The formula for great customer engagement is using the right medium to send the right message to the right person at the right time. So your customer engagement platform should allow you to do just that.
This article will explain exactly what you’ll need your platform to deliver, which features you can do without, and what you’ll need to enjoy the customer engagement success that your business deserves.
Let’s dive straight into it!
Advanced segmentation
Make sure you can send your campaigns to the right customers instead of being limited by poor segmentation.
As Forbes succinctly puts it: “In the last few years, we’ve seen a huge shift in customer expectations.”
Segmentation is vital to a successful customer engagement strategy. Unfortunately, many platforms will only offer you two choices when it comes to segmentation: matching all your chosen criteria or any of your criteria.
This might not seem too limiting until you want to target two different sets of customer with one message. If you recall our example campaign, we needed to target both CFOs and Finance Directors.
Simple all/any segmentation won’t let you send a message to both of these groups, so you would have to set up two identical campaigns for each job title. But or segmentation means you can target customers with the job title of CFO or Finance Director with a single campaign, saving you both time and costs.
You’ll also want to make sure that you can segment your customers through engagement itself. For example, you might want to send a message to customers who have recently viewed a particular web page.
A lot of platforms will tell you if customers have ever viewed that page or if they have viewed it a number of times. But a customer who viewed a page five years ago is very different to a customer who viewed it yesterday. Look for a platform that instead gives you that recency data so you can speak to engaged and disengaged customers in the relevant way.
Focused channel messaging
Make sure your chosen platform doesn’t offer channels that are irrelevant to subscription-based businesses like yours.
Platforms that support channels such as social media or SMS aren’t just charging you for channels you don’t need. They’re also investing time and resources into those channels, meaning the features you do need won’t be serviced or updated as regularly as you might want.
Instead, make sure your platform offers focused multi-channel engagement via email and in-app messaging – the two channels you really need.
In-app messaging offers context-aware messaging.
You know what your customer is doing and can deliver a message that’s relevant and targeted to their current behaviour. As they’re likely at their desk and working, it’s a perfect time to ask them to take action.
For off-site messaging, emails are superior to any other channel.
They’re sent directly to the customer, with no algorithms in the way. That makes email perfect for directing customers back to your site or re-engaging customers.
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Easy to use
Look for platforms that make it easy to build messaging sequences without code or complicated setup.
If you want to send a message to customers a day after they view a particular web page, for example, some platforms require you to set up complex events and insert code into your website. They make it easy to make a mistake that breaks your entire automation sequence.
Instead, choose a platform that makes setup and configuration easy and straightforward. This will not only mean your automations work properly, but it will also let you focus on making your sequences as refined and engaging as possible, rather than worrying about getting a line of code right.
Analysis
It’s important to review the data from your engagements to not only make sure they’re working, but to help you build even better engagements in the future. So you’ll need a platform that makes it easy to view and understand your engagement data in real-time.
Waiting for a tech team to run reports or using a platform that can only show data that’s days old will hamper your ability to make swift changes when needed. A platform that offers real-time feedback gives you the information you need when you need it, and means you can adjust and improve your engagement campaigns on your terms and in your timeframe.
Does it work with your existing tools?
Now that we understand the importance of good data quality thanks to lesson three, we know that your customer engagement platform needs to work with your existing services. A customer engagement platform that doesn’t integrate with your Customer Data Platform (CDP) will result in two sets of data for your customers that don’t match, and your messages will become irrelevant and disengaging.
So look for a customer engagement platform that offers integration with your existing services, or one that will help you integrate them so that they work together seamlessly.
It’s time to Engage
It might seem like finding a platform that can do all of these things is a tall order, but we can say with certainty that such a platform exists.
We created Engage to help subscription-based businesses like yours implement everything you’ve learnt in this course and delight your customers, retain your customers, and acquire new customers through the power of customer engagement.
Find out how Engage can help you boost customer engagement by booking your personalised demo today.
