In today’s crowded digital marketplace, consumers have an abundance of options at their fingertips. From the moment they wake up and check their smartphones to the late-night online shopping sprees, consumers are inundated with choices from countless brands vying for their attention. To stand out in this battleground for customer loyalty, the key to success lies in delivering hyper-personalized customer experiences tailored to the specific needs of each individual customer.
But this is a tall order for most marketing teams today. While marketers have access to a vast amount of customer data, they often struggle to distill this information into actionable insights that can have a material impact on the customer experience. The reality is, not all data is created equal, and not all of it provides the insights needed to create truly personalized and engaging customer experiences.
I recently sat down with Scott Opiela, Chief Marketing Officer of Acoustic, a global marketing and customer engagement provider for B2C brands, to discuss how marketers can begin to solve their customer experience challenges by rethinking their approach to customer data. His company recently launched a new customer engagement platform designed to help marketers capture and decode customer signals and act on these insights from a single solution. In this interview, we discuss why marketers don’t need more data, but a new approach to capturing and analyzing customer signals, with behavioral experience insights at its core.
Gary Drenik: What is preventing brands from providing exceptional customer experiences today?
Scott Opiela: Brands have been so focused on customer acquisition that they’ve lost sight of customer relationships and the individual customer experience. Changing market dynamics such as shifting consumer buying habits, new channels emerging, and evolving data privacy regulations have created even more hurdles for brands to overcome.
To create engaging experiences, marketers need to get closer to customers by understanding more than demographics and what actions customers do or don’t take across digital properties – they need to be able to understand why customers are behaving in this way. This means investing in a data strategy that directly supports customers by balancing privacy with personalized customer experiences.
Drenik: How can marketers update their data strategies as the privacy landscape shifts? What recommendations do you have?
Opiela: The data marketers have historically gathered may not be the right data to realize this level of customer engagement. Today, first-party data is more critical than ever. According to a recent Prosper Insights & Analytics survey, 55% of Gen-Z and 60.7% of Millennials are somewhat or very concerned about the privacy of their personal identity when shopping online. This figure rises to 65% of Gen-X and 70.2% of Boomers.
The deprecation of third-party cookies, increase in new privacy laws and regulations, and Big Tech companies responding by putting walled gardens around customer data each attempt to address consumers’ concerns. But marketers still need customer data to personalize the experience, especially when personalization can lift revenues by 5 to 15%.
By prioritizing first-party data across owned properties like email, SMS, and social media, marketers can utilize information that customers actively share and expect brands to have access to. Data around customer behaviors, purchase intent, and content and channel preferences can give marketers a deeper understanding of their customers, something that traditional metrics like clicks, open rate, and bounce rate can’t uncover.
That’s why our team recently launched Acoustic Connect, a customer engagement platform designed to capture and decode customer signals and empower marketers to act on these insights from a single solution. With behavioral experience insights, marketers can uncover the intent behind each engagement, deepening their understanding of their customers and fueling personalization efforts with richer insights.
Drenik: Please define behavioral experience insights. What are they and why are they important today?
Opiela: As brands grapple with the need to balance customer privacy with demands for personalization, behavioral experience insights can provide the first-party data that modern marketing teams require.
Behavioral experience insights reveal customers’ interactions and engagement with owned digital properties like websites, apps, or other online platforms. This data goes beyond opens and clicks to reveal the behaviors that occur in-between – think intent, interests, pain points, and preferences. By capturing these customer signals, marketers gain a more holistic understanding of customer interactions with their brand.
Drenik: How do you expect the marketing landscape to evolve over the next five to ten years?
Opiela: Recently, we’ve seen an explosion in the number of channels available to engage consumers, and based on the pace of technology, I expect this to continue growing. With more channels available, there are more opportunities to create positive digital experiences that encourage consumers to become customers. At the same time, this will present challenges for marketers looking to understand the end-to-end customer journey. Having a MarTech stack that can scale with brands’ needs will be critical to success.
Drenik: What recommendations do you have for marketers looking to future-proof operations?
Opiela: First, let’s separate the strategy from the technology and tools. From a strategy perspective, investing in direct customer relationships through owned channels can help brands overcome some of the challenges they face today. Focus on creating multichannel experiences that fuel personalization efforts with accurate, reliable, privacy-compliant customer data. Third-party cookies are deprecating – any modern, future-proofed strategy will prioritize first- and zero-party data instead.
From a technology standpoint, every marketing conversation starts and ends with data, so marketers need solutions that deliver actionable insights. When marketers understand why certain messages resonate or don’t, they can use this information to optimize the experience moving forward. Being able to demonstrate the impact of marketing on both growth and retention empowers marketing leaders to defend their budgets and realize new levels of customer engagement and conversion.
Drenik: Thanks, Scott, for taking the time to provide your insights on the power of behavioral experience insights and customer intent data. As marketers aim to provide personalized, engaging digital experiences, I look forward to seeing the impact of behavioral insights on the customer experience.
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