Contactlab Marketing Cloud

Have you already heard about Customer Activation Strategy? The most popular definition among experts offers interesting ideas for those who deal with marketing and must build and finalize communications aimed at customers to increase their engagement or overall sales.

It consists in using all the data made available by the CDP to identify the most effective marketing actions for each cluster and make customers more active towards the brand, with more frequent and higher value interactions – be they purchases, subscriptions , donations, …

Are you wondering why we talk about it right now? Because the heart of the Contactlab Marketing Cloud, that is the Customer Data Platform, can support you in carrying out these activities,

Integrating information in profiles.
Using and activating data.
Automating actions towards specific targets.
Generating a positive impact.
With execution and results in the shortest possible time.

Welcome then to the fifth round of the series on the Contactlab CDP.

Activation

We have seen together how to create and enrich profiles and the potential offered by advanced segmentation tools. Now we have to use these data. Let’s talk about Activation.

For those of us who deal with CDP, Activation consists of starting from the segments to design and execute marketing campaigns. Campaigns that base their success to some components on which the marketeer has to act, considering his own goal but also the customer needs and expectations. You have to personalize them.

And these variables in the activation phase are basically three:

Content: a tailored message on customer desires, preferences, socio-demographic data, hits the mark more than a generalist and impersonal communication. The content is not only word – or substance – but also form. An email with all the elements and spaces distributed and used correctly, or with attractive images and videos, invites the customer to click, to get to the heart of the relationship and start his adventure for example on the ecommerce portal.

Timing: an email received at the right time has higher openings and click rates. Time can be the instant of the day or in the customer’s life cycle. The first is simple, let’s see the second. If I have purchased infant formula for months, my son will probably no longer use it after one year. How do I react if the brand continues to send me communications regarding a product I no longer need? Knowing the customer means understanding that it’s time to promote other products that follow him, and that follow his changed needs.

Channel: nowadays the importance of multiplatform and multichannel communication is a fact. To be successful, a brand must plan to interact on all the contact channels, choosing the preferred ones for each single customer. And as some of them may be active on several different fronts simultaneously, it is necessary to harmonize the activities on the various channels to ensure consistency in the messages and in order to propose an integrated offer and successful marketing plans.

Contactlab supports the brands with a combination of services and technologies able of managing the personalization of content, timing and channels.

Content, timing, channels

When you talk about content, you meanly deal with creating communications and goes hand in hand with the contact channels.

> To reach your customers you can rely on the SMS which, according to recent research, is still a very effective channel with opening rates above 98%. In 90% of these cases, they are open within three minutes (source Forbes) and 74% of those who read it, then interact with the brand (source SMS Advantage Report). It therefore continues to be a valid option both as a one-shot delivery and inserted in a more complex contact plan. Choose concatenated SMS to not limit the length of the text or use the special UCS-2 characters to convey your messages in many modern languages. Plan delivery to punctual segments or use this channel in customer journeys. The choice is wide, relying on professionals can help not to leave any road unexplored.

> When it comes to email, the choice of the HTML editor must be made by balancing the creative need towards the ease of use. It is necessary to evaluate what the specific needs are in order to create attractive and successful emails. In most situations, privileging the creative area means collaborating with a team of experts – often external companies – which provides more sophisticated tools that require in-depth technical knowledge not found within the organization. On the other hand, if you prefer the usability so desired and desired by the brands over the years to increase their autonomy, you put the attention on drag and drop and simplicity which more often do not require specific skills. In any case, whatever the preferred solution, the added value comes from platforms equipped with an integrated editor so that HTML can be called from within the application and it is not necessary to open anything else externally to proceed. In addition of course to the possibility of using the communication obtained both for one-shot delivery and for selected audiences or at the appropriate time, in predefined automations.

> Then there are push notifications. Thanks to webhooks that facilitate the exchange of information, it is now possible to interact with software designed specifically for this type of delivery. When an event is logged, a notification is sent to the external system in a completely transparent way and the communication sent automatically.

In short, the list goes on. You have to be clear from the beginning what you want to achieve in order to understand what you need to build and adopt a platforms that can follow you on your path.

Timing. A focus on timing arises from the fact that the customer is increasingly sophisticated today, has high expectations regarding the quality of the relationship that the brand wants to create and maintain with him. He has many different opportunities with the brands and he must understand where to invest his resources. And this is where the topic of marketing automation comes into play. As we said in a previous article in the series, the era of mass mailing has now ended – or rather, it is no longer the only one and certainly the most appropriate choice for every situation, without distinction. It is necessary to create journeys for your customers in which you anticipate and follow their needs, actions, preferences to always be able to capture their attention. Because it is precisely to the individual that you can turn to and this the customer perceives it. To do this, the availability of data in unique profiles becomes vital, where you collect all the information concerning him updated in real-time, also managing to predict behavior or trends.

All this can be found in the Customer Data Platform signed Contactlab.

The benefits from activation with the Contactlab Marketing Cloud

Create communications simply and independently.
Design differentiated and tailored journeys.
Communicate in real-time, automatically and in the most suitable moment.
Establish lasting individual relationships.
Improve the customer experience.
Increase the engagement.
…

All of this while being fully compliant with GDPR.

And now?

Contact us to know our CDP. Contactlab can become your partner from the analysis and the shaping of your customer activation campaigns to execution and monitoring. To learn from your activities, to learn from tour customers.

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