We’re all familiar with omnichannel marketing – ensuring that the customer has a consistent experience across channels. Whether you’re communicating with them via text, email, mobile apps, or elsewhere, customers are told the same story and given the same offers regardless of whether they’re browsing on their desktop in the office or checking their smartphone on the move. Always connected. But is it always relevant?

The cost of consistency

The start of the twenty-first century brought with it an upturn in the use of preference centers, where customers are more likely to opt out of non-relevant engagement channels than opt in to receiving an endless deluge of communications that arrive at inconvenient times.

Alongside this, the cost of targeting multiple channels with the same marketing campaign or offer becomes a commercial burden for businesses.

Picture a customer receiving their end-of-year utilities bill. Year after year, they’ve received cashback due to conservative monthly estimates – a small reward and something the customer’s grown to expect. Suddenly, they’re being asked to pay extra because their energy usage has gone up. The customer is confused and wants to speak to a call center agent right away to try to understand what changed, costing the utility company time, money, and customer satisfaction.

Getting more optimal and less optional

What if, instead, we could predict this behavior and offer an alternative solution. We know that this customer needs a particular level of person-to-person service and that they communicate with the brand regularly. Perhaps we send them an e-bill linked to FAQs or a chatbot to proactively answer their questions more quickly and efficiently. Alternatively, a mobile app would give them access to personalized information at their fingertips, with push notifications flagging increased energy usage well before receiving any surprise bills.

Equally, understanding when, through which channel, and with which device your customer is interacting with your brand can help you build the best customer experience with maximum engagement.

We know that customers’ behaviors and preferences also change over time. Marketing preferences opted into at the start of a business-to-customer relationship might now be outdated and, even though they initially liked receiving emails, they’ve started to bounce or go straight into the trash folder. In certain regions, regulations might also legally limit a brand to only two or three communications per month. A few irrelevant messages can mean a customer won’t fully engage with the brand for months, with 32% likely to stop doing business with a brand altogether after just one negative experience.

What if brands focused their efforts on building a deeper understanding of their customers’ behaviors to identify the actual optimal channel for a particular message at a particular time, both in terms of propensity to engage and return on investment? And what if this information could be accurately predicted or even provided in real-time?

Right place, right time

Identifying the channels your customers use at specific times means developing a marketing strategy that gets the most important messages to the customer at the exact right moment. Meanwhile, less crucial offers and marketing campaigns maintain visibility on slightly lesser-used and more cost-effective channels.

While most marketing automation platforms or standard CDPs unfortunately can’t offer this level of control, NGDATA’s Intelligent Engagement Platform gives businesses true real-time interaction management to reach customers in the most effective way and at exactly the right moment. It allows you to react to split-second behavioral changes and offers precise targeting so that you can invest in the best channels for the customers most likely to convert.

We build target audiences based on any combination of 1000+ industry-specific DNA metrics, meaning that we can create look-a-like models so that we’re constantly evolving with behavioral dynamics. By accurately predicting the next best action, we’re sure to maximize the chances of content being seen and engaged with and help your business’ marketing function work smarter, not harder.

If you want to get more precise with your customer communications, get in touch for a chat today.