When a crisis hits, a challenger brand thinks of new ways to emerge out of the situation and thrive despite facing market odds.
When the pandemic hit globally, many retailers pivoted their focus from offline retail to digital channels and up their ecommerce game to not lose out to competition. Owing to a permanent shift in customer purchase patterns brought by the pandemic, the ecommerce space exploded!
‘72% of retail professionals said the crisis accelerated their digitalization plans by at least one or two years with 21% saying it fast-forwarded plans by at least three years.’ – A survey by Euromonitor International
Technologically advanced retail experience is the future – digital and physical. As customers increasingly become dependent on ecommerce for grocery to white goods even when stores are reopening, enabling a smooth and seamless experience is the key goal of a marketer. As the data shows, after a surge of almost 34% in 2020, ecommerce retail sales are expected to grow 13.7% this year while non-ecommerce sales will see 2.2% growth. To aid marketers ride the wave of ecommerce growth, we have released technologically advanced features to fetch the best value out of the digital world!
1. Search box enhancements on ecommerce site
Today’s customers are technologically empowered. A website/an app becomes the face of a brand when they shop online. Enhancing the complete customer journey with technology can go a long way in making their shopping experience truly enjoyable. To enable a great customer experience and maximize the effectiveness of the website search box, here are the recent additions to the Anywhere Commerce+ Platform.
Spelling correction: Typing out the incorrect spelling/short form of words and missing out some letters while searching for a product online is one of the most common mistakes. To auto-correct it and show the right results for the customers, this feature can be enabled. With spelling correction, the shoppers can now be shown products which are closest match to the keywords even if they spell it incorrectly in the search window. Find out how to enable this feature here.
Use Case: A query for Pajama instead of Pyjama can still show the right product results.
Benefit: Allows shoppers to continue their journey on the website leading to higher chances of adding products to the cart.
Synonyms: There could be a huge difference in how a brand categorizes its products and how a customer searches for it. This difference could lead the search queries to ‘no results found’ page. With the Synonyms feature, brands can now enable similar words for common searches that can match with the shopper’s search criteria and show similar items. This feature also has high relevance in regional context where people might be using local words to search products
Use Cases: In India, customers might search for the regional word – ‘Badam’ of Almonds for a supermarket’s website and still get the right results.
A shopper searches for pants but the ecommerce website has categorized it under the ‘trousers’ section’. Enabling synonyms could be helpful in this case.
Benefit: Higher click through rates leading to higher conversions
Stopwords has the ability to ignore unnecessary keywords such as prepositions, conjunctions, articles from search queries.
Use Case: In a search query – Tops for women, ‘for’ can be ignored to get the results for women’s tops.
Benefit: Boosts precision and improves the system performance by saving processing time during search execution
Tracking no search results: Brands can now slice and dice the queries leading to ‘No search results pages’ in Google Analytics to measure the impact of no search results on conversions and their frequency. It also enables brands to understand the efficiency of keyword search, recognize synonyms, and add any more product lines customers might be interested in. Learn how to enable this feature here.
2. Enhanced Webpage experience
Google emphasizes on user experience once again with the Core Web Vitals to rank the websites with a good on-site experience higher. Google has shared 7 search signals to improve the health of the website and delivery search results. While the 4 vitals – Mobile friendliness, Safe browsing, HTTPS/SSL, or encryption, Intrusive interstitials have been around for quite some time now, the last three are going to impact the ranking majorly.
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Decides the page loading performance to show the largest website content such as images and videos
First Input Delay (FID): Processes the first interaction on the website after it loads
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Refers to unexpected layout shift while users are interacting with the website
At Capillary, we aim to rank your website higher with the recent enhancements on our Anywhere Commerce+ Platform inline with Google’s Core Web Vitals. The Google Lighthouse Score, which measures the quality of web pageshas been improved to bring more traffic to the website leading to a possible increase in the conversion rate. Learn how to enable this feature here.
In this customer oriented world, merely providing a good experience is not enough to provide an edge to your brand. Customer behavior is different from what it was yesterday and will be different tomorrow from what it is today. Constant amplification of a complete retail experience with the change is what’s needed.
The world expected a better 2021 with vaccination and a hope for a brighter tomorrow! And here we are, yet again standing still amidst chaos in the second quarter of the year. There are fresh guidelines being issued everyday on travel, lockdown, opening of schools, malls with the second wave of COVID hitting Asian and South American countries hard. In these times of emotional distress, what could be the motivating factor that can influence customers to shop? What could brands do to provide an unmissable customer engagement? How can brands achieve growth when people are increasingly scared of stepping out of their homes once again? In the marketing world, one must set the bar high with meaningful connections.
The switch to digital was inevitable even in 2020 to survive the crisis, however, marketers will have to try harder to get a customer’s mindshare in the ever cluttered world. The value focused shopper these days connects with the brands who appeal to their cognitive senses. Brands who can best use the digital shopping behavior of customers and blend it with empathy by understanding expectations are the ones who can thrive in this pandemic hit world.
