Engaging one-on-one and at scale with new and existing customers has always been a top priority for large and small businesses alike, as personalized engagements translate to customer loyalty, greater retention, and greater sales. However, due to new customer privacy restrictions, businesses can no longer rely on social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram to provide important data or share key information about potential customers. This hits small businesses especially hard, who traditionally use their social channels for customer research and outreach. This is why SMBs are now shifting their focus to finding a more tailored approach that allows for attracting and targeting new customers directly.
To remain competitive in an oversaturated market, businesses face the challenge of building greater customer engagement, multidirectional communication, and allocating marketing resources to provide a personalized experience for customers.
According to a Salesforce report about the“State of the connected customers,” 80 percent of customers say that the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services. This begs the question, how can brands gather customer data and build personalized approaches to better connect with customers?
Building stronger connections with customers
Since the roll-out of the new customer data privacy restrictions, it’s become increasingly important to find a cost-effective solution to target and connect with customers and prospects directly. As buying customer data or collecting third-party data from platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, has become limited and presents new challenges, there’s an even greater pressure added on small businesses to develop loyal customer relationships.
Reaching customer-level personalization delivers relevant and valuable information, making users prone to purchasing. The connection with customers is built through tailored messages, directly addressing the user’s needs and wants. The key to achieving this level of personalization is to gather as much relevant information as possible to deliver a message that conveys value to them.
One of the most effective channels to target audiences, engage, and ensure a purchase is through SMS. Text messages are instantly read by users, generally don’t get stale or lost in saturated inboxes, and are also great at bridging the in-store and online divide.
As customers flock back to stores with lessened Covid restrictions, businesses need to find ways to unify offline and online strategies to strengthen new and existing customer relationships. One way to do this is to offer customers the flexibility and continuity of purchasing from e-commerce platforms as well as traditional brick-and-mortar stores. Providing online coupons for subscribing to services or newsletters, redeemable in physical stores, and vice-versa can help bridge this gap. The success behind this strategy is understanding your customer’s needs and preferences and then delivering the solution in a clear and actionable message.
Turning engagement into sales
Keeping track of engagement levels helps measure how effective a marketing strategy is and how well you can connect with your audience in order to drive sales. Many companies track engagement through clicks on their website, for example. However, the magic behind this number is what really adds value and allows businesses to add a customer name to these clicks and connect individually. Here is where companies start to learn more about their customers and their interests. Simple data such as who clicked on what will allow them to understand what content is relevant and potentially actionable, making the message more effective.
A personalized approach enabled by deep analysis will help not only sales numbers but your marketing and ROI grow, and lower the acquisition cost. Platforms that offer customer-level insights and advanced technology to help create effective strategies to connect and engage with your target audience successfully.
At the end of the day, companies need to evaluate the cost of acquisition, how relevant their message is to their target audience, how relevant the product is to solve customers’ pain points, and how they incentivize customers to complete a purchase.
What to expect in 2022
The way companies connect with their audience is constantly changing, and last year’s pandemic definitely pushed new trends. 2022 will further highlight SMS as one of the most prominent marketing tools for the future, providing brands with the opportunity to contact customers directly and connect through personalization. Just by optimizing a few messages, as opposed to weekly or daily newsletters, you can ensure that customers receive and take action.
But while SMS will rise and mobile marketing, in general, will lead the way, the market can also expect a massive rise in traditional brick-and-mortar stores with the lessened Covid restrictions. This trend adds to the importance of using an omnichannel approach to drive traffic to both online and physical stores to dramatically increase engagement levels. With large investments in place to push and enhance the in-store shopping experience, small and large companies alike need to plan and execute strategies that will allow them to serve both channels seamlessly. With greater engagement, companies will achieve greater sales.
