Global shutdowns and fluctuations in consumer purchasing habits have caused disturbances in the supply chain ranging from material, inventory, and labor shortages to port blockages and industry backlogs.
These disruptions have impacted consumer experiences and loyalties significantly. So, how can you solve challenges in the supply chain to enhance the customer journey and meet specific expectations?
Given that uncertainty in the supply chain is an ongoing issue unlikely to resolve soon, brands must respond to the instabilities strategically to ensure operational reliability. This requires developing a resilience strategy to identify and address functional gaps in your supply chain.
For example, when mapping out your multi-layered operations, you may discover setbacks from your product suppliers or discrepancies in your production line. By collaborating with external suppliers and stakeholders, you can gain insights and share crucial feedback to build solutions and facilitate effective processes.
Once you’ve developed a sound operational strategy, you need to invest in digital technology to test and execute resiliency. According to Gautham Acharya, Strategy and Portfolio Planning Leader at IBM, “investing in digital technologies helps you get a better view of your supply chain…and predict shortages in certain areas and overcapacity in other areas.”
Artificial intelligence simplifies your supply chain operations and consolidates multiple systems to maximize visibility. Additionally, automating your supply chain optimizes effective decision-making on forecasting and allows you to create simulations of key supply chain issues to evaluate resiliency.
With inventory shortages and more brands entering the market, customers have switched to competing merchants with available products that provide quality service and speedy delivery. For this reason, brands should communicate product availability and ensure delivery times.
So, what can you do to retain customers and improve experiences?
Each of the aforementioned supply chain strategies must be optimized to fulfill consumer expectations. This involves interacting with customers at every touchpoint to collect data and feedback to establish a customer-focused culture. With a customized experience focused on accomplishing individual goals, Stephan Bieber, Group Product Manager at Adobe, says you can achieve “higher customer satisfaction rates, reduce churn, and increase retention rates.”
As the new year approaches, website traffic declines, so customer acquisition is a top priority for brands. One way to optimize your acquisition spending is to invest in loyalty programs and strategies. Yet, some brands often notice that customers don’t return for a second purchase after signing up for a loyalty program. Additionally, when it comes to brand loyalty in general, consumers will switch brands willingly due to factors such as product pricing and availability.
So, how can you augment and expand loyalties to retain new and existing customers in the coming year?
Customers who utilize loyalty points and redeem earned rewards are more than twice as valuable as those who disregard them. But, according to Brad Macdonald, Vice President of Loyalty Strategy at Epsilon, an average of “28% of consumers are abandoning loyalty programs without ever redeeming any points.” Sometimes, that churn rate can be as high as 50%.
So, why are customers declining these seemingly favorable opportunities?
The reason is delayed gratification, which diminishes the value of a program. With standard loyalty programs, it takes an average of six months — sometimes as long as 16 months — for customers to earn an incentive. For this reason, providing consumers with instant and goal-oriented rewards is imperative to increase purchase rates.
With the accumulation of unredeemed points and rewards, brands must develop strategies to maximize program engagement. “70% [of customers] are more likely to recommend a brand if they have a good loyalty program,” states Michael Klein, Global Director of Industry Strategy and Marketing at Adobe.
When creating effective programs, it’s ideal to combine easily attainable rewards with long-term aspirational ones. This requires clearly communicating how the customer can benefit from each reward to enhance its value proposition and relevance.
Case in point, Kohl’s and Old Navy offer cash rewards that require customers to make a second purchase to redeem the reward. This gives consumers a goal to work toward while building loyalty and brand profitability.
While loyalty programs aim to increase ROI for your business, some companies feel these programs are too large of an investment and cannot obtain value from them.
So, what other actions can you take to expand customer retention efforts?
Customer personalization is a viable alternative for generating brand loyalty. This strategy creates meaningful moments customized for specific consumer purchasing habits and preferences. It’s best to communicate with customers during each touchpoint in their journey by following up with a personalized email campaign after every purchase or action.
“The whole purpose of loyalty,” says Ashley Lockridge, Vice President of Strategic Consulting at Epsilon, “is not necessarily to live over here in a silo…which, for many organizations, they have a loyalty program, and they kind of live in their own little world. The beauty of [customer personalization] is that you can combine the two so that with every touchpoint, you have the ability to speak to that person on a one-to-one level.”
No matter the loyalty efforts you leverage, it’s crucial to diversify, personalize, and optimize each strategy.
