Using the example of a food chain based in the north of England – that offers the hugely popular and now famous Yorkshire pudding wraps – Rob Meakin details how well personalised customer loyalty schemes can work and how shoppers expecting speed, efficiency and simplicity in every step of their retail experience can tap into a ‘membership economy’.
Wonderfully convenient or a bit too close for comfort: when does personalisation and detailed data usage become just a bit too personal? And how on earth can marketers tell when their carefully crafted messages are actually creeping their targets out? It was the subject that was under discussion at a masterclass in London recently. Here’s what the experts had to say about walking the tightrope between too much and too little:
A clear data hygiene strategy is vital if your business is operating on a global scale, says Anna Kayfitz – but it’s not an easy task to monitor and maintain international data and to standardise fields and formats. Here are her tried and tested tactics for optimising data management and keeping globalised data pristine.
Are marketers equipped and resourced to deal with major challenges ahead? How will the marketing landscape pan out this year? What’s at the top of a marketer’s wishlist for 2018? What did they get right last year and can build on in the months ahead? Robert Howells checks out the major annual research report from Winterberry (hindsight and predictions) and compares it with comments from Marketo’s community of marketing practitioners. Here’s what he found:
In this digital age, modern buyers have often already made their decision before they reach the salesperson. How do companies stay ahead of that trend? Marketers will need to be more involved post-sale, AI-powered solutions must gain traction, marketing content should improve and the traditional B2B salesperson must change, says Andy MacMillan – citing this year as the tipping point in the digitisation of B2B customer relationships.
Marketing automation is being used increasingly to allow the social media team to focus on the quality of the marketing creative, targeted at the right audience, says Jeremy Wood, who champions end-to-end management as the ideal social ladder to reach the dizzy heights of customer engagement and insight.
Technology is only valuable if you combine knowledge of what you want it to achieve with the ability to interpret what it tells you. So says William Roberts, discussing whether CMOs aiming to bridge the Digital Divide should be optimising data and incentivising customer behaviour by aligning customer understanding with tech strategy.
High street sales figures make grim reading currently, as rising inflation is clearly impacting consumer spending levels. And, with household incomes failing to keep pace, there is little sign of an upturn for retailers – in the immediate future at least. But Peter Zeun argues that in these difficult times, when it is getting ever harder for retailers to persuade consumers to spend their hard-earned cash in store or online, putting in place the right customer engagement and retention strategies is increasingly imperative for any brand. So start now, scrutinise your CRM strategies and take control of the future.
Research shows that more than half of consumers stop buying after a poor customer service interaction and that 95% ‘share’ bad experiences – so what, if anything, are companies doing to stop customers ‘falling through the cracks’ in the multichannel experience brands are offering? And how can they improve that offering? Chris Robinson says they should start by looking to their lines of communication and ensuring their customers can easily reach them.
Did the John Lewis TV ad ‘Moz the Monster’ prompt you to buy from that retailer . . . or do you fast-forward through the ads? Sweet seasonal telly ads leave a bad taste in the modern connected-up world, says Alex Hill – who believes brands busting their budgets on a big Christmas TV ad campaign should instead think audience-first, with social and digital activity leading the marketing, rather than the other way round.