Insights-led CEPs Strengthen Brand-customer Connect During Holiday Season

By Kunal Badiani , Regional VP - Growth & Strategy at MoEngage

Know your customer (KYC) is mostly synonymous with industries like BFSI, Fintech, Crypto, Medicare, etc. But this upcoming holiday season will also become relevant for industries like Retail, E-commerce, and Travel & Hospitality.?

However, not in the literal sense

The rise of the digital economy, coupled with shopping experiences becoming phgyital, has made it imperative for any retail or ecommerce brand to know their customer more deeply and holistically. Simple recommendations labelled as personalisation may not cut it anymore—especially this holiday season.

The need for deeper personalisation beckons

Holidays and the festive season often denote an occasion where families dine, shop, and even travel together—when consumers are more willing to spend.

It is also a time for marketers to devise different campaigns, dig deeper into insights to create that accurate customer segment and build a holiday marketing strategy to engage and retain new and existing customers.?

This is where deeper personalisation, like moving beyond the first name and looking at different customer events, is needed to create relevant communication beckons. In a space filled with numerous discounts and accurate recommendations, a brand can stand out by knowing where each of the customer’s hearts truly lies – by keeping a check on the pulse of the customer.?

In fact, as per a recent survey of 2000+ consumers across the Middle East and Africa, more than 50% of customers interacted (in terms of clicks or replies) with personalised communications based on previous encounters or purchase history.?

This establishes the need for more personalised and tailored communications.

Data to insights takes charge

Such stats and many other surveys indicate that customers today expect more hyper-personalised touch from any brand they interact with.?

So, to meet these expectations, brands today need to start exploring their existing data in a manner never done before. Hence, analysing the data analytically and culling out meaningful and relevant insights can be a game changer.

Using the analysis and actionable insights, a retail/ecommerce brand can use website personalisation capabilities to showcase the most relevant offers and products unique to each consumer. Similarly, the airline industry can use different predictive models like RFM to understand how to regain dormant customers, especially during the summer holidays.

The need to create highly personalised and relevant experiences based on relevant insights cannot be underestimated. Moreover, it should seamlessly extend across different channels like email, SMS, and WhatsApp, to name a few.

Another report , which analysed more than 10.9 billion emails on different levels of personalisation, found the open rates of emails increased by 2.1x – 3.3x for behaviour or attribute-based personalised emails vs general emails. Like the previous one, this stat further solidifies the need for deeper and more meaningful personalisation.

Build insights to gain foresight this holiday season

Speaking strictly about the upcoming holiday/festive season the consumers eagerly await the November sale or the Dubai Shopping Festival. Brands must start leveraging advanced AI-based platforms to optimise their engagement strategy.

This is where intelligent platforms like Customer Engagement Platforms (CEPs) can help by managing the scale of data and extracting useful insights for the engagement strategy.

An insights-led CEP is a marketing automation platform that optimizes customer engagement and helps deliver memorable customer experiences. Most importantly, the platform helps you in upping your retention game. Here are the different stages across which a CEP will help you this holiday season:

• Onboarding: Imagine a customer has opened an app or visited a website during a festive season (November Sale) but did not register. The marketer can analyse and understand the drop-off stage and build an effective communication strategy. For example, a push notification with a holiday greetings message and a relevant discount coupon (based on insights from the product display page or landing display page) can be sent after a gap of 15-20 mins post-drop-off
• Activation: Now the customer has registered and looked at some products or added some products to the cart but did not complete the purchase. For this instance, a CEP enables brands to leverage AI capabilities and helps analyse the best path to conversion or the most relevant/preferred action.
• Repetition: If a customer has completed a purchase, a brand can leverage different capabilities of a CEP, like smart recommendations to bring back the customer to make a second purchase and be in their mind share – during and after the holiday season.
• Habituation: The customer has purchased from the brand several times and has a certain lifetime value. To increase that $X amount, marketers can build event-triggered campaigns.?

Ultimately, the idea is for brands to make data-informed decisions during the holiday/festive season and beyond, whether it is to nudge customers to make their first purchase by giving them a holiday discount, re-engaging dormant ones with special offers, or cross-selling/upselling other products.???

The deeper the understanding of the customers, the more chances of conversions.??

Additionally, with the scale at which the influx of data is pouring in for every customer’s journey, an integrated platform like a CEP can help manage the same and extract insights that can help in the long run.