3 Things All Engagement-Driving Marketers Have In Common

According to Gallup research, engaged customers increase your profitability, revenue and growth by 23 percent. More than simply satisfied, these customers feel an emotional connection to your brand, are exceedingly loyal, and are quick to recommend your business to others. B2B companies that actively engage customers typically realize:

• 63% decrease in customer attrition
• 55% higher share of wallet
• 50% higher productivity

The remarkable results achieved by companies with high levels of engagement have led to numerous studies. One global survey of approximately 1,700 senior marketing executives found that marketing operators, who have mastered the art of customer engagement, are among the top 20 percent of their peers. These high-achievers consistently empower their companies to obtain greater revenue and market share growth than their competitors. What’s even more interesting is that all the customer-engaging 20-percenters have three things in common.

1. Customer Engagement Leaders Connect Their Tech

Being in-the-know and ahead of others is a hallmark of both well-connected people and a well-connected marketing stack. In order to get the most from your customer data, you must be able to connect and compare that data across all sources and in real time. Only then can you be certain that the insights you are gleaning are the ones you should be acting upon. If you have been intimidated by the perceived complexity of connecting everything in your martech stack, you needn’t be. There are a number of integration solutions that enable both tech gurus and the non-technical to link all systems, tools and platforms with relative speed and ease. Among the manifold benefits of a fully integrated martech stack are:

• Increased efficiency through more automated processes and fewer manual tasks
• Enhanced website performance via a seamless customer experience across all channels
• Increased visibility of time-sensitive actionable insights
• Increased relevance of ads through access to comprehensive data insights

Marketing operators, who connect their tech, not only see the big picture, but enjoy a more accurate view of their customers. Moreover, when data is shared across tech, it empowers everything (and everyone) to be on the same page. It equips you with the right information at the right time, which is essential to providing more engaging experiences to customers.

2. Customer Engagement Leaders Are Curious and Perform Experiments Regularly

The second variable all great marketing operators have in common is an insatiable desire to learn from their data and a willingness to try new things. As any good counselor will tell you, all relationships need fresh approaches from time to time in order to keep things interesting, and that includes customer relationships. When your tech is fully connected, your access to real-time insights gives you a unique advantage in that you can go from being reactive to proactive by testing ideas and theories on various customer samples. Researchers at Marketing Sherpa chronicled how Acorio, a B2B firm, quadrupled pipeline activity through ongoing data testing and learning. “Every email, every social media post, every website title, we have an A and a B version and test everything we do. From all of these small discoveries, every day, every week, we make great strides over time,” said Meghan Lockwood, Acorio’s Vice President of Strategic Marketing. One such example included attempting to speed responses and increase click-through rates by testing how potential customers would react to the addition of a countdown timer in their emails. The test was a success and produced a 74 percent increase in click-throughs, as well as $6.6 million in new business.

3. Customer Engagement Leaders Share Insights

All customer-engaging marketing operators know that knowledge is most powerful when it is shared. Conversely, when knowledge is hoarded it loses its power, as anyone who’s had the great misfortune of dealing with silos knows. As you gather data and results from testing and experiments, be sure to share this information with fellow executives, team members in marketing operations, and other departments throughout your enterprise. Dispersing data insights across your company not only fosters collaboration, it encourages people to think more critically and creatively about ways to take advantage of opportunities and resolve issues. In fact, the more people you allow to access and review data, the larger the variety of perspectives and fresh insights you stand to gain from those who will apply their own professional skillsets and strengths to the information at hand. Before sharing data, it does help to place it in an easy to digest format. One easy way to provide data insights to anyone at any time in a readily understandable format is to use a data dashboard. These marketing operations workhorses are able to centralize your view of data, and translate numbers and information into visually compelling graphs, charts and reports that empower people to process insights quickly. More importantly, they take the hassle out of mining data and reporting results. This enables you to equip people with instant insights and ultimately lead a team that is prepared to take action, interact with more customers, and become members of the elite 20-percent of marketing operators who drive engagement.