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DECIDE.
Unless you’re a football fan like I am, the name Vince Lombardi might not be familiar to you, and you might not know that he used to be the head coach of the Green Bay Packers, one of the original teams in the US professional National Football League. In addition to being a winning coach, Lombardi is famous for his many colorful quotes, witticisms such as, “If you’re not fired with enthusiasm, you’ll be fired with enthusiasm” and “Once you learn to quit, it becomes a habit.”
Personally, my all-time favorite Lombardi quote is this one: “The measure of who you are is what you do with what you have.” Isn’t that the goal of marketing as a discipline? Doesn’t is sum up what marketing is all about – to make the best out of what you have?
Marketing isn’t about “putting lipstick on a pig.” It’s about “putting your best foot forward” and taking the greatest advantage of each and every chance you have to interact with your individual customer.
So, if you’re ready for real time marketing (because you know who your individual customers are and you know what journeys they are on), then it’s time for you to face the third truth of real-time customer engagement:
If you can’t decide which of your offers are most appropriate, you can’t expect your customer to do it for you.
I know that sounds good on paper, but how does it work in the real-world? How, exactly, can you decide which offers to extend?
Great question… and if your answer is “just give them everything and let them decide,” you’re not trying hard enough in this relationship. Remember: This is about leveraging individualized insights. What’s the point of understanding the customers you’re interacting with and knowing what journey they are on if you’re not going to make some really strategic decisions around which specific offers you want to extend to this particular customer? This when you prove your ability to engage with connected consumers – on their terms, on their journeys, in their moments of need.
Granted, deciding which offers are the most appropriate will require making some difficult decisions, and you’ll have to make those decisions quickly. That means you simply cannot resort to human intervention. It simply won’t scale as elastically as needed. Instead, you’ll need modern analytics tools, like automated decisioning technology that’s lightning-fast and capable of making determinations based on a number of different rules and attributes.
Keep in mind where we started this conversation a few weeks ago, with the notion that “not all customers are created equal.” The opportunity that exists at this moment may be very specific to this customer, and there’s nothing worse than a self-inflicted marketing blunder. If you extend the wrong offer, you may lose your chance with this customer. If you extend too large of an incentive to the wrong customer at the wrong time, you may lose margin on the transaction unnecessarily. Plus, you can’t expect your customers to weed through a litany of poorly targeted offers hoping to find one that resonates. These days, your approach can’t be based solely on the results of an A/B (challenger/champion) test. As the old adage tells us, “You may never get a second chance to make a first impression.”
Therefore, whatever real-time decisioning engine you select needs to be able to arbitrate potential messages/offers based on the strategy to be applied to this customer, specific offer qualification/eligibility rules, statistical likelihood of offer acceptance and overall business impact. That way, you’ll know that you’re not only selecting the best offer(s) for each customer, but that you’re also selecting the ones that make the most business sense as well.
Read the first post in this series: The Four Essential Truths Of Real-Time Customer Engagement
Read Truth #1: The Four Essential Truths Of Real-Time Customer Engagement: The First Truth
Read Truth #2: The Four Essential Truths Of Real-Time Customer Engagement: The Second Truth
The post The Four Essential Truths Of Real-Time Customer Engagement: The Third Truth appeared first on Teradata Applications.