4 Ways Connected Marketing Tech Enhances Your Customer’s Experience

There’s a classic Saturday Night Live skit in which a man, who has just died, is able to get insights and information about his life from a saint who knows all. He is delighted to discover the career he was best suited for was president of the United States; that the $50 that went missing at his graduation was stolen by his uncle; and that there is an entire list of women he knew that secretly had crushes on him. It’s a funny idea and yet it speaks to a powerful innate desire all people (including your customers) have — to be known and understood. While you may not have access to an omniscient saint, you can still delight your customers with attentive insights simply by connecting the technology and data sources throughout your company. Below, we’ve gathered a few of the top benefits and next steps you can take to enhance your customer’s experience through connected tech.

1. Understand Individual Needs

Connecting all your martech tools, apps and systems across your enterprise and enabling them to share data intelligently is one of the best ways to get a fresh perspective on your customer’s likes, dislikes, needs, wants and expectations. A well-connected stack not only enables you to centralize your view of customer interactions, it empowers you to see, clarify and respond to those interactions in real time.  It also enables you to learn each customer’s preferred methods of contact and tailor your interactions accordingly, such as allowing customers to contact you on their terms and at their convenience. Moreover, research has shown that accommodating customer preferences leads to higher customer satisfaction ratings and is a major competitive advantage in the quest to build enduring brand loyalty.

Next Steps: Connecting the tech in your stack shouldn’t be a complex endeavor. Most modern martech tools are designed to accommodate the fact that the majority of marketers take a best of breed approach when adding technology to their stack, so they are built to integrate with both current and future technology. However, once everything is connected, you will likely want to manage these connections by using an integration platform (IP), like Connect. A good IP centralizes the management of all your integrations and should feature both pre-built integrations (plug-n-play), as well as the opportunity to build specific integrations.

2. Personalize Experiences

Did you know that 48% of customers spend more when their experience is personalized, or that 35% of all Amazon sales are generated by personalized recommendations? Personalization is a relevant and profitable practice that is easily performed when tech is well-connected. Connected tech enables you to harness the elusive power of big data by collecting, managing and analyzing multiple sources of data from a central location. It also provides you with a 360° view of customer data pertinent to personalization such as office location, account history, job title, manager, business unit, office group, frequency of site visits, etc. Having instant access to this information empowers you to personalize your customers’ experiences in a number of ways, including: offering appropriate incentives, sharing promotions specific to individual interests, proactively addressing unique needs, and making relevant recommendations. You can also use this data to send hyper-targeted marketing campaigns that increase conversions.

Next Steps: Creating personalized marketing experiences that resonate with customers is a fairly simple process when you use a personalized content automation tool with your marketing automation platform. In addition to making personalization a low-stress process, content automation tools enable you to extend the lifecycle and value of your content by repurposing it across multiple channels.

3. Create a Seamless Experience Across All Media

Providing customers with a consistent experience of your brand on every channel is critical to your efforts to create a strong and united brand presence that inspires loyalty. When all of your martech tools are connected and working together, you are able to give customers the experience they expect to have with your company regardless of how many different types of media they use to interact with you. For example, if a customer places an order via their tablet, and receives an SMS about an order update, and calls a service rep to confirm a delivery time — all three actions should be noted in their account and updated across all media, so that the customer can remain confident that your company is on top of their needs and actively listening to them on all fronts.

Next Steps: Developing and maintaining a solid cross-channel strategy is a great way to increase engagement, target new customers, and expand your reach. If you’ve relied solely on email in the past, try rekindling dormant relationships by adding SMS/MMS, an RSS Feed or direct mail to your marketing mix. Be sure to test messages and campaigns on each channel before launching them to make sure your brand experience remains seamless and on point.

4. Know Where Customers Are in the Sales Cycle

Marketing research shows that 61 percent of companies are losing revenue due to disconnected martech stacks. When your tools aren’t connected, your view of customers is skewed because you aren’t getting the whole picture based on their total interactions with your company. This is how great opportunities are missed. On the other hand, when things are working in synch you can track game-changing data like email engagement and responses, campaign referrals, mobile usage, social interactions, geolocation, customer service logs, and other actionable information that allows you to transform every customer experience into a deeply satisfying one — for you and them.

Next Steps: Sometimes when all your tech is connected, it can be hard to pinpoint the insights you should act on first, unless you use a data dashboard. A data dashboard culls all the data coming in from connected stacks and highlights actionable insights for you, so you can prioritize next steps, keep leaders in-the-know and track website performance across your stack.