The New Year is a great time to revisit your CRM and loyalty plans and renew your focus on the customer. As you examine your approach and set goals for 2024 amid the changing digital environment, consider these areas to ensure your plans include innovations that will help make your brand, their brand.
Decisioning and Personalization Relevancy: This has always been a key driver in connecting effectively with prospects and customers, and with new AI tools aiming to decrease technical barriers, automate and ease integration, anticipate an even higher baseline for personalized product offerings, content, and communications in the marketplace this upcoming year.
Revisit your personalization capabilities to ensure you’re scoring and maximizing output across transactional, behavioral, and situational data.
Zero-Party Data Campaigns: They’re not going anywhere — gaining popularity in 2023 as an initial outcome of cookie deprecation announcements, expect brands to continue to take advantage of these for turnkey data collection and application. Well suited for on-the-fly personalization, situational/environmental touchpoints and driving conversion rate optimization results.
Incorporate zero-party data campaigns into your CRO strategy to gain quick, actionable learnings about your audience.
Interactivity: In an increasingly digital environment, it’s even more challenging for brands to break through the clutter in inboxes and experiences. Increasing the interactivity of your digital touchpoints — from email to MMS/SMS can help significantly boost engagement and results.
Make interactive features and formats, like GIFs, quizzes and countdown clocks a regular part of your digital brand experience to engage customers and deliver offers and content uniquely and memorably.
Experiential Rewards: Engaging loyalty program members requires a blend of transactional and emotional benefits. While transactional benefits — discounts, offers, points — can drive direct replenishment and purchase retention, incorporating experiences whether gamified or as exclusive rewards can drive brand differentiation, preference and loyalty.
Pilot a gamified or exclusive experiential element in your loyalty program to spark member interest and engagement.
Prioritizing Customer KPIs: Increases in consumer privacy policy will continue into 2024 and as key platforms and providers decrease the amount of data shared back to marketers, brands need to find alternative measurement solutions across digital ecosystems.
CRM is no stranger to this, as customer-centric marketing is channel agnostic. From an eCRM perspective, email marketing campaign rates and website metrics historically tracked for performance and attribution will have less reliable coverage in the new year, something the industry is already realizing from the recent iOS17 update adoption.
Prioritize defining, regularly calculating and placing weight on customer-centric metrics alongside campaign KPIs in 2024 to provide a bigger picture of your campaign’s impact on ultimate goals: changing key behaviors and growing customer lifetime value.
The author, Jenny Brenner, is Group Director, Digital Strategy + CRM Solutions at 9RoofTops.