4 things you need to boost your most critical KPIs
You’ve used your marketing capabilities to attract thousands of customers to your business. Now they’re in, you need to inspire them to contribute to your most valuable KPIs – like buying new products, renewing their subscriptions, and switching to direct debits. That means communicating with them. And it’s all about execution.
Every time a communication misfires and somebody doesn’t activate their account or make their first purchase or defects to a competitor – all of that is money lost.
This, right here, is what we call the Customer Activation Gap. The final pitfall at the last mile of customer communication. It’s the hardest, but most profitable part.
We have identified 4 things that you’re going to need to be able to plug the Customer Activation Gap and inspire people to take the actions that send your KPIs soaring.
1. Convenient channels that people trust.
Email is great for promotions and news updates. And social media is great for troubleshooting and targeted promotions. But when it comes to customer activation, you need channels that people don’t associate with marketing, that people check regularly, and that gives your customers an easy way to reply so they’re always in control.
Together, mobile channels give you that. They let you blend voice, text, image and video in one convenient device, with the possibility to trigger immediate actions from your customers.
People can reply to texts to tell you options they’d like to go with or tell you their feedback really easily. And they do. The average click-through rate for SMS is 36%, compared to 3.2% for emails. And it’s the same with voice. In fact, 71% of consumers think voice will be used for one or more daily tasks in 10 years’ time. These mobile channels are instant, easily accessible from people’s smartphones, and because people associate them with customer service, not marketing, they’re trustworthy too.
By all means, use a full blend of channels – each one has its place – but don’t be afraid to vary your approach. Fundamentally, it’s about the combination of appropriate channel, message, timing, and execution that really nails it. Your customers will thank you for it.
2. A way to automate those channels at scale.
Choosing the right channels for your personalised, customer communication is a great start. But you also need a way to scale up all those interactions in an automated way. To use intelligent automation to trigger relevant, real-time adapted, highly targeted communications that feel one-to-one. Being able to do that at scale is critical to closing the Customer Activation Gap – and no ordinary campaign automation tool can manage it since it’s just an empty tool.
Somebody has got to execute on it to steer customers towards your most valuable customer activation KPIs. Automatically. And to do that, you’re going to need it…
3. Data to drive every communication.
If you’re going to automate the way you communicate through mobile channels, that automation mechanism needs to be fed with data. Lots of it. Specifically, you need data on the most effective communication methods to inspire valuable customer actions.
To find the optimum way to nudge people towards each action, you’re going to need data on the most effective:
– Message timing
– Message content
– Tone of voice
– Calls to action
That means analysing the performance of hundreds of thousands of customer interactions to find which combination has proved most effective at inspiring customers to act at each moment of customer activation.
It also means adapting your messages in real-time to reflect how each customer responds.
Once you have the data, you’ll know the best-practice approach to effective customer communications in each of the most crucial moments in the customer lifecycle. Now it’s time to activate all that insight.
4. You need to personalize.
This is the last piece in the puzzle. Let’s say you’ve gathered all the data on the optimal communications strategy to inspire action from customers through the mobile channels they prefer. Now you need to tailor that best-practice approach to each of your customers and deliver a truly personal service – one that can adapt in real-time to optimise engagement.
Do you know how each of your different customers likes to receive messages from you? Everyone is different. People may want to be contacted through different mobile channels, or at different times, and they may have shifting circumstances. Your communications need to take all of these personal factors into account, in real-time, if they’re going to resonate with people. At scale, that’s going to need some machine learning assistance. You need to listen to customers’ feedback in as close to real-time as possible and make adjustments to messages to suit each person’s preferences on the fly.
With machine learning, you can continuously learn how to best communicate with each person, and constantly improve the service it gives them. Do that, and you’ve got yourself a customer experience that really shows people how much you value them. Show how much you value them, and people are more likely to stay loyal to your business, more likely to buy more products, and more likely to contribute to your most valuable KPIs.
And you know what, this is exactly what we do. Supercharge your marketing stack for customer communication with our software for Mobile Customer Activation. Wiraya uses data and artificial intelligence to generate exactly the right messages, to exactly the right people, through the mobile channels they trust at exactly the right time. Automatically. Whenever you need customers to do, know, update, start, change or buy something. Wiraya makes sure your communications are optimised to inspire action from your customers.
