Commentary

The customer experience is broken: Lifecycle marketing is the fix

Augie MacCurrach, CEO, Customer Portfolios, offers insight on what leads to a broken customer experience and tips and advice on how to fix it.

Photo by iStock.com

October 30, 2018

ByAugie MacCurrach, CEO, Customer Portfolios

Technology has created a demand for a seamless, omnichannel customer experience, but we've noticed the experience isn't becoming more seamless and personalized, it's more disparate and broken. The way technology is created has caused these problems, and to connect the dots now, we're up against organizational resistance.

CMOs nowadays are spending more money on technology that consists of multiple point solutions, each of which requires a marketing specialist with expertise. Thus, the marketing organization has become siloed as the technology resides with different specialists for search, display and retargeting, social marketing, web personalization, email, catalog, and retail point-of-sale. It's harder than ever to get the team to work together, because everyone is busy with their heads down on day-to-day tasks. It is very difficult to coordinate communications, treatment and offers across channels and touch points.

The result? This internal problem manifests itself in the customer journey and creates a broken customer experience. Here are two examples of what the broken customer experience looks like, in the digital and direct worlds:

Digital

On the digital side, we have these powerful cookies that let brands chase consumers around the internet. For example: There's a brand of earplugs that allow you to hear the crispness of the music at concerts, while protecting your eardrums. As a frequent concert-goer, it's brilliant, and it's targeted, and it's relevant to my lifestyle. The problem is that the brand is surrounding me now. It's not just appearing in the context of when I'm listening to music or when I'm buying tickets. Everywhere I go online, there they are.

It gets to be too much. The problem is exacerbated by the digital side not seeing the offline side. Let's say I buy these earplugs at a live music event or in a retail store. The digital world often doesn't have this data, so their ads continue to chase me around internet. Given that most multi-channel retailers still make 90-95 percent of revenue in brick and mortar, this use case is a normal occurrence. It goes over the top until it becomes creepy and annoying.

Direct marketing

Let's think about direct mail, like a catalog. I've bought from a brand five times, so I am considered a pretty good customer. But for whatever reason, I did not purchase in 2017, so they haven't seen me in 18 months. Meanwhile, catalogs are expensive and thus constrained by a fixed budget. The brand can only send so many books, so even good customers age off the list. They simply can't afford to send me a catalog anymore.

I'm a five-time buying customer, but I've aged out of the active catalog list. Now I'm just getting the email blast every day. These emails are typically untargeted, one-size-fits-all communications. If you were to look at my five purchases, you would see that I bought in the same category four times, and then crossed over to another category. And then I mixed it up a bit more. None of this data is being leveraged in communications to me. I get every email about everything all the time. Even though I'm a pretty good customer, I get no specialized treatment, and I slowly fade away. And as I fade away, the chance of me ever seeing another catalog gets slimmer and slimmer.

How to fix the broken experience

To fix this broken experience, marketers need to be looking at their customer data. To reference the direct marketing example above, let's say my average lag time between my five purchases is 160 days. As I approach that 160-day point, marketers should be speaking to me in a targeted and personalized way. Product recommendations and offers should be based on my previous purchase behavior. If I go beyond my typical buying point, send me another catalog and follow up with a "We miss you" email with a personalized offer.

But marketing isn't doing that.

We put a lot more focus on prospecting and new customer acquisition. We invest tons of money to get somebody to buy for the first time, and then we throw them into the email blast and treat them all the same. That's broken. And we have the technology, we have the data, we have the analytics to change it. If we don't have that holistic single view of the customer yet, we need to get it. More importantly, we need to act on it across the buying lifecycle.

The fix: Lifecycle marketing

Lifecycle marketing is a way to develop a personalized, one-to-one relationship with a customer. As customers interact with the brand across channels, lifecycle marketing delivers messaging that is personalized and relevant to where the customer is in the lifecycle. The goal is bigger than reporting revenue from a single email blast; by growing the customer relationship, you are growing loyal customers with a higher future value.

To do this, you first need the single customer view to execute targeted and personalized customer treatment across all channels. As marketing becomes more relevant, you also need to change the cadence and frequency of the email blasts, at least to buying customers.

Ideally, this process will evolve so that a brand will have a fully flushed-out lifecycle strategy with a campaign for every type of customer, at every lifecycle stage. Next, they can model blast content against customer profiles for a relevancy scores to send only messages pertinent to qualifying profiles. Once we hit this point, we know the experience is fixed — holistic, relevant, and rewarding for the customer and the brand.