In this edition of TheCustomer Quick-Take: Next-level personalization, martech disfunction, improving customer satisfaction, and where to spend your spend.
Happy Wednesday!
PS. If you like what you see here, you can get TheCustomer Quick-Take newsletter delivered straight to your inbox each week by subscribing here.
PERSONALIZATION
And Then There’s Really Smart Personalization
Quick-Take: Amazon’s recommendation algorithm is the perfect example of using personalization to stay ahead of competitors. First introduced in 2010 and continually perfected since, their machine learning-powered algorithm uses input about a customer’s interests to generate a list of recommended items. Today, Amazon claims that these recommendations drive 35 percent of their sales.
And Then There’s Really Innovative Personalization
Quick-Take: Today, the company launches a new platform called Freestyle that creates a customized store for every shopper. It’s designed to mimic the discovery process of a traditional department store, where brands and styles are showcased together, rather than a typical e-commerce site, where you have to search for exactly what you want. This new approach to shopping has the potential to grow Stitch Fix’s business beyond its subscription model—and also transform the way we shop online.
UX
Customers Respond to Speed
Quick-Take: Research suggests that every 100-millisecond delay in website load time can cause up to a 6% drop in sales.
MARKETING OPS
Your Next Hire
Quick-Take: There are currently no fewer than 61,000 job openings on LinkedIn which refer to “marketing operations” in the U.S. alone. Right now, there’s not enough talent to fill all these positions. It’s at the front of CMO’s minds because of the value it can bring.
LOYALTY
Freedom to Redeem
Quick-Take: One of the things we learned during the pandemic was really paying attention to your redemption strategy,” Proctor said. “We grew our offerings and tried to focus on personalization within redemptionsspecifically. We added elements to our offerings that allowed our members to redeem based on their needs, interests or what they needed at a time.
MARTECH
Not Quite Omnichannel Yet
Quick-Take: By 2022, 50% of large organisations will have failed to unify engagement channels, resulting in a disjointed and siloed customer experience that lacks context. This is according to a study by Gartner, which has urged companies around the globe to deliver frictionless omnichannel experiences to create more connected experiences for customers and further drive digital commerce.
Top Automated Functions
Quick-Take: “The two top automated functions were order-to-cash and data-pipelines…to me this is like the mantra of modern business — flow the cash and flow the data,” said Brinker. “But also, look at those percentages of all automated processes. They’re still mostly pretty low. We have a lot of headroom ahead in Big Ops on how many things can be automated, and automated across departments and not just within one.”
Stack Dissatisfaction
Quick-Take: “Only one in 10 (10%) CMOs characterize themselves as completely satisfied with their martech stack, which leaves ample opportunities for marketing ops teams to seek out more relevant solutions to deliver the desired business outcomes and close the gaps in their existing technology.”
More Stack Dissatisfaction
Quick-Take: Marketers are using too many tools and integrations — and getting too few results, according to The State of Martech, a study from SharpSpring conducted in partnership with Ascend2. This is a special headache for email marketing teams, since email is the top tool used by both marketing and sales. Overall, 83% agree that consolidating tools would increase their efficiency.
CUSTOMER SATISFACTION
Better than C-Sat
Quick-Take: A “customer effort score” is 40% better at predicting loyalty than customer satisfaction. Position short surveys throughout various processes to gauge customer effort.
Specific Language Affects C-Sat
Quick-Take: We found that a certain type of language improves customer satisfaction. It doesn’t just make people happier, it causes them to be more likely to come back and buy more in the future. This linguistic feature is called “concreteness,” basically how concrete the language is that people use.
CUSTOMER DATA
Battling for Ownership of Customer Data
Quick-Take: DoorDash Inc sued New York City on Wednesday over a new law requiring food delivery companies to share customer data with restaurants, saying it violates customer privacy and lets restaurants compete unfairly.
What Questions are You Asking of Your Data?
Quick-Take: First, is your insight team focused on the big picture rather than the smaller details? Typically, insight teams do a lot of work checking how consumers respond to different ideas, products, store formats and more. This work can be important, but it is far less important than the bigger questions. How are people living? What do they aspire to? How does your brand or service fit?
Cultural Opportunities
Quick-Take: Even though one out of three consumers in America is multicultural, only 5.2% of marketing spend is directed toward them. This is despite forecasted spending power exceeding $1 trillion for Black, Hispanic and Asian populations.
Photo by Patrick Langwallner on Unsplash
