Chairman and CTO at Cierant Corporation, overseeing strategic initiatives in personalized communications and marketing process automation.
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One word being heard routinely in e-commerce marketing meetings is “engagement.” In a world disoriented by a global pandemic and embracing e-commerce like never before, marketers have become obsessed with digital engagement as a means of sustaining brand differentiation in the online world.
To do this, companies are applying CRM technologies like Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Hubspot or Oracle CX, capable of generating personalized content, recommendations and offers tailored to each consumer’s detailed profile and buying history. Sounds great, right?
In fact, it is great — as a starting point. Engagement should be a holy grail for a commerce business in any channel, but creating engagement isn’t about creating “personalized” communications. It is about creating personal dialogue — bidirectional conversations and digital small talk as if the buyer were in the room with you, even though the interaction takes place online.
Think for a second. If you were a salesperson completing a checkout with a customer who just spent $1,000 on a piece of furniture, would you be presenting a litany of offers and promotions? Or would you engage in conversation about how they are planning to use the item or about home decorating style? The trouble is that creating personalized communications is easy, but creating personal dialogue is hard, and it is the area we see most underestimated or overlooked in marketing plans.
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Let’s explore the concept a little more through some examples:
Online commerce star Chewy.com is one of the most consistent examples of corporate commitment to personal communications. The Chewy team is known for its empathetic posts to pet owners who have lost a treasured friend, or for joyful notes to celebrate the addition of a new pet to the family. Delivered through a customer team engaging with commerce, social media, email, text and voice channels, their associates scour data to identify clues for encouraging conversation with customers. At the extreme, Chewy delivers hand-painted pet portraits to owners based on triggers such as a pet passing away. Chewy customers respond by creating a treasure trove of online content and word-of-mouth referrals. Beyond its comprehensive product selection and customer service policies, Chewy is successful not because of promotions, but because of demonstrably caring about customers.
Another example is the Etsy practice of including handwritten notes in orders. Etsy educates sellers that each purchase is a chance to build a personal relationship between a customer and a craftsperson. To many consumers, including digital-native millennials, this is a comforting anachronism in a world that revolves around shipments of boxes with smiles printed on their sides. It encourages the customer to communicate requests and comments and to engage in direct communication with the seller. Etsy is succeeding not because the seller added a promo to a box, but because they paved the road for future purchases by saying “hello” and “call me.”
I want to emphasize that a consumer creating an online review or social media post, while a visible act of engagement, is far from establishing the relationship needed to really drive lifetime value. In fact, an engagement initiative is a never-ending commitment that must be driven by the brand. Companies successful at this today typically have several characteristics:
• A clear purpose or mission that encourages participation by the consumer.
• Unwavering commitment to customer satisfaction.
• Effective methods for creating seed content or harvesting customer lifecycle triggers to drive communications.
As Chewy and Etsy demonstrate, communications beyond product and promotion are not an abstract concept, nor are they constrained to any particular product categories. A brand like Duluth Trading, selling rough and tumble workwear, uses a “No Bull Guarantee” as part of its customer promise, encouraging a path for conversation beyond the next promo. At scale, this can seem daunting, but it is the key to stepping beyond personalization.
This is where technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning enter the picture. These applications can help organizations mine data or organize content into categorized streams to facilitate conversation at a personal level. And implementations like Amazon Personalize make this technology accessible and affordable for even smaller brands.
Now, if this begins to sound a little creepy, that is good. Consumers do not want to engage with a machine. Stilted, robotic interactions are the enemy of engagement teams! More importantly, the collection and use of data to drive personal dialogue is an ethical challenge to be managed with care. Regardless, the pandemic has promoted personal interaction to business imperative. But technology cannot shortcut a process that is intensive and must be human-focused. An insert in a box with your name emblazoned above a generically-written note fronting a machine-generated offer is no more likely to generate engagement than a simple packing slip. And neither will create competitive differentiation to sustain loyalty in an online world filled with choices. That requires enticing customers to open a window on their preferences followed by the hard work of building meaningful content to drive persistent conversation.
2021 will hopefully mark the end of the Covid pandemic — a time of unimaginable disruption in commerce and customer relationship management. A key to the post-pandemic future will be creating true engagement with consumers operating through their increasingly preferred channel of choice — e-commerce. But creating true engagement means thinking about how to build sustained dialogue, not just personalized communications.
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Author: James Cioban, Forbes Councils Member