Capillary’s recent enhancements in line with the change in customer behavior can help brands to engage them effectively and foster loyalty.
Social Media Campaigns
There is a growing number of social media platforms and a growth in the number of social media users every second. Would you believe that on average, more than 1.3 million new users joined social media every day during 2020, equating to roughly 15½ new users every single second? Like no size fits all, there is no specific social media platform which is preferred by all the users. Customers have varying preferences which poses a challenge for marketers to keep in touch with their customers on different channels using one solution to provide an effective and seamless experience.
Marketers can now build that personal connection with the option of directly setting up Instagram and Facebook partner network campaigns from Capillary Engage+. CRM Managers can now leverage ad channels to engage with users and improve the conversion rates. Facebook and Instagram are two of the most loved channels and with stricter regulations for SMS leading to reduced conversion rate through SMS campaigns, this enhancement is of paramount importance to marketers.
Loyalty Programs
A well-designed loyalty program along with a positive emotional engagement strengthens the brand-customer relationship helping develop trust and loyalty. Marketers make the effort to keep their customers happy while ensuring that the benefits provided are well utilized. To help marketers create the best program while controlling the budget of their loyalty programs and preventing any suspicious increase in redemptions, our Loyalty+ enhancements can enable them to limit the points earned or redeemed upon a successful purchase.
Points earning: Marketers can now define maximum points or bill amount a customer could earn for a single purchase or across the purchase cycle for a defined period.
Use cases:
A rule can be set to issue points on purchases for a maximum amount of USD 50 in a week or USD 1000 in a month
A rule can be set issue points on a specific bill amount of USD 100 at a specific line of products
Points redemption: Marketers can set-up rules to define the rules on the number of points that could be redeemed for a day, week, or a month.
Automated Target Tracking
The pandemic has been hard for everyone, more so for store employees with many retail stores shut for months at a stretch. With stores reopening now, it’s the right time to strengthen the incentives program within all organizations and compensate the frontline workers well for their service. An efficient system of rewarding employees can motivate them and eventually contribute to the overall increase in sales. With Capillary’s Insights+, marketers can now automate the process of setting up KPIs for a defined period of time and track the performance by store, zone, country, etc. A country manager can have an overall view of all the stores while a store manager can view the performance of his/her store employees. This automated reporting brings in transparency for all employees reducing the chances of errors in assessing their incentives.
Conclusion
Technology has rescued marketers in turbulent times and helped them navigate the strong storms of Covid while teaching the lesson of understanding the importance of human life and developing a sense of community. Both these factors combined together is the perfect recipe for marketing success and accelerating growth.
With every brand trying to sell you something, it’s no surprise that the Internet is chock full of content and marketing messages.
But which messages or ads do you really remember?
If you spend some time thinking about it, you’ll notice that it’s usually something that you connected with at a personal or emotional level.
Unfortunately, very few brands have mastered this art. Here are a few examples that became popular because of effective communication that people could connect to.
Burger King’s Day Without Whopper campaign to support McDonald’s Children with Cancer Day promotion appealed to the emotional senses of the people. This helped Burger King gain a lot of publicity where they focused on being a humane brand rather than sales.
Dove’s “Real Beauty Sketches” Campaign created an empowering ad for women to look beyond their perception of themselves. The focus of this ad was not to sell the product but to make women feel great about their looks. It was so powerful that women connected with the brand at an emotional level.
Communication, if done in the right way, can spark revolutions, break cultural barriers, prevent wars, and inspire millions.
At Capillary, we believe effective communication is the key to building long term brand-customer relationships. To this effect, we have released multiple features this month to help you communicate effectively with your customers and increase conversions.
Capillary has always focused on providing the right platform for brands to effectively communicate through the channels that strike a chord with their audience. After the recent enhancements to LINE, we have now added Viber as a communication channel within Engage+. Viber enables brands to interact with customers in a secure way using messages and stickers.
Viber is a cross-platformvoice over IP (VoIP) and instant messaging (IM) app used by more than 1 billion users worldwide. Marketers can easily form one to one connections with their customers (especially millennials and Gen-Z) by making the conversations more personal and creative, leading to high engagement rates.
It is immensely popular in Russia, the Philippines, Vietnam, etc. The low-cost acquisition model that is priced less than the traditional SMS makes it a great channel for businesses to go after while engaging the audience with rich content.
Understanding a friend better will require us to know their personal details, likes, dislikes, interests, etc. The same approach works for businesses as well. And hence the need to capture data from customer activities, touchpoints and brand interactions. This helps them to know their customers better and personalize their communication to make it more effective. The brands can form relationships with their customers at a personal level by leveraging this data in a secure way.
Capillary has added a new feature of creating and adding custom labels to customer communications based on their interactions with your brand. It goes beyond standard message customization labels by adding custom labels using the data captured and shared with Capillary. It will enable you to personalize and make every customer conversation relevant inline with their shopping experience.
Use Cases
Brand Y can send a personalized message to all customers who have clicked on Notify Me for the Out Of Stock products. The message can contain the specific product item they had shown interest in with a link to complete the purchase journey.
