Connected CRM summary

In the twenty-first century, people the world over can buy countless varieties of products online instead of visiting real stores. But this isolates customers from marketers, forcing marketers to find new ways of reconnecting with their audience.

What exactly does this mean?

It means that today’s ads need to go beyond promoting the latest products. They need to engage the customer.

At the moment, many things come between the customer and the company. For example, in online shopping there’s a lack of communication; the customer’s reactions are hidden behind screens, so it’s hard to ascertain how they feel.

Then there are also occasions when the problem is too much communication.

We see so many ads throughout the day that they don’t even affect us anymore. That’s why ads need to go beyond just communicating and really draw us in. An example of an engaging ad is the iPhone 6 campaign, which displayed iPhone users’ own photos. This triggered engagement because everyone who saw it felt they could take great photos with their own iPhones.

There are also trends that make it easier to reconnect with customers. One thing that helps customer engagement is the modern economy’s shift toward platform marketing, as on Amazon or Ebay.

When someone buys something on your platform, like a cookbook, you could collect that data and use it to target them with food-related ads. However, when your competitors also have powerful platforms, you need to develop more and more sophisticated ways of interacting with your potential customers. So while platform marketing offers the chance to amass loyal customers, actually doing so presents a considerable challenge.

Another way of reconnecting with customers is to use personalization. But don’t think that just calling a customer by their first name will suffice. Instead, you should group customers into segments, with each segment representing a certain kind of behavior. Then, by preparing messages for each segment at a frequency that is neither too pushy nor too shy, you can guarantee a high level of personalization for your customers.