivating relationships with clients and prospects, converting them into customers. It’s a powerful tool that turns the simple hardware store owner into an orchestral conductor.
Step5: A/B Testing Makes the Messaging Right
Messaging, even if the store has a 100% accurate customer persona and a carefully orchestrated automated marketing campaign based on accurately defined customer data, is still important. The store can have the best data and the best content, but if they’re not messaging it in the right way, they’re not going to make the sale. With A/B testing, the store can use a small sampling of members of a particular persona to test two different versions of the message they’re trying to get across and make sure that the message that gets to the customers is not only the right one, but is delivered the right way.
Step 6: Contact Management and Social Marketing Helps the Cycle Begin Again
Now that your store has created a hard-hitting campaign that produces strong sales and a healthy ROI, the store owner can put their feet up and relax. Or, in the real world, they can take that data and, using Kentico’s Contact Management module, combined with their existing CRM system, keep track of each customer as they come back to the site. If the customer hasn’t been back in a while, your store knows what type of content might bring them back. Instead of sending out a generic email blast to the whole contact list, your store owner can send out targeted content or offers that speak to that customer.
About ConeKtions:
ConeKtions HQ'd in Orlando FL, is a Bronze Partner of Kentico that provides an All-in-one CMS, E-commerce, and Online Marketing platform. Kentico’s products include Kentico EMS, the all-in-one CMS, E-commerce, and Online Marketing platform, and Kentico Kontent, the flexible Content-as-a-Service solution. Talk to us today to help us serve your implementation OR upgrade requirements.
If you like our Blog - Don't forget to subscribe below, for us to keep you updated with more informational content:
Comments