Brand X can create a custom label for customers who wishlisted a specific product online. This label can be used to personalize communication with an irresistible offer to encourage them to make the purchase.
Communication, as we know, is essential in every area of the organization – to build loyal customers and motivate employees to work better and achieve the organizational goals.
We have added new features within the Storemax app that are tailored to each store employee to showcase their performance and encourage them to sell more with engaging games.
Gamification – An achievement-based badges game can be used to award different badges to the store employees based on their performance within a specified time such as 30 days. The movement from one badge to another keeps the staff engaged and motivated.
Leaderboard – A rank-based list is another addition to elevate employee productivity and automate their rewards and recognition. The leaderboard displays each employee’s sale numbers, keeping the ones who have made the highest sale at the top to promote healthy competition between staff.
Reporting – The reports app within Storemax app has been enhanced to view the progress by each store for a specified duration of time – day, week, or month. This enables marketers to understand the busiest days of the week based on the data and make key business decisions to allocate the right staff and provide a great experience to the shoppers.
Conclusion
A very few things can match the sheer transformative power of communication. Marketers are the brand’s flag-bearers to promote the products/services with not just push selling but getting into a customer’s shoes to understand their feelings and emotions. Remember, conversations win the hearts, mere content does not.
Community & connections are integral to humans and we tend to do badly when isolated from each other.
The irony is that it took us a pandemic to realize the need for building and maintaining strong relationships.
With social distancing in place, we have realized how much we crave human connection. Not being able to meet your friends, spend time with your colleagues, or interact with your gym buddies, left all of us with one solution – Go Digital.
However, in the digital world, relationships and connections are not confined to family and friends.
It’s a massive ecosystem that includes brands, businesses, governments, and institutions – and they are increasingly expected to interact with their customers (and citizens) with human-like levels of cognition in terms of tone, context, and relevance.
And that’s where data becomes tremendously important. Customer data and insights have become a marketer’s best friend when it comes to understanding customers, predict their behavior, and engaging them with relevant and context-driven content at every stage of the purchase cycle.
In 2021 and beyond, brands aiming towards having hyper-relevant, one-to-one conversations with customers, and building a strong foundation of trust will need to optimize, enhance, and even rethink their marketing strategy.
Our new feature additions will help you delight your customers and build deeper levels of trust.
Lead Management System
Manage and close leads
With vaccines on the horizon, the world has started moving towards normalcy with a hope of a better year. People have started going out and brands are also opening shops with precautions in place.
Our newly launched mini-app, Lead Management System within the Storemax Appwill enable store employees to provide a seamless customer experience. It will help them understand the customers better by maintaining their profiles, adding their product requests, tracking purchases and points history, and communicating with them about the availability of products at the right time to ensure customer delight and closure of leads.
The app is closely integrated with other Capillary products – Insights+, Engage+, and Loyalty+ to ensure effective customer engagement. The app is capable of :
Connecting the offline and online customer data
Efficiently manage the inventory
Converting leads into customers
Increasing loyalty among existing customers
Incentivizing store staff for leads closure
Use Cases:
Mary visits an apparel store and wants to purchase a dress. She likes a dress, but her size is out of stock. The store employee captures her interest in LMS and sends her a message when the dress becomes available.
Tom visits an electronics store to check laptop options. A lead can be captured in LMS by adding specifications/model/brand etc. for effective follow-ups and closing the purchase.
Promised Points
Event-based points redemption
Loyalty marketing practices have evolved to remain relevant to changing customer behavior and increased time spent on digital platforms. Brands are increasingly leveragingloyalty programs to create memorable brand experiences for every touchpoint. To keep your brand relevant in the disrupted consumer landscape post-Covid-19, you must implement customer-focused and dynamic loyalty programs.
The recent release of Promised points within Capillary Loyalty+ has enhanced the platform’s capabilities to fit hospitality, CPG, and ecommerce loyalty marketing scenarios.
Brands can now allow conversion of promised points into redeemable points upon the successful completion of defined customer events. The events could be the return of purchased products, online order delivery, payment settlement at a later date, hotel check-out, purchase approval, etc.
It empowers marketers to control their points liability and provide a hassle-free customer experience.
Use Cases:
Dan books a hotel room for a 3 days/2 nights stay and makes the payment online. After his stay, the day he checks out of the hotel, and the promised points are added to his account. It creates a win-win for both the hotel owner and the customer.
Jane purchases a dress online and returns it within the 14-days return period. Promised points saves the retailer the hassle of adding points to her account during purchase and then reverting it back when the dress was returned.
Partner Broadcast Campaigns
Hybrid approach for customer engagement
Customers expect brands to engage with them, but they also expect them to safeguard their data. Unsurprisingly, data breaches are PR disasters that can severely dent brand perception and business for months, if not years. This makes it vital for brands to closely scrutinize the platforms that handle their customers’ data.
Capillary’s flexible and intelligent engagement platform, Engage+ adds another feather to its cap with the latest release. Marketers can now get the best of both worlds by creating marketing campaigns on Engage+ and communicating/distributing to customers through partners.
