In the latest edition of TheCustomer QT: Re-shaping email, Customer data efficiencies, CX leaders’ purchase priorities, and a new data protection agency?
Happy Skimming!
Off-The-Rack Personalization
Quick-Take: There is much hype about email personalization. Yet only 49% of retailers have personalized their email, according to Ecommerce Personalization Benchmark Report 2021, a study from Netcore, conducted by Wakefield Research. At that, email is the leader. Only 48% are are providing personalized search results, while 47% are providing product displays, 45% are giving discounts and 38% provide home pages. Despite that, 62% of retailers claim they have improved their personalized shopping experience over the past year. However, only 45% of consumers say they see first-rate personalization.
Apple’s Privacy Change to Email
Quick-Take: It’s challenging to lose foundational metrics, but opens are considered by many to be a vanity metric in any case. It’s time to move on. Although opens may still be an historical indicator of list hygiene, they will likely no longer work as an indicator of success.
My advice? Consider each email message to be an experience. Use this opportunity to reach beyond the open and think about the multichannel moments and points of connectivity that will provide that next best message and experience for your customers.
Building Sustainability into Customer Engagement
Quick-Take: According to the UK email and marketing benchmark 2021 from Campaign Monitor, retail had the lowest unsubscribe rate for email marketing of any industry across billions of email interactions. It also had the lowest open rate as well at 13%. It’s not just the way marketers communicate externally that has a bearing on a brand’s carbon footprint. Think about all those emails sent every day asking for a file, image, datasheet – and the replies. While a standard email has a footprint of 4g CO2e, an email with an attachment has a footprint closer to 50g CO2e – well over 10 times the amount – according to Berners-Lee.
CUSTOMER DATA
Making the Most of Customer Data
Quick-Take: According to a recent Teradata report, even though companies collect ever-increasing amounts of data on customers, many still have a difficult time discerning how to use that data to provide better CX.
More specifically, though 82% of respondents said their firms are trying to collect more types of customer data, 61% went on to admit that capturing and making sense of digital customer data is difficult for them and 55% said understanding customers across all touchpoints and lifecycle stages is challenging.
CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT
Keeping Up with the (Patient) Consumer
Quick-Take: Although patients say online reviews are extremely important in selecting a provider, most providers have no reviews. After a provider’s location and whether they accept the patient’s insurance, consumers rate online reviews as the third most important factor when selecting a provider. However, 50 percent of healthcare facilities and 65 percent of physicians have zero online reviews. “This is a massive disconnect between what consumers want and what healthcare is delivering,” Ms. Haarmann said. “The good news is that since the industry has not leaned into third-party reviews, this is low-hanging fruit that can lead to success.”
The Digital Banking Customer Journey
Quick-Take: A recent McKinsey analysis shows that the top-quartile banks in experience in the United States have had meaningfully higher deposit growth over the past three years and that the few “experience leaders” are generating higher growth than their peers. In fact, highly satisfied customers of those financial institutions are two-and-a-half times more likely to buy new banking products with their existing bank than those who report being just satisfied.
But a dangerous thing can happen when financial institutions are in a rush, especially when it comes to customer experience — they can end up missing critical details that make or break the long-term effectiveness of the digital transformation.
AI
UX Should Guide AI
Quick-Take: AI’s effectiveness at specialized jobs comes at the price of severe context blindness and a general inability to develop meaningful feedback loops: The typical algorithm does not and cannot consider the wider implications of the decisions it makes and hardly affords us users any control over its inner workings. But the convenience of these algorithms — that show us the best route to our destination or recommend an item for our grocery list — lulls us into a dangerous cult of AI that gradually pushes our human needs out of the picture. User experience (UX) quickly becomes secondary to the algorithm’s success at its narrow task.
This ultimately results in a number of aberrations that we as users should not accept quietly because they have an outsized effect on our daily lives and our cognition.
FORECAST
The CMO Balancing Act
Quick-Take: In Gartner’s recent CMO Strategic Priorities Survey, 73% of CMOs reported that they will be relying on existing customers to achieve growth, rather than look to develop new markets.
It seems a turbulent 2020 has created polarity between marketers globally; adopt low-risk yet low-return strategies or be bold by reinventing and rescaling strategies to win new customers in new markets. Gartner’s findings suggest balancing more conservative strategies with emerging opportunities for new growth.
CX
CX Leaders Top Investment Priorities
Quick-Take: More than half of digital customer experience leaders told CMSWire in its State of Digital Customer Experience 2021 report they see analytics, insights and dashboarding as a top investment priority (51%). Trailing behind are the following items:
- Customer journey analysis & optimization: 37%
- Digital experience/Web CMS platforms: 36%
- Personas, targeting and/or personalization: 34%
- Social listening and engagement: 29%
- Marketing automation and orchestration: 27%
- Mobile apps or mobile touch points: 25%
- Skills and training: 24%
- Voice of the Customer programs: 24%
REGULATION
A New Agency to Deal with Data Privacy
Quick-Take: The Data Protection Act isn’t a privacy bill in and of itself. Rather, it establishes a Data Protection Agency, whose job would be to regulate and enforce federal data privacy laws. The bill also spells out some prohibited data collection and usage practices, including those that are discriminatory or deceptive, and bans re-identifying users from de-identified data.
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Photo by Paul Treubrodt on Unsplash
