Maropost recently hosted a customer event in New York City, where some users of our platform sat down to discuss the new approaches they are trying within their customer engagement programs. They shared various marketing challenges they experience in their jobs daily, as well as areas in which they’ve found success. 

Our team learned a lot from our customers during this discussion and wanted to share a few key takeaways. 

Social Media

Social media can be a difficult channel to navigate; many organizations have trouble determining what kind of messages to deliver via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other platforms. Based on our discussion, we found that most of our customers are experimenting with different social sites and using each differently. 

One Maropost customer, in the health industry, previously used Facebook and Instagram solely for awareness; however, they’ve noticed more people converting directly from Facebook, so are leveraging the channel more strategically for moving prospects further in the journey.

Maroposts next customer, a media and publishing company, uses Facebook and Twitter to drive website traffic, while Instagram is more for building an engaged community. The company’s marketing team is starting to explore Snapchat as well, since certain audiences still use it often, and are even looking to get into podcasting. 

Another customer told us that they have decided to have more fun with their social posts, adding value and encouraging people to follow. In sum, depending on target audiences, social platforms serve different purposes, and the best way to find success with social is testing various content to land on what strategy garners the best response. 

MarTech Stacks 

A lot of customers are using multiple solutions for their marketing processes－many using between five and 10 programs, and some using even more than 10. Each provides its own capabilities, making it hard to cut back. Some customers said they were content with leveraging different technologies that serve different purposes, but that it comes with the complexities of consolidating data from all sources and keeping collection consistent. 

Consolidating multiple marketing tools into one comes with several benefits for marketing teams; first and foremost being the efficiency of having all your data in one place. A single view of customer information allows marketers to deliver personalized messages that will resonate most, increasing both acquisition and retention rates. Internal efficiency and a more engaged audience is a win-win for both marketers and their customers.

Our key takeaway: The martech formula that works for your organization isn’t black and white; find a strategy that allows your marketing team to be most efficient, effective and data-driven.  

Metrics 

Another trend we noticed was that marketing teams are wrestling to determine which metrics have the greatest impact on customer experience. Most are measuring email engagement, which is a top source for driving site traffic, but what is the ROI of those efforts? Are those people coming back? Are they making purchases?  

Marketing teams want to determine overall brand engagement, loyalty, and frequency of being top of customers’ minds, and the key to that is engaging the right people. In order to do so, you’ve got to get granular with your data, using metrics like lifetime value (LTV). LTV estimates how much total revenue a customer will generate for you, and is a way to aggregate the data you collect to determine the value of different customer segments. 

One customer mentioned their strategy of assigning unique identifiers to each contact that track engagement, site, and purchase activity of an individual, tying it all together under one record. Marketers can then gain insight into what that activity means and how they can effectively market back to them.   

Our key takeaway: Gold standard marketers do more with data, using past customer behavior and engagement to inform their strategy. 

In-App and Push Messages  

Finally, mobile in-app and push messages were talked about amongst customers. While they can be effective in sending timely promotions or nudges when a customer is near a store location, many are using these two types interchangeably when they in fact serve different purposes.  

Push messages are delivered to someone’s mobile device regardless of whether they are using it, showing an alert in the lock screen. Many companies agreed that push messages work better to mimic emails with breaking news, rather than pushing marketing messages. One customer mentioned a “surround sound” approach, with the same messages in email and push messages for an effective cross-channel strategy.  

Certain communications may not meet the criteria to send to someone’s inbox or directly to their mobile device. In-app messages only appear when a user is within an application. Across the board, customers felt they were not using in-app messaging well, struggling to tie their app to other, more traditional marketing channels. While leveraging in-app messages helps to gather app metrics, marketers are hesitant about throwing everything at people, everywhere they are. Most were aligned that there is a need to understand audiences, and how to uniquely engage them across channels.   

Our key takeaway: In-app messages should be based on actions a user takes within the app to have the most relevancy. 

We had a great conversation with our customers and appreciate everyone who participated in this event. We look forward to hosting more of these conversations in the future.

Have more to add on these or other customer engagement-related topics? We’d love to hear them! Contact us here.   

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