The new capability allows you to design a campaign, add incentives, use personalization strategies, get granular level insights through Engage+ while allowing you to broadcast communication through your partner network. The customer data is securely added to an FTP Channel which can be picked by the client or their partner.
Use Cases:
Brand X shows available coupons to Harry in the rewards section of his mobile app instead of communicating through any channels with Partner broadcast campaigns
Brand Y uses Capillary’s CDP and personalization engine to create a targeted customer list and uses Partner broadcast campaigns to communicate it through their other CRM partners.
LINE Enhancements
Engage and enhance customer experience
To build a universally loved brand, companies must take a glocal approach to understand the unique needs, shopping trends, customer preferences, and devise the best strategy suited for each region. The social media and messenger apps used by customers also vary considerably by each country. While LINE is the most used messaging app in Thailand, it’sWhatsAppin India and WeChat in China. It makes practical sense for marketers in these regions to target their users on these apps.
Capillary’s latest enhancements for LINE will empower marketers in Thailand to engage their audience with beautifully designed campaigns.
The new update allows the use of videos, emojis, rich media, and images to capture attention and increase conversions. LINE messages designed through Capillary Engage+ now support stickers, carousel images, and multiple bubbles in a single message. This new addition will let you form a stronger connection with your customers and encourage them to click, and complete their purchase journey.
Conclusion
The lifestyle changes are here to stay with the possibility of creating permanent changes in customer behavior. So what would be wise for marketers to do? It’s a no-brainer if you have read the blog – hop on the digital bandwagon if you haven’t already or you will get crushed in the survival race, adapt to the changing market landscape, automate with AI to predict your customer actions, frame the right marketing strategy and accelerate your business growth.
Work from Home – a term, a novelty, once a privilege, and now, the new reality.
When the pandemic broke out in March, most of the corporates made the switch to allow their employees to work from home.
It turned out to be a blessing in disguise for many who were struggling to find time to spend with their family, pursue hobbies or simply enjoy some ‘me-time’ due to extended work hours and long commutes.
But this is just one side of the coin.
The other side is the blurring of lines between home and work. For most people, work got stretched to impact their personal time and social life became non-existent since everyone was homebound. The WFH scenario also had a negative impact on mental and physical health with several people experiencing an increase in anxiety levels, mental stress, loneliness, and neck/back pains.
There exists a similar ‘two sides of a coin’ analogy in the marketing world – Customer Acquisition and Retention.
While stakeholder and investor opinions may vary on the importance of each, a marketer understands the subtle dynamics and balance that needs to be maintained between these two entities. It’s a well-established fact that 44% of companies have a greater focus on customer acquisition vs.18% that focus on retention. But the truth is, if we don’t acquire new customers, we would not have any to retain. And if we don’t retain customers, we’ll continuously squander valuable marketing budget on acquiring new customers.
This month’s feature rollouts are inline with helping you find that perfect balance between customer acquisition and retention.
The most efficient purchase funnel starts from Awareness and ends at Advocacy with all other stages of Consideration, Evaluation, Purchase, and Loyalty lying in between. The focused goal of every business is to move the maximum number of people from Awareness to Advocacy. This is the stage where customers are not only happy with the company’s products and services but they also start evangelizing them, resulting in higher brand equity and mind share.
Capillary’s newly released feature – Funnel Charts, enables marketers to increase the number of people filtered through different funnel stages, to help achieve the end objective which could be conversions, retention or coupon redemptions, etc. Marketers can visualize the data flow from one stage to the next, identify the possible reasons for drop in customers/leads, and take the corrective steps with extensive analysis. The customer insights derived from transactional, behavioral, CRM, and demographics data is analyzed with Insights+ to understand the needs and motivations, possible bottlenecks in the journey, and steps to resolve them in order to increase the number at the bottom of the funnel.
Funnel Charts is integrated with the other Capillary products to perform deep-level analytics and trigger personalized and targeted campaigns. These Funnel Charts can be created for both Acquisition and Retention use-cases based on the needs of the marketer.
History books will mark 2020 as the year of change. Along with other things, customer purchase behavior has seen a drastic shift and the trend is here to stay. With 60% of global customers stating that their shopping behavior has changeddue to Covid-19, and 13% seeing it as an opportunity to try new brands, customers are increasingly switching between retailers.
In such a scenario, the role of effective loyalty programs has gained more prominence than ever before. The plain vanilla programs will no longer suffice to get ahead of the competition and keep your customers coming back. Marketers need to dig a little deeper and strategize on new ways of customer engagement and loyalty.
Capillary has introduced supplementary memberships as a part of Loyalty+ to enhance the scope of loyalty programs and increase the customer lifetime value. The memberships can be offered over and above the existing loyalty programs to provide additional benefits to your customers. In the UK, 80% of retailers believe that subscription-based loyalty programs have grown in popularity during the lockdown. And let’s face it, everyone loves to feel special, important, and exclusive (94% of Americans reported that they would take advantage of an exclusive offer). This unique feature will help you enable that exclusivity by offering it to your top customers, or as a paid subscription. It will help marketers to retain customers, increase customer loyalty, and develop strong emotional connect. In fact, 80% of emotionally loyal customerswill act as brand advocates, promoting the brand to their social groups.
