In today’s marketing world, customer-centricity is all the rage. Forrester calls it customer-obsession; others go so far as to call themselves customer companies.
Some companies have embraced it. Nordstrom, for example, is focused on providing a consistent customer experience wherever customers go, giving them personalized messages across channels, and recognizing them properly when they’re in store. They have personalized stylists for frequent customers, and they have invested in things like Mobile POS to shorten lines for their customers. They accept they’re no longer in control, and that acceptance ensures they never all out of touch with their needs.
Companies like Nordstrom get rewarded with what we at the Marketing Cloud call ideal customers. It’s not enough just to convert a customer; can you create such an individualized experience that they spend more over time, stay loyal, and ultimately drive advocacy for you.
According to research by Deloitte, these types of advocates spend 2x as much as regular customers, and carry a 5x greater lifetime value because they drive a modern word-of-mouth strategy for your company, service or brand.
For most companies, however, this ideal of customer-centricity eludes them. For all the talk and hype around customer-centricity, most companies struggle to deliver customer-centricity. In fact, the majority of customers don’t feel a connection with a brand beyond the transaction.
77% of customers cite no relationship with a brand.
- Harvard Business Review
So Why Do Most Companies Fall Short?
For one, the Customer Experience Is Broken
For customers, it’s very fragmented.
Most of us don’t receive a consistent or individualized experience across channels. As they move across your paid, earned and owned media, they get treated like they’re brand new, receiving random promotions, messages and content that doesn’t map to their interests.
In fact, according to Accenture, only 22% of customers receive a consistent experience across channels.
It’d be one thing if the experience were just fragmented; it’s also completely impersonal since companies focus on the transaction, rather than a long-term relationship.
Everyday, they find themselves bombarded with ads, promotions, content and messages that aren’t relevant to them. This irrelevant experience happens as they travel from channel-to-channel, frustrating them. At best, this will result in a low-conversion rate. At worst, they may discontinue communication altogether.
The marketing ecosystem has grown large and unwieldy. With the proliferation of SaaS and web-based marketing services, it’s easier than ever to turn on new technology to power your customer experience.
But this technology has cluttered the marketer’s ecosystem. Most enterprises have dozens of e-mail, campaign, social and web tools to power the customer experience. You have e-mail and campaign tools, social listening, web analytics, and myriad more. You also have your ad networks, media partners, and 3rd party data providers, and they’re all spread out all over creation.
Marketers lack a centralized place to create, manage, and orchestrate customer experiences.
Big data may sound passé at this point. Funny thing is, despite its massive potential, most companies haven’t even scratched the surface of what’s possible. That’s because their customer data is chained down. It’s stuck inside all of these marketing applications, and it’s also stuck in dusty old enterprise systems that aren’t in the cloud and not real-time.
In fact, according to Forrester, 82%: marketers have no synchronized view of customer interactions.
This failure to bring data together has massive operational consequences for marketers. Teams execute marketing activities in isolation, failing to develop programs and campaigns that actually serve customer needs.
As marketing teams get handed down the next revenue or growth goal, they lean on these fragmented systems and bombard customers with irrelevant messages, promotions and ads across all the channels in which their customers interact.
More Content
More Campaigns
More Promotions
More E-mails
More Ads
More Social Media Messages
More Sales Calls
More Webinars
More Whitepaper
More. More. More. And as marketers do it, they’re digging a hole even deeper towards creating a customer-centric experience.
Sometimes, marketers think they can go it alone. With the emergence of cloud and SaaS, you can do a lot today without IT. But to solve these complex challenges around data and unifying marketing resources at scale, marketers need a strong partner in IT.
And all too often, collaboration isn’t at the right level.
It’d be one thing if collaboration just wasn’t at the right level – marketing and IT can’t even agree where to prioritize their efforts.
Number one CMO Priority: Deploy better marketing execution and platforms. For CIOs, that’s number 6 on the list.
CIOs number one priority: Focus on better marketing measurement and campaign optimization, which is number 8 on CMOs list.
It’s time for Marketers to Take a Different Approach.
With the Oracle Marketing Cloud powering your customer experience, customers will for the first time enjoy a consistent experience across channels. Whether they interact over mobile, web, social, or any of the other channels you invest in, you can ensure they get the right experience at the right time.
With the Oracle Marketing Cloud, you can engage customers intelligently, and really think beyond the transaction. Don’t just leverage the purchase a means to trigger communications – something like writing a review on your website or engaging with you on social channels should be recognized.
No marketing cloud gives you a more comprehensive view of customer data. With Oracle’s Data and Audience Management solutions from BlueKai, you can unify your 1st, 2nd and 3rd party data in place. You can build rich audience profiles that help you analyze and target your most ideal customers, helping you deliver them relevant experiences that resonate across your paid, owned and earned media assets.
With Oracle Marketing Cloud’s Cross-Channel Marketing Solutions from Responsys and Eloqua, in one centralized view, you can granularly map out how customers receive promotions, ads and messages throughout their journey, delivering them a relevant experience across the web, mobile, e-mail, and social channels.
The Oracle Marketing Cloud provides marketer’s with a comprehensive suite of marketing solutions to unify data and execute their marketing programs from one platform. With Oracle’s background in delivering enterprise technology, you have a set of platforms that meet the stringent requirements of your company. With our platforms, we’re handling billions of marketing messages a year, delivered to millions of customers around the world.
Our App Cloud and Data Marketplace for BlueKai creates the largest pre-integrated ecosystem for marketers, tapping into hundreds of data providers, digital marketing firms and apps that connect to your Cross-Channel marketing efforts.
The benefits are massive for marketers who can collaborate with IT and bring in platforms that deliver customer-centricity. In fact, when CIOs and CMOs were asked in a social business survey, the the benefits included better marketing messages, faster time to market, and faster updates to products and services.
So what value does this deliver to companies that can unify their data, engage the right audience, and analyze performance?
For one, you can grow revenue. Exceed topline revenue goals by unifying data and orchestrating better customer experiences across your paid, owned and earned assets.
You can also get credit for it. Improve your ability to attribute marketing revenue across the many digital channels where your customers engage with your product, brand or service.
Finally, by creating marketing simplicity and unifying their resources under one umbrella, Marketing Cloud customers can maximize the efficiency of their budget.