Marketing News
Why unlocking new levels of agility is critical to achieving personalised customer experiences
The digital expectations of customers continues to rise, according to findings that highlight the changing attitudes towards creating stand-out digital experiences.
Adobe’s digital trends report reveals that thousands of seasoned professionals are reacting, evolving and succeeding amid significant disruption and opportunity of the past 2 years across all kinds of sectors.
More than 10,000 global marketers were surveyed in its report, with 2,004 marketers and business leaders from the UK explaining that 9 in 10 customers use digital content first.
The research reveals 84% of businesses saw the emergence of new customer journeys over the last 18 months with customers expected to permanently adopt their ‘digital first’ shopping behaviours they embraced – from virtual changing rooms to click and collect services, for the foreseeable future.
The importance of developing and nurturing relationships directly with customers has never been more important. However, how organisations collect and extract insights from customer data will become even more critical as marketers shift from relying on third-party data and embrace first-party strategies.
Obtaining clean, reliable, auditable, cohesive, contextual and timely data, is one thing but businesses also need to ensure that it is easily accessible to support real-time decision making. That’s if they want to keep existing customers engaged and win over more customers from their competitors.
Simply stockpiling data does not achieve these ends
Delivering excellent experiences relies on organisations’ solid grasps of customers’ behaviours, motivations, preferences, and needs, which can only be achieved by translating customer data into meaningful insight that enables potential value-adding moments on a customer’s path to purchase.
Businesses need to ask the questions why and what, customer data they’re capturing and think about how the data will translate into marketing insight and actions that create real value for customers.
Organisational agility has never been more vital
Organisations don’t just need to translate data into insight, they need to do it at speed to keep up with rapidly shifting customer preferences and demands. That’s where cross-functional marketing teams with a wide range variety of skills are the foundation of agile sales and marketing operations.
Today’s agile teams need to work at pace from any location and over any time difference. Successful agile organisational cultures connect vision to strategy and in turn, strategy to delivery and experimentation.
The vast majority (82%) of practitioners surveyed observe, understand new and changing customer journeys, frictions, loyalty and retention drivers as well as drivers of purchase. Therefore, to achieve more personalised customer experiences, the right sales and marketing skills are essential.
Unlimited collaboration is vital
Since most customer interactions are done through marketing, it’s the marketer’s job to make sure that every potential prospect or the customer journey is as effective as possible.
Sales and marketing teams that can successfully operationalise rapid decision making and act on customer insights by collaborating with website managers or CIO’s, will be better placed to achieve customer-centric experience innovation and sustain business growth in 2022 and beyond.
The key takeaway from the research is that businesses must fast-track digital change company-wide, or risk falling behind competitors since personalisation at scale is critical to success in the digital age.
Reading / Sources
News: Nine in ten business leaders say customers are now digital first, according to Adobe Digital Trends Report B2B Marketing
2022 Digital Trends Adobe