Brands incorporate a lot of tactics to delight their paid subscription members – early access to new products, preference in check-out queues, more benefits and discounts, early entry to grab the products, etc.
One such example is Everlane, a clothing company that gives its members early information and access to their limited-edition products. It enables Everlane to gauge customer interest in specific products by tracking customer response data and optimizing their inventory.
Customer loyalty and retention is usually one of the top priorities for every business. Gartner states that 80% of your company’s future revenue will come from just 20% of your existing customers. In the current scenario, where almost every business is facing a slump in sales and revenue, it is essential to support each other and grow together. You can kill two birds with a stone with Partner Loyalty Programs – give your customers more options to redeem points and at the same time, build a strong partner network.
Capillary’s Loyalty+ product enables you to extend your loyalty program by adding partners and providing customers with the option to link and exchange points between the programs. Customers who are already part of multipleloyalty programs can easily unify their membership and redeem points across partners using this feature. It is a win-win situation for both brands and customers. While brands can increase customer retention and cross-sell opportunities, customers get more points at their disposal.
Here are some successful partner loyalty program use-cases:
Walmart: Walmart has a partner program with brands like Murphy USA Gas Stations, Neighbourhood Markets, Sam’s Clubs and MasterCard. Customers holding Walmart Money Card and Walmart Credit Card get 1-3% back on their purchases. The members of this program also receive monthly rewards and discounts on gas and other products.
Bajaj Allianz: A major insurance provider in India launched an innovative loyalty program – Jiyo Fit – by partnering with Yes Bank and Visa. Customers can opt for a health debit card when they purchase a medical policy and use it to avail discounts at gyms, spas, health clinics, chemists, restaurants, and retail chains. Bajaj Allianz also gives their customers an option to purchase Visa debit card from Yes Bank at Rs150 per annum and open a zero balance savings account with Yes Bank.
Conclusion
Both sides of marketing – acquisition, and retention – go hand in hand, and marketers have to prioritize the weightage based on business priority and organizational goals. While effective engagement and a delightful customer experience can help in acquiring new customers, providing a great after purchase experience can help you retain these customers for the long run.
Rapid globalization has increased market opportunities and revenues for brands, besides reducing the costs to serve audiences across borders.
But can brands reap the benefits without facing the challenges? Especially when you consider the fact that the localization realm is abound with obstacles.
Every country has a different culture, belief system, cultural nuances, and needs; this poses a challenge for marketers when it comes to understanding the pulse of their audience. A one-size-fits-all business and marketing approach doesn’t work anymore. We have witnessed numerous instances of businesses that have succeeded in one country but failed to take off in others – the recent exit of Harley Davidson from India is an example. Brands need to understand endemic nuances and strategize a Glocal approach to garner a regional market share and win customer loyalty.
Brands and marketers also have to deal with complex rules, regulations and compliances in localized markets. Laws are getting stricter and more focused on safeguarding consumer interests. A few recent ones are GDPR laws in Europe, TRAI regulations & banning apps citing data security reasons in India, recent amendments to Singapore’s Personal Data Protection Act and TRA regulations in UAE, etc.. Brands should be able to comply with these regulations and find alternative channels in order to survive in these highly competitive markets.
At the same time, customers are also increasingly becoming sensitive to irrelevant and push-based marketing and resort to blocking ads they see as an intrusion. Ad-blocking tools are gaining massive traction across the globe, with China being the leader in mobile ad blocking use with 159 million monthly active users and followed by India at 122 million users. Marketers need to understand this shift and make smarter decisions to engage their customers with intelligent marketing solutions.
Capillary has been a Thought Leader in building unique retail solutions and adaptive product enhancements to help marketers adapt and succeed in a competitive landscape.
With the world becoming a smaller place thanks to today’s digital-first customers, the amount of data is also piling up. To give you a sense of it, International Data Corporation (IDC) estimated the global datasphere is expected to reach 175 zettabytes by 2025 wherein a zettabyte is one sextillion bytes. Deriving insights out of this tremendous amount of data is a marketer’s nightmare. This largely unorganized data collected from various online/offline sources and customer touchpoints is a goldmine of actionable insights that can be refined and gleaned with the right AI and ML models.
Capillary aiRA is an intelligent solution leveraging AI and ML technologies to organize data, understand customer behavior, and predict outcomes based on previous behavior. aiRA delivers value at scale by gaining a deep understanding of a specific sector and its customers. It employs an intelligent possible approach to understand customer propensities and predict the most favorable offers, products, content, etc. to deliver a relevant and enriching customer experience. Marketers using aiRA have seen a considerable boost in their sales and high conversion rates.
Old school marketers usually have a ‘let’s throw everything at the audience and see what sticks’ mindset to campaigns and ads. The modern marketer, however, is aware that customers are getting increasingly annoyed and frustrated with being bombarded with promotions on the brand’s app, website, third-party apps, and other channels.