Adobe’s Marketo platform helps you get measurable results from acquisition to advocacy, all while keeping customers engaged. Marketo allows you to send emails, build landing pages and, most importantly, look at data so client journeys can be customized.
Specifically, Marketo’s lead scoring tools allow you to build out the customer journeys from when they first appear in your database all the way to close. Through personalized campaigns, the scoring strategies help you attract, nurture, and deliver on win-ready leads.
Lead scoring is the methodology for ranking leads in order of sales-readiness. It saves time and helps companies focus on high-quality leads that have a better chance of converting through to a sale. Once a lead scoring method has filtered relevant leads, companies can customize their communication approach to meet the needs of the customer, further moving them toward a sale.
Lead scoring is typically divided into two segments: demographic scoring and behavioral scoring. Demographic scoring is anything that exists in your data that has to do with who your customer is. This could be company size, company name, industry, job title, or country — the list can be infinite. Behavioral scoring includes things like filling out a form, browsing a website, event attendance, and other similar actions. Demographic and behavioral components work together to create a lead score for each particular customer.
Although there are plenty of platforms that have lead scoring capabilities, Marketo far surpasses competitors in various ways. Marketo offers flexibility in terms of lead scoring — compared to other platforms where you’re often married to the lead scoring method.
One of the benefits of Marketo is unlimited scoring fields. You aren’t locked into scoring only the things that your platform wants you to score. You can customize scoring fields on any data point or behavioral action, giving you the opportunity to pinpoint more relevant leads specific to your company.
Some of the more advanced strategies Marketo offers are lead scoring A/B testing, product-specific lead scores, negative lead scoring, and the ability to run lead scoring on your own schedule.
Marketo has a long list of benefits, but building your scoring model still comes with challenges.
When you’re putting a scoring model into place, one of the biggest challenges is determining what you will score. You want to collect relevant information, but you don’t want a 20-question form to identify your ideal customer profiles. Many companies solve this through enrichment tools that help you collect extra data.
Another challenge is getting buy-in from your team on a cohesive strategy. You should ensure that both your sales team and demand generation team have a voice, but you still need the leadership team to drive decisions at the end of the day. To find a good balance between conflicting voices, you can take feedback from all teams, build two different models, and see which one is more successful for your company.
Regardless of how well your scoring model is running, you want to check in from time to time and see if it needs updating. And you want to look at this from both a process and an organic standpoint. You should be in the loop with your teams and have consistent meetings, getting their feedback on what’s working and what’s not working. On the process side, revisiting your model every quarter can be helpful to ensure that you’re hitting opportunity goals as well as marketing qualified lead goals.
With the digital transformation taking over the business world, personalization is more important than ever before. Customers don’t want to feel like another number in your marketing statistics or website analytics.
So, how can you create personalized experiences that speak to your customers’ individual wants and drive real results for your brand?
When it comes to creating personalized experiences, getting started is easy. However, finding long-term success can be a little bit more difficult. That’s why it’s essential to build a sturdy foundation for your personalization program to grow and succeed. According to Sarah Ohle from Hero Digital, there are four pillars that can help you win at personalization: customer understanding, moments-based experience, privacy and trust, and industry-specific needs.
By leaning into each of these pillars, you can design personalized experiences that speak directly to your consumers’ wants and needs. How? By putting humans at the core of your personalization strategy.
In-depth analysis is the key to understanding not only what your customers want, but also the greater context around their buying journeys. But, with so much first-party data at your fingertips, where do you start?
Simply capturing traffic and data sources isn’t enough to give you a full view of your audience — you need to know how to apply it in order to create a successful personalized experience.
Luckily, there are a few tools to help you make the most out of your data. Digital intelligence tools, for example, help brands go beyond customer interactions through digital touchpoints that align with data streams from other sources. These include sensors, bots, digital assistants, news services, and more. If you want to create a data-driven personalized experience, it may be time to expand your tech stack.
Once you know who your audience is and what they want, you can start to create personalized experiences and content for them — no matter what stage of the customer’s journey they’re in.
However, providing a personalized experience doesn’t just mean producing content for different stages of the journey; the most successful brands should also segment each stage by even smaller criteria, such as the generation of the customer or their level of savviness with technology.
There are a number of creative and automated ways to segment your customers into groups, from email surveys to artificial intelligence tools. But whichever path you take, Adobe’s Christopher Young has one word of advice: make sure to bring your legal and compliance departments along during the process.
Communicating with them from the start will help you build a roadmap that improves customer trust and drives business success.
