According to research, 99% of marketers plan to change their client involvement techniques as customers cut back on regular spending.
Braze, a comprehensive platform for customer engagement, released the results of its third annual Global Customer Engagement Review. Braze drives connections between customers and the businesses they love. As client acquisition expenses have risen to unsustainable heights and cost-conscious consumers are faced with more options than ever in a volatile market, the paper looks at developments in customer interaction over the past year. According to the report’s findings this year, more marketers are spending money on tactics and solutions that encourage customer engagement and loyalty.
“Consumers today have high expectations for real-time, personalized communication, seamlessly choreographed across the channels and platforms they prefer, in a way that feels relevant and human. At the same time, marketers are under tremendous pressure to deliver greater return-on-investment, often with smaller teams”, “More than ever, it’s important for brands to invest in effective tools that enable teams across an organization to combine efforts to quickly reach shared goals. With the right tools, strategies, and expertise, brands can create meaningful experiences that delight consumers, drive value and loyalty, and drive long-term revenue growth.”
Bill Magnuson, Cofounder and CEO, Braze
Important conclusions from the study include:
The development of retention as a tactic for marketers to protect its clientele
According to the survey, brands are becoming more concerned with protecting their customer base, which is not surprising given the current circumstances. By shifting to a retention-led strategy, marketing professionals are recognizing that providing customers with value contributes to the long-term growth of brand value and loyalty – and marketers are allocating their budgets appropriately. Up from 33% in 2020, 45% of firms reported spending more than 50% of their marketing expenditure on customer retention in 2022. According to Braze, the proportion of surveyed businesses spending the majority of their marketing expenditure on client retention has increased by 36% over the past three years.
Moreover, data indicates that 83% of the global companies questioned expect their marketing spending to rise over the next 12 months, a significant increase from 2020, when only 60% of the companies surveyed anticipated doing so.
Marketing professionals may reach consumers by using customization to cut through the noise.
By personalized, relevant interaction that better fulfils consumers’ demands and offers great experiences at the right time, in the right place, marketers can keep and protect their client base in one of the most effective ways possible. Brands should be well-positioned to better satisfy customers’ demands and deliver great experiences that spur growth as 99% of surveyed marketers believe they will change their customer interaction methods when consumers tighten their discretionary spending. In addition, compared to using only one channel, brands that employ cross-channel strategies can increase retention rates by 55% over a 90-day period.
To implement individualised retention techniques, it is essential to comprehend real-time data.
Today’s brands struggle with data management, and a key component of implementing individualized retention tactics is properly understanding and activating data, especially real-time data. Without a well-thought-out data management strategy, marketers are unable to gather and act on real-time insights and may find it difficult to design customer experiences that increase revenue, which will hurt overall performance. Surprisingly, 80% of the organizations who responded to the poll claim that they are gathering too much data, which leaves them with knowledge they can’t use efficiently. As a result, marketers need to be more deliberate about the data they gather and give careful consideration to a data management strategy that can transform this data into timely, useful insights.
Brands must eliminate the barriers between their data, engineering, and marketing teams in order to become more multidisciplinary in their approaches to customer interaction. 60% of firms polled globally claim that the marketing department is primarily responsible for consumer interaction. Importantly, 42% of polled marketers reported working with internal data scientists/business intelligence teams who don’t understand marketing priorities as the primary issue with using data for consumer interaction, while 38% cited a lack of data capabilities among marketing staff. More than ever, marketers who work to forge stronger ties with their data partners will be in a better position to test, experiment, and adapt the customer experience and thereby increase the likelihood of profitable business results.
The 2023 Global Customer Engagement Study also deconstructs the strategies used across several sectors, including financial services, health and wellness, media and entertainment, QSR and delivery, retail, and e-commerce, to achieve corporate objectives and generate income. Each industry breakdown also includes a case study from a top company, such as Majid Al Futtaim, Gympass, HBO Max, Hugosave, KFC Philippines, and HBO Max. The findings are based on global research done in collaboration with Wakefield Research among 1,500 VP+ marketing decision makers in 14 countries, as well as customer insights via the Braze platform.