An average person is now estimated to encounter between 6,000 to 10,000 ads every single day.
The end result being customers marking it as spam, blocking the ads, and most importantly, developing a negative perception about the brand. Marketers need to carefully balance the fine-line between meaningful and relevant promotions and intrusion.
Capillary’s communication limit on messages has been designed to achieve this objective. Marketers can restrict the number of messages a customer receives in a day, week, or month across different channels. This helps in preventing message fatigue to the customers.
An increased focus on consumer privacy has prompted governments to roll out new rules and regulations around data privacy, data security, consent capture, etc. While these regulations are beneficial for the consumers, it adds to marketers’ woes. They need to be on their toes and analyze their decisions to ensure compliance without incurring any negative impact on the revenue. A recent regulation from the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India and UAE restricts brands from sending promotional messages to customers without their consent. Lawsuits and legal hassles, especially involving the government, is something no brand needs at this moment, so it’s a no-brainer to comply with these regulations and find alternative channels of engagement.
Capillary’s X-Engage is an AI-powered solution that reduces the dependency on single-channel SMS campaigns, increases reach and conversions while optimizing marketing costs for brands. It empowers marketers to automate the channel mix and reach customers on their preferred channels. X-Engage provides a plethora of direct channels as well as Ad networks to setup campaigns and engage customers. Start improving your prediction model of finding the best time to engage customers and create highly-targeted campaigns based on historical data, shopping patterns, and individual customer behavior exhibited at various touchpoints.
To build a universally loved brand, companies with a global customer base should get accustomed to the glocal approach of thinking globally and acting locally. Understanding the unique needs, shopping trends, customer preferences can help marketers devise the best strategy suited for each region. The social media and messenger apps used by customers also vary considerably by each country. While LINE is the most used messaging app in Thailand, it’s WhatsApp in India and WeChat in China. It makes practical sense for marketers in these regions to target their users on these apps.
Capillary’s latest enhancements for LINE will empower marketers in Thailand to engage their audience with beautifully designed campaigns. The new update allows the use of emojis, rich media, images, and videos to capture attention and increase conversions. LINE messages designed through Capillary Engage+ now support stickers, carousel images, and multiple bubbles in a single message. This new addition will let you form a stronger connection with your customers and encourage them to click, and complete their purchase journey.
In a world beset by stricter regulations and rising consumer aversion to intrusive marketing, marketers need to equip themselves with unique strategies and intelligent tools to deliver great brand experiences. So step up your efforts and stay ahead of the competitive curve!
Even before the pandemic, customer attention was at an all-time low of 8 seconds (a goldfish has a higher attention span of 9 seconds). Unfortunately for marketers, the prognosis doesn’t look great either.
Here’s why:
At this very moment, people across the globe, irrespective of their age group, are adapting themselves to learn new ways of doing things – a grandfather is learning to order groceries online, a teacher is gaining new tech skills to teach his students more effectively, a mom is learning her way around social media to stay in touch with the kids.
We all are evolving with the new reality. Experts are saying the pandemic has catapulted tech adoption 5 to 10 years ahead of where it would have been had we not been forced indoors.
And this rapid influx of tech and the resultant torrent of information is going to make it even harder for you to capture the attention of your customer.
That’s why Contextual Marketing, Customer Experience and Personalized Engagement that resonates with the customer and grabs their attention is mission-critical for marketers. In fact, 86% of the buyers are willing to pay more for better customer experience and by the end of 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator.
Marketers can achieve their goals of revenue generation and optimizing costs if they identify the right engagement strategy for each customer based on their historical data. In fact, 64% of customers expect tailored engagements that are based on past interactions.
Here are some of our feature enhancements that will help you provide an individualized customer experience.
BEE Free Integration:
Email has always been the go-to marketing channel to launch a new product, promote existing services, getting new business or retaining the customers. 80% of business professionals believe that email marketing increases customer retention. Personalized and responsive emails have been at the forefront to drive business value for marketers with 59% of marketers saying that email is their biggest source of ROI.
Capillary has always remained market-ready with its innovations and multiple platform integrations to enable brands to provide the best customer experience. The most recent addition is the integration with BEE Free email builder to create personalized emails with the easy drag and drop builder. It is convenient for a marketer to have one to one conversations with their customers with dynamic content.
The benefits :
Engaging customers with personalized emails
Driving higher CTRs with the relevant content for each customer
Segment Automation:
The first step towards exhilarating your customers with an amazing experience is to group your similar customers into segments based on demographics and behavioural factors. Different customer segments could be: a loyal customer segment who has not transacted in the past 45 days, a customer segment who has availed a particular discount offer, a segment of customers with a transaction value of 10k in the past 3 months. These customer segments can then be used to target the customers with the right offer that resonates.
Capillary has an effective segmentation engine to collect data, segment the audience, and track their performance to improve campaign effectiveness. It has made an enhancement to increase a marketer’s productivity with the new segment automation feature. You can now automate the process of creating and updating customer lists without any manual effort in Insights+.
