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Thought Leadership

Interactive Marketing and the Customer Experience

Marketers have relied on the traditional tactics of campaign-based marketing for years. Even as technology and changes in the practice have evolved, marketers still use campaigns as the impetus for customer communications.

Campaign-based marketing takes a lot of time, effort and money, but doesn’t give you the results deserved for all the work you put into it. This is due to one reason: campaign-based marketing is product-centric, not customer-centric. Deploying campaigns based on static, slow moving information, hoping your content will somehow match a percentage of the people you are sending it to, just doesn’t cut it anymore. With campaign-based marketing, you don’t know which customers need intervening, who has visited the website, or who wants to interact but weren’t able to. You are not sure who to up- or cross-sell to, who already has certain products/services, who has become inactive, or who is really a happy, satisfied customer.

If you want your marketing to bring real results, you need to know your customers.

The way customers want to interact is no longer through impersonal campaigns, but through more relevant conversations. The more you know about your customers, the more on-target your messaging, timing and context will be when you interactive them them, and vice versa. You can gain greater results when you work with more detailed and dynamic information on each individual customer, rather than treating people as members of broad segments at a single point in time.

Interactive, conversational marketing creates a two-way dialogue between you and your customers. You open the door for imperative inbound conversations that your customers can take advantage of through all of your communication channels. These “always on” inbound channels allow for more opportunities to interact with customers. When a customer takes the time to interact with your company, they want to know that their needs are being heard and addressed. Because of this, you must be at the ready to impress your customers at every inbound opportunity, or else risk losing them and the valuable business they bring your company. Whether they land on your website, dial into your call center, or interact via email or social media, you need to make sure that every interaction with your customers is relevant so that each experience is maximized.

The measure of success is all about the customer—satisfaction, profitability, retention, and advocacy. Understanding customers and the elements that go into their decision-making is a direct correlation to increasing loyalty and revenue, and above all, the customer experience.