Staying on the pulse of the latest martech integrations and innovations, customer behaviors, and data plays are all critical to business success. That's why MoEngage sat down with two of our Directors of Strategy, Alex May and Tiffany Fitzgerald, to help keep marketers in the know. We're talking omnichannel campaigns that drive real results, tech stack hacks, how to dive into the new territory of AI, and much more.
Can you share specific omnichannel campaigns you or clients executed that were particularly successful?
ALEX: One that comes to mind is from the food services space. We had a client who was looking to grow their engagement with their less engaged customer base, and wanted to do so in a way that drove orders without having to require a monetary type of discount to avoid cutting into their margins. To do that, we took a look at some of their customer purchase and lifetime behaviors to identify the right folks who have an opportunity to grow some of their frequency. Like the rest of the food service industry, frequency was a big problem for them.
After looking into that customer's subset and analyzing their preference data and location, we decided to deliver a weather-targeting strategy where, via email and rich push, customers experiencing inclement weather would receive preferred products from past orders that pair that up with the weather, temperature, and precipitation.
Research shows that the demand for delivery significantly increases when there's inclement weather, and the success of this campaign proved that. It drove a huge lift in engagement compared to the control group that didn't receive any weather-related targeting. It goest to show that getting food delivered is just as valuable to customers than a monetary discount.
What advice would you give to marketers who want to execute successful omnichannel campaigns?
ALEX: It all comes down to putting together a consistent formula when you approach different projects. Begin with "What the problem we're trying to solve?" and find the KPIs that ladder up to that overarching goal. You'll also want to determine what phases of the funnel you'll need to influence to drive those behaviors; starting at the top and working your way down to more granular steps can help formulate your strategy.
From there, look at metrics like click-through rate to help provide some general insights into customer interests and engagement patterns, along with purchase behavior and customer lifetime value data. Those data sets will indicate the most profitable segments with the most opportunity. Once that's in order, you can start to look at lifecycle data to determine where customers are at in their individual journeys, as well as channel engagement to understand trends across multiple channels and where to target different customers.
In short, you need to work with what you have and put trust into the data and the tools you have at your disposal to make the most informed decisions that you can. But don't let perfection hold you back from executing, because then you'll never get anything done.
The final piece is keeping key stakeholders involved and making sure they're well aware of everything that's going on. Be sure to deliver campaign results in a way that's not only clear and digestible but ladders up to the overall goal.
What role did customer engagement data play in shaping your strategy?
ALEX: To identify the opportunities each type of customers, we determined which channels they engaged with most and then leveraged that data to develop a module and a strategy that could target folks on the right channel. This resulted in an engagement-driving, personalized piece of content for every customer.
Tracking incremental purchase behavior allowed us to show how CLV would be boosted over time, proving its future value.
What new skills do customer marketers need to be successful in today's landscape, particularly when it comes to leveraging martech for campaign planning and execution?
TIFFANY: Forming a plan for a testing strategy and execution is key, along with strong analysis and reporting skills. You not only have to be able to understand, interpret, and tell a story with your own data, you need to do it quickly so your response remains relevant.
You also need to have a high-level understanding of AI types and models—such as generative AI, deep learning, and machine learning—and how to leverage them at a basic level.
And develop a good omnichannel strategic perspective. How do you think about the omnichannel environment, and where does mobile come in for you? How do you leverage social media? Having an idea as to how each channel is working and needs to evolve will solidify your strategy.
With technology evolving rapidly, how can marketers future-proof their martech investments to remain effective long-term?
TIFFANY: Evaluate your tech stack and investments to ensure you're set up for success—but stay flexible with what that stack looks like over time. Part of that involves testing to understand what's currently working and what should be expected out of our tech stack. Once you establish that baseline, you should expect to move the needle year over year. Track that by setting up data and analytics to know how much ROI your martech investments bring to the organization.
From there, make sure you're loud about what you've achieved. Clearly illustrate your wins, your learnings, and your growth opportunities to your executive leadership team. Even if you tell them, "Hey, we tested this method and found it wasn't as effective as this approach," it shows that you know the reasoning behind results, building you credibility for when you do share those great results. This helps when renewal cycles roll around. You won't be asking for the investment without your team understanding exactly what they've been getting out of it all year.
When you're looking for that next investment, it can be tempting to look for a one-tool-for-everything solution. But there are smaller applications that are often the answer to creating whatever bespoke tech solution that's really needed for your organization and team. You can definitely start with those larger tools that get a lot done, but be open to bolting on smaller applications to maintain that creative and innovative edge.
How can marketers use martech to ensure they are interpreting data in ways that align with customer expectations and behaviors?
TIFFANY: There are four key ways to ensure you're interpreting customers' data in the right way:
- It's really important to have a smart customer insight tool in your back pocket because it can be very challenging to do this manually. A good tool will do a lot of this interpretation for you to enable quick iteration on the insights. We all know what it's like to have to iterate on stale data that's six months, a year, or even two years old. And at that point, everything has changed.
- You should have a tool—and it can be the same tool—that helps you visualize your data and analytical interpretations clearly to show your executives exactly what's happening in your customer experience playground. A lot of tools have great dashboards that make it easy to take a couple of images, or even create a custom dashboard, to help your decision makers see what you're learning from your data analytics. This speeds up the typically long process of decision making and testing.
- If you're able to add in deep learning, or even an LLM-based query tool, this layering will allow you to query with natural language and get back plain-spoken answers to your questions.
- It's really important to tell a story with the data. Oftentimes I'll see teams present loads of raw data that have really interesting insights that are virtually buried and don't allow decision-making teams to walk away with any actionable takeaways. Instead, bring up two or three top-level actions and support those decisions with the data you found to tell a clear and consistent story.
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