The benefits :
Increase the productivity of teams
Time saved with automation
X-Engage
Customers associate brands with the experiences they provide. With customers using digital mediums for buying groceries to furniture, digital experiences have gained more prominence than ever before. Targeting your customers based on the actionable insights gathered from their data using AI technologies can reduce the information overload faced on multiple channels. Identifying the right channel where customers would prefer to talk, respond and transact with a brand is where they should be engaged to get the best results. Companies that successfully engage their B2B customers realize 63% lower customer attrition. And they also achieve a 55% higher share of wallet, and 50% higher productivity.
Going beyond formal communications and developing emotional bonds is what a consumer of the 21st century is looking for. Knowing your customer to enhance their experience on their preferred channels is what they like. Capillary X-Engage is an AI-powered feature to solve a modern marketer’s dilemma of targeting the right customer on the right channel. It automates the channel mix based on the shopping patterns and past behaviour of the customers to arrive at the channel where they are most likely to respond to and transact. It can be enabled within Capillary Engage+ to deepen customer relationships by engaging customers in the most efficient way.
The benefits :
Higher hit rates with individualized messages on the preferred channel
Increase ROI by optimizing marketing spend on campaigns
Conclusion
Automation and AI are the two best friends every marketer must have to scale the business and keep his customers happy and satisfied. Right technology clubbed with a well thought of marketing strategy can enable brands to provide an unforgettable experience and enhance customer loyalty.
Isn’t it high time to embrace these features and create powerful customer experiences? Get in touch with us now!
Customers have always been the focal point for marketers to devise key marketing strategies. This focus has only intensified in the present time when brands have to be more empathetic to understand the changing customer mindset and shopping habits. Using data and analytics to understand these trends and providing unique customer experiences is the need of the hour. 78 percent of frontline employees report that their leaders have made customer experience a top priority.
As customers become more adaptable to change and shift to online experiences, marketers need to constantly evolve their ways of communicating and engaging customers. Digital engagement can pave the way to embrace the new reality, form an emotional connect with customers and maximize profits. As this is likely to become a permanent customer behaviour, retaining brand loyalty and optimizing costs should be the top priority for brands. 80 percent of companies believe that their core business model should be digitized to remain economically viable.
New Product Upgrades & Enhancements
Here are Capillary’s key features that can help marketers use changing customer trends to understand their customers and build deeper relationships :
In the constantly evolving marketplace, one of the topmost priority areas for marketers is to keep a constant check on the dynamic customer insights. The first step towards getting there is understanding consumer patterns with data-backed analysis. With data and analytics, marketers can anticipate the expectations of their customers and engage them with the most relevant offers.
With Audience Reporting, garner deep insights about customer behaviour and shopping patterns to improve the campaign effectiveness and increase the chance of getting high hit rates. Marketers can now get automated reports in EI before, during or after sending out a campaign. The segmented audience lists can be used to compare performance and use these insights to set-up campaigns. Choosing the relevant offer for each customer based on these insights can enrich their experience.
Benefits:
Pick the right offer for each consumer to maximise customer spend
Improved productivity with a reduced go-live time for campaigns by 50%
Easy to build reports with a simple & intuitive UI
Use Cases:
Track the behaviour of customers included in a list during the campaign lifecycle (before, during and after the campaign) to analyze the performance of campaigns
Comparative analysis of the current year with the previous one for a list of customers during a particular sale or festive season
The whole marketplace is evolving in sync with the changing shopping behaviour of consumers. A huge number of consumers earlier preferred the touch and feel aspect of traditional retail to make important purchase decisions. Now, the focus has shifted to receiving a great contactless experience. This has pushed marketers to rethink their strategy and use digital mediums to keep their consumers informed and engaged.
Marketers can use these changed habits to offer consumers a gaming-like experience while communicating important information of tier upgrade/downgrade of loyalty programs. This can encourage shoppers to spend a little more to retain or upgrade their tier. The goal to reduce losses and optimize costs is also taking a center stage in the new reality. Marketers can identify the low spending consumers and reduce their loyalty benefits with a downgrade strategy. Recognize your best customers with industry-specific metrics and qualified loyalty engagements based on marketers’ criteria through tracker support.
Benefits:
Engage and encourage customers to make more purchase
Reduce costs for business by downgrading liable consumers
Flexibility to set industry-wise tier criteria
Use Cases:
Use trackers to set a tier management strategy for each industry. The metrics could vary – for Hospitality, it could be room nights and for Fuel retail, it could be the volume of fuel purchases
Customers who can upgrade to the next tier by making a purchase for a smaller amount could be informed about it using gamification
Consumers are moving more towards digital and are embracing digital channels to learn, communicate and shop. This new trend has increased the pool of customers who interact with messages on various channels. Marketers should leverage this to their advantage by sending relevant and contextual messages which strike a chord with their consumers.
