Earlier this week I came across an article on The Wise Marketer titled, “Benefits of a customer engagement strategy,” (registration required) and highly recommend you take a look. As a business process and category of technology solution, customer engagement is the real deal and in its active form I would argue it’s most effective. The article highlights results of a study into customer engagement practices by E-Consultancy and cScape, and describes it as follows:
“Customer engagement is seen as being about creating relationships which result in value both for customers and for organisations. Company respondents are most likely to indicate that increasing long-term customer value (37%) and increasing value delivered to the customer (35%) describe their interest in customer engagement most appropriately.”
Surprisingly, the study finds tactics like email newsletters and Twitter are top of mind among many of those marketers surveyed. It’s therefore not surprising that:
“Marketers are benefiting more from the relationship-building aspects of customer engagement rather than being exclusively focused on the more directly financial benefits such as sales.”
With marketers under more pressure than ever to deliver quantitative results for their investments, it is hard to imagine CMOs authorizing significant investments in engagement strategies which cannot be measured. The beauty of Active Customer Engagement is that by definition, it’s measurable and maps to business objectives. It was encouraging therefore to read that:
“Mapping the customer experience across all touch points has a tangible impact on the ability to engage with customers. Of the companies who said their customer engagement strategy has been successful, 46% say they are ‘very advanced’ or ‘quite advanced’ at mapping their customer touch-points. For the companies who have not been successful, only 14% are quite advanced and none are very advanced at this kind of mapping.”
We prescribe this same process to help marketers hone in on the mobile marketing strategy that will create the greatest impact to their business. Doing so can yield results such as these, where a casino implemented a three tiered mobile program that is a fundamental part of its customer engagement strategy.
Following is an excerpt from the study regarding the mobile channel – marketers who embrace mobile as a foundation of their engagement strategies will achieve better results than those who do not. Firms like Interactive Mediums make it easy to get started.
- A large proportion (41%) of companies are not planning any investment at all in the mobile channel in 2010, and a further 49% are planning only limited investment. Only 11% are planning to invest significantly but this increases significantly for the largest companies.
- Only a small number of organisations (6%) say they have a customer engagement strategy which seamlessly embraces mobile marketing. The majority of companies who are using the mobile channel at all are using it just for the occasional, ad-hoc piece of marketing (18%).
- When it comes to building customer engagement, companies have been quickest to use the mobile channel for increased dialogue with customers. A fifth of company respondents say they are doing this and a further 36% say they plan to do this.
- One-third (34%) of companies are planning to create applications for mobile phones, in addition to the 16% who say they are already doing this.
- Nearly two thirds of companies (62%) have no plans for mobile commerce. Only 10% of companies are using transactional mobile activity to build customer engagement. A further 28% are planning to do this.
- Companies who are either using or planning to use mobile as part of their customer lifecycle marketing, for broader CRM, for user-generated content or location-based marketing are also in the minority.
- Companies generally attribute their lack of inertia when it comes to integrating the mobile channel to a lack of resources (51%), although there are other widely cited reasons including lack of skills / experience / understanding, and lack of a sound business case.
