How loyal are new customers acquired during the pandemic? Not very, according to this Braze survey. While 26% of consumers have tried at least one new brand during the pandemic, their retention rate is 82% lower than customers added during previous non-COVID, non-holiday periods. A whopping 91% said they’ll consider how brands behaved during the pandemic when deciding where to shop in the future.
U.S. marketers are struggling to measure the return on their programmatic advertising investment, according to this Forrester study for MediaMath. While 94% say they try to measure programmatic ROI, just 33% say they can do it completely and accurately. More than half (55%) say privacy rules are restricting programmatic targeting and 45% say new rules are making it harder to maintain scale.
Gong’s Web site is like a direct view into the subconscious of those hyper-enthusiastic sales people who make the rest of us nuts but get the job done. The actual product is AI technology that captures video, phone, email, and face-to-face interactions and extracts insights about people, deals, and market events. It must work: they just raised a $200 million Series D, bringing total funding to $334 million. Did I mention their chatbot is a bulldog?
Twilio is adding ‘contextual awareness’ to its Segment CDP, which in plainer English means data stored in Segment will be available when creating event-triggered, real-time messages. This and a redesigned journey architecture are part of Twilio’s “next generation” customer engagement platform, which also includes natural voice AI agents, voice and text analytics, and RCS and WhatsApp messaging. Twilio separately announced a multi-year partnership with Microsoft to speed the adoption of conversational AI for customer engagement.