Ask And Ye Shall Receive: How Engaging Potential Customers With Relevant Questions Impacts The Bottom Line

CM Group’s Signals22 conference features insights from PepsiCo, Forrester, and others.

The first step in any Relationship Marketing strategy is to acquire new potential customers—the act of turning unknown consumers into known customers.?

That effort relies on collecting data directly from unknown customers themselves… personal data that consumers willingly provide to brands in return for a range of benefits.?

This process of communicating directly with potential customers and simply asking how to best serve them is called zero-party data. The result helps brands acquire new customers, build up their databases and understand customers as individuals far more effectively than in the old days of using creepy tracking cookies to monitor consumer behavior and make educated guesses about their motivations.

The only question is how. According to the speakers participating in the first day of CM Group’s recently held Signals22 conference, the answer is relevance. Successfully engaging with unknown customers requires offering relevant experiences for them to engage with, and providing equally relevant messaging in return.?

According to Cheetah Digital’s 2022 Digital Consumer Trends Index, 70% of global consumers report frustration with irrelevant content and offers emailed to them by brands.?

“No one wants to be bombarded with things that they aren't interested in (and) if the data's wrong, they are going to be bombarded,” said PepsiCo Marketing Technology Lead Chris Muscutt , during his interview. “So how can we make their life easier so that they're in control?”

Gayle Gunning, CRM Director at the gift-giving service Smartbox, offered one answer. The company flipped the script on zero-party data by focusing on those receiving the gifts their existing customers buy and send through their platform . The goal is to turn the beneficiaries into potential buyers. They did this by engaging those redeeming gifts on their site with different experiences designed to get to know them better.??

“While we have a lot of transactional data, we don’t know a lot about the beneficiaries,” Gunning said. “We know they redeemed the gift, but we don’t know what they like or what their interests are.”

Presenting them with experiences designed to capture that sort of information freely turns that unknown beneficiary into a known potential customer, so long as the information collected is properly used.?

“If a customer is going to give you information and is happy to do so, you need to use it and target them with relevant products,” she said. “People gather all this great information, but they never use it, and then customers stop giving them information.”

These efforts resulted in 50% of Smartbox’s prospects becoming highly engaged site visitors, resulting in a “phenomenal” increase in business volume.?

“The two work in tandem,” Gunning said. “If you engage your audience and send them relevant content, you will see your numbers go up.”

Of course, for this to work, there needs to be a level of trust between the customer and the brand. That brings us to control.?

For instance, PepsiCo has multiple brands under its roof and would like customers of one brand to be recognized when visiting the site of another. Scaling data across brands like this is a challenge that requires trust to resolve. PepsiCo’s Muscutt pointed to how social media companies lost trust with consumers when they attempted to implement social sign-on features across websites with this same idea in mind.?

“I think the trust was lost and people have moved away from it. The adoption rates of social sign-on just disappeared,” he said. “Everyone wants to create a new account because they felt more in control of it. I think there's certainly an opportunity there. How do we as brands make their lives easier? How do we deliver value to them?”

The answer again is relevance. According to Forrester Research’s Stephanie Liu, 39% of surveyed consumers say they're more likely to purchase from brands that share content that interests them. Another 45% say receiving relevant messages, offers and promotions are a key reason they join loyalty programs.?

“But the way brands are going about trying to define relevance and deliver on it is missing the mark today,” she said. “This is where zero-party data can help bridge the gap. Instead of trying to make assumptions or inferences on what is relevant to a customer, you can ask them upfront, How do you want us to communicate with you? What do you want us to communicate with you about?”

The trick is to take it slow, and only ask for a little information at a time – and information that you are going to use.?

“I like to use the analogy of a first date,” said Liu. “You don't roll into a first date with 50 questions that you need to know off the bat, right? That's called an interrogation. Instead, you ask a couple of questions and you share something about yourself. You get that conversation rolling and it should be a bi-directional conversation.”

Ray Wang, Principal /Analyst & Founder, Constellation Research, offers some specific tips. ?

“Start with the things that really matter, he said. “Can you save them on price? Can you save them on time? Can you give them an offer that they couldn't see before? Is there a problem they're trying to solve that you can solve immediately? And you want those things out there to start building trust.”

Making the effort to take these steps is critical because the rules of data collection and use have changed thanks to both regulatory and technological advancements. Brands need to respond, and collecting zero-party data as the path to acquiring new customers is the way to do so.

“We're in a situation where we actually have to change the way we look at marketing,” said Wang. “The tools and the marketing techniques that we've been trying are no longer effective. They're not working. We're going from spray and pray to really nurture, grow, and really land and expand. And that's what you want to do. Once you get my trust and once you earn my trust, I'm willing to spend more time with you. And part of earning that trust is not wasting my time.”

To learn more about the Acquisition stage of Relationship Marketing and how relevant engagement can help your efforts, visit the Signals22 website to watch the Sessions and many others available, now on-demand.