With Capillary’s personalization capabilities, brands can now recommend products at the right time of the day, based on the purchase behaviour of customers. Knowing your customers’ changing preferences can come in handy to enhance their online experience. The current trend of customers’ preference of making purchases from nearest stores can be used by marketers to incentivize customers with the best offers based on their propensity to shop from a particular store.
Benefits:
Improve your ROI with 1:1 targeted messages
Enhance your customers’ online shopping experience
Connect on a personal level by understanding their preferences
Use Cases:
For a customer who prefers to buy casual wear from your brand, sending the right offer on work from home collection might entice him/her to shop
A personalized, time-bound offer can be sent to a customer on Tuesday if he/she prefers shopping on Wednesdays. This creates a higher top of mind brand recall that can increase the chance of engagement and conversion.
Conclusion
This is the time to build trust, loyalty and win your customers’ hearts by developing a more personal relationship. Show them that you care by understanding their preferences, engaging them with the right information and delivering unique online experiences. And that’s how you will create a brand identity of being the most loved brand for your customers.
Interested in exploring these solutions? Reach out to your Customer Success Manager or contact us
The rapid pace of digital transformation in the last 5 years has impacted every industry. With increased mobile usage and internet penetration, customers are increasingly becoming information weary and they expect brands to deliver more personalized experiences. As more brands jump on the digital bandwagon, it becomes even more imperative to create highly personalized and tailor-made experiences for every customer.
But 2020 has been a ruthless year; hitting businesses hard, forcing them to devise new strategies to survive the COVID crisis. Smart brands have innovated and even benefited from the situation by offering unique digital experiences to their customers. Taking the appropriate precautions, boosting reach on digital channels and providing a touchless delivery experience has enabled businesses to retain their customers and slash costs.
While the situation might get better, brands should be aware of the shift in customer psychology, shopping preferences and overall purchase behaviour. With digital adoption on the rise, brands must utilize the full potential of online channels while augmenting it with the latest customer engagement strategies.
Capillary’s new feature additions will help you achieve just that and maximize your customer engagement.
WhatsApp Notifications
WhatsApp is one of the most loved messaging apps with 1.5 billion users in 180 countries. The penetration is only increasing with each passing day due to the coronavirus situation. According to statistics from May 2020, there has been a hike in the use of Whatsapp by 51% during COVID-19 lockdown.
Capillary’s integration with Whatsapp enables marketers to send transactional messages to customers to provide information about their transactions, loyalty program points, coupon codes, and also collect feedback and bot support for various enquiries. WhatsApp can be enabled from Loyalty+ using Events Notification Queue. Identify the most relevant customer events (e.g. new transaction, customer registration etc.) and use WhatsApp utility to read and respond with a message. Sending WhatsApp messages to customers helps brands to improve the campaign effectiveness by tracking various metrics such as coupon redemptions, tier downgrades and the total value driven from this channel vs others. Automated workflows can also be set-up for frequently asked questions and requests to save time.
Use Cases for Marketers:
Retain the customer by issuing coupons and points earned in the transaction based on their profile
Provide information about ongoing offers and nearest store to encourage customers to shop
AI-Powered Filters
Capillary’s AI-powered filters help you foresee your customer’s likelihood to respond, transact or churn. During these difficult times, knowing your customers can help enrich the whole customer journey and overall purchase experience. Marketers can choose filters required as per the business need while creating an audience list in Engage+. A single filter or combination of filters can be used to create a hyper-targeted list. Increase your ROI and win back customers who are about to churn with the predictive filters.
For businesses, it’s always more expensive to acquire new customers (almost 5X ) than retaining existing ones. A staggering $1.6 trillion was the estimated cost incurred by businesses due to lost customers and, once they leave, 68% of them don’t ever go back to the same brand again. Additionally, the COVID-19 crisis has created a highly competitive marketplace, where every brand is vying for customer attention, and retaining existing customers is a clear growth strategy brands should adopt. After all, the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70% while the probability of selling to a new customer is 5-20%.
Use Cases for Marketers:
Understand customers’ propensity to a particular store, product and time to send the right message to the right audience at the right time
Predict the likelihood of a customer to respond to a particular campaign
Foresee customers who are likely to churn
Channel Priority
In current times, ecommerce has become the go-to channel for customers. This presents marketers with an opportunity to reach a massive customer base through online channels. And brands who don’t get their digital strategy right, risk losing out on a lion share of customers. On the other hand, customers are divided by their brand/product preferences and their propensity to respond to different channels.
Capillary’s Channel Priority has been designed to address this challenge by offering marketers a list of channels that is ranked from highest to lowest priority based on the likelihood of customer response. It can be set-up while creating a campaign in Engage+. Choose the scenario most suitable for you and the channels within that by prioritizing according to the customer preferences. The feature helps marketers to prioritize channels of engagement based on customer’s availability on each channel, without having to create multiple campaigns. This enhances the productivity of internal teams and empowers them to create personalized customer experiences to increase hit rates.
Use Cases for Marketers:
Minimize the cost of communication by prioritizing channels to reach the customer
Maximize the probability of conversion with channels known to give higher ROI over others
