As competition within the digital marketing landscape becomes war-like, brands must constantly innovate and reinvent marketing strategies to get customers excited. But, like most good things in the world, it’s easier said than done.
With dropping attention spans and too much content (marketing or otherwise), customers don’t stick around brands that aren’t giving them what they really need. And we don’t blame them.
This has made acquiring new customers more challenging than ever. Naturally, brands direct most of their energies to this, so they don’t spend as much time building deeper relationships with existing customers. The result? They lose people that are loyal to them.
Part 1 of this article discussed the twin challenges in digital marketing – increasing business costs and decreasing customer loyalty. We highly recommend you read Part 1 first. This second part discusses innovative solutions: disruptors that help you break free of conventional marketing wisdom and bypass common pitfalls.
A quick recap – digital marketing discontents
Skyrocketing ad spends and unprecedented AdWaste are serious challenges that require immediate attention from marketers and industry thought leaders. Primarily, the following trends drive marketing budgets into an unproductive wall:
Rising CAC in digital ads
Adtechs like Google and Meta take up a significant chunk of your marketing budget for digital advertising and branding. Market monopoly has driven prices into outer space; brands divert massive amounts of their budget to advertising, which does not always translate to profits. Such efforts often lead to acquiring mass, uninterested customers who become dormant or uninstall the app.
Attention recession in push messages
Push messages no longer have the same efficacy as before. Whether you send them via SMS, email, or other notifications, open rates are low, or they get blocked by anti-spam technologies.
Sub-optimal experience on brand properties
Even if customers do reach brand properties, their experiences aren’t always the best. Factors that often cause customers to bounce are:
- lack of direct interaction
- absence of personalization
- no differentiation for ‘Best Customers’
- sub-standard search experience
- complexities of properties
Future-forward disruptors to combat discontents
Email 2.0 (Interactive emails using AMP)
AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is a Google-driven technology that turns emails into mini websites/apps. It lets users interact with the email inside their inbox, far beyond just clicking a link. People can see images and stylized text, scroll through options, select desired options, make payments, fill out forms, play games, answer quizzes, and do much more – right inside the AMP email.
With AMP emails, marketers can bring WhatsApp/website/app-like interactivity into users’ inboxes. Since it’s cheaper to market via emails than WhatsApp, you also get scale and frequency while driving much higher user engagement.
Early campaigns done by Netcore customers have seen a 3-8 times increase in conversion actions within AMP-powered emails. There is no downside to sending an AMP email: the regular email is shown for those inboxes where AMP is not supported (Apple’s email client, for example).
Loyalty 2.0 (Atomic Rewards in the form of tokens for attention and data)
Enable brands to use micro-incentives (Atomic Rewards) that change user behavior along different junctures in the user journey – online and offline. This goes beyond traditional tactics that just offer redeemable points for every transaction. Atomic rewards are persuasive micro-incentives that pay users for their attention and engagement. They come in the form of non-financial points (Mu) that can be aggregated across multiple brand engagements and redeemed at the Mu Shop.
Atomic Rewards enable marketers to nudge and direct customer behavior. They are based on the groundbreaking concept of rewarding customer attention, the precursor to a customer transaction.
Brands have long focused on rewarding transactions either through their own loyalty programs or partnerships with credit card companies. But what has been missed (or ignored) is what comes before the transaction – our attention. This is where Atomic Rewards can be the game changer.
Martech 2.0 (A unified stack that reduces integration hassles and collates a holistic customer view)
Until now, marketers have had to implement numerous point solutions on their sites and apps to get data for automation and customer journey orchestration. However, using too many tools to get data from different assets just muddles up the final numbers and their correlation. It fragments data, makes AI less effective, and prevents an accurate, unified view of customer data.
The solution is to upgrade to a Martech 2.0 solution providing a SINGLE stack to acquire data from all assets as well as provide a superb customer experience. Most notably, this solution must be able to provide differentiation in customer experience – a little extra for the ‘Best Customers’ so that they stay on and keep buying.
Velvet Rope Marketing (Focus on ‘Best Customers’)
VRM is all about focusing on the ‘Best Customers’ for your brand. Find them, acquire them, and turn them into brand loyalists. The ‘Best Customers’ almost always deliver more revenue than you spent to acquire them.
Companies must roll out the ‘velvet rope’ experience for these customers and treat them like royalty. It creates exclusivity, envy, and a feeling of being special. VRM can help generate additional revenues, higher profits, loyalty, and word-of-mouth.
The key here is to calculate the CLV and figure out who the customers with the highest CLV are. Zero down to what they have in common, and you have your silver bullet to kill the competition.
In conclusion: Choose the winning quartet in the marketing race
If you’re looking to build better customer relations, eliminate AdWaste, and drive profitability, go with the four disruptors discussed above. After repeated applications in the real world, we can confidently declare that this is the way to a future in which Chief Marketing Officers can become Chief Profitability Officers.
Of course, the information in this article is just a gateway to those lofty goals. Connect with us, and let’s delve deeper into how these innovations can push your brand into the future of marketing excellence.
Comprising excerpts from the blog “Digital Marketing and its Discontents and Disruptions” by Rajesh Jain. He is the founder and Group MD of Netcore, a bootstrapped SaaS company that helps brands create outstanding and holistic AI-powered customer experiences at every touchpoint.
