Marketing Analytics and automation for BFSI

Segment of One -Building Streaming Audience Engagement Analytics for customer lifecycle engagement automation

The future of Audience Engagement – Real Time – Real World “Segment of One”

How is Customer engagement defined in new digital world?

• Customer engagement today has new meaning – it needs to be renamed as Life Cycle Engagement because it’s about engaging the audience, even before they have become a customer – Infact it is about engaging the audience the moment he steps into your customer life cycle journey. This would mean engaging the audience even in anonymous state of suspect or a prospect
• Till Now the audience and their behaviour was tracked from the moment they became a customer – Because till then they are anonymous or unidentified state and were dropping out before becoming a customer.  It was not possible to collect and tag behavioral data at an individual level.
• From a marketing point of view the entire effort – driven through the conversion funnels are Inwardly skewed towards 80- 90% drop outs before they even become a customer
• Using technology to improve performance & delivery is just not enough – its all about increasing experiences – keeping Delivery & performance as constant

More visitors or more customers?

While most businesses, may be facing a host of operational, logistical challenges; there is a key area that everybody is either consciously ignoring or not giving a serious thought to is about conversions.

The facts and trends today seem to be going in the wrong directions.

• Conversion rates of Digitally enabled marketing processes is less than 5 %
• Over 90% of visitors on a website are anonymous
• Focus on social and Mobile is not necessarily yielding conversions
• Customer acquisition costs are mostly on an increasing trend
• Customer loyalty through digital mediums is not even worth mentioning
• ROI’s on digital spends are not necessarily as positive as previous quarters

The above facts may point to a direction that the digital trends are bound to get broken or effect stagnation. Needless to say that most ecommerce and online marketing businesses are facing the profitability challenges.

While most of the digital marketing efforts today are focused at driving visitors to the site or carefully orchestrated inbound marketing efforts, which increases the traffic on the site, but every website today suffers from a congenial paralysis of what to do or how to lead a visitor or customer when they are to their site.

Radical thinking or technologies of engaging visitors – (Yes even though many might be anonymous) is an idea that not many are experimenting or involving themselves with currently.

One way to look at the problem is to flip the problem upside down, which would mean broadening the bottom end of the conversion funnel rather the top end   

Multi Channel Tracking and Measurement for Advertisers

Plumb5 for Advertisers from Weir Endra

Solving the Unsolved Challenges in E-commerce & Digital Marketing

Solving the unsolved challenges in E- commerce & Digital Marketing from Pavan kumar

Customer Centric Digital Marketing

In today’s new age economy, more and more businesses are driven by digital commerce, as traditional and new businesses are leveraging the web as a channel to sell their products & services. Most businesses, small or big, whether they like it or not, has witnessed the rise of the new digital consumer, especially the ones that have tried to harness technology and leverage on the power of digital consumer web or e commerce.

Online marketing still seems to be largely disconnected from the customer, in spite of the fact that social web, mobile web and other web apps have become an ever-bigger part of the online experience. However, many have not recognized its importance or are still trying to figure it out or just trying to avoid or bypass them altogether in the context of their short term priorities.

The Invisible Customer

The Invisible Customer

The invisible Customer on your website:

The conversion funnel has been the holy grail of many Digital marketers till date, wherein usually about 3- 7% of the total visitors to the site actually convert, leading to the question what happens to the remaining 90+ %?

The reasons for the drop outs attributed are either as bounces, dropouts, casual window shoppers, price checkers or just about anybody else who was never interested in your product. It is in somewhere in this 90+ % visitors that brings to light the concept of “invisible customers”.

Real Time Marketing

Discover The Power of Crowdsourcing

Real Time Analytics And Engagement For Real E- Commerce

In the era of global uncertainty and depressed world economy, one sector has seen some impressive growth trends – Its e-commerce!
Global e-commerce sales reached $1.1 trillion in 2012, up 21.9% from $893.33 billion in 2011. While North America continued to claim most of those sales. Forecasts indicate that in 2013, total e-commerce sales worldwide will grow 19.3% year over year to reach $1.3 trillion. China drives most of Asia-Pacific’s e-commerce growth, and is poised to surpass Japan to become the world’s second-largest e-commerce market after the United States this year. India’s E commerce on the other hand, was worth about $14 billion in 2012, and has close to 10 million online shoppers and this number is growing at an estimated 30 percent.

Real Time Analytics – A Discoverer’s Opportunity

Most businesses today are Reactive – They react only after the customer has placed an order, after the stock price has fallen, after the customer discovered a bug , After Customer has complained, After customer has dropped out , stopped a payment

Most often, either it’s too late or one has too little options and space to manoeuvre or salvage the situation. This type of “Kick me now” syndrome and is witnessed commonly in most organizations.

How is analytics related to this?

What Online Customer Wants?

Online shopping is the only phenomenon that has bucked the trend of recession and weak economic outlook in many countries. This phenomenon might have started in late 90’s, after a few and brief anxious moments, its been on a roll; because nearly a trillion dollars were spent by online shoppers just last year; Surprisingly that’s just about 30% of the potential – wonder what’s more to come. E-commerce has no doubt evolved tremendously over the last decade or so; it has transcended through most of the product, services and commodities categories, so much so that today there are more choices available to user than a traditional super market or hyper market.
While it is clear that the basic fundamentals of product variety and brand experience stay at the heart of buying and selling online, But its the evolution of the new era of customer experience that has increased the online shoppers funnel from just $ 50 Mn to $1Tn Dollars in the last 10 years. Online shoppers have no doubt adapted themselves over the years, and while a lot of things might have changed in the e-commerce context, but a lot of things that remain unsaid in every customer experience survey and research. Being an online shopper myself, I would like to put the context of customer experience in three stages viz:

Making Sense of Online Marketing in Real Time

There are about 2.5 bn people online, less than one fifth of them shop online regularly but they account for nearly $1 Trillion of sales a year, that’s up by almost 21.9% compared to last year (2011). According to one estimate 70% of the retail sales are influenced online, and this is also applicable to people who don’t buy online. That’s a phenomenal raise, in spite of the weak economic outlook in many countries. US itself accounted for about $226 Bn of online sales followed by countries like china.

Needless to say consumers today are spending more time online. They are not just buying, but are also comparing prices and researching about products and brands. Marketers are not unaware of these facts, and are going all out to woo the customers. And while digital marketers, are trying to increase their effectiveness and reach with their data driven processes, techniques and tools; But many of them are still struggling and because they are unable to converting leads to sales or reduce the shopping cart abandons (Typical shopping cart abandons range from 65% to 80% –abandonment rate)

Social Media Rules of Engagement – Part 2

While the best practices for utilizing Social Media will continue to evolve, some multi-million-dollar marketing budgets will be challenged and undermined by simple consumer. It is expected that consumers will use Social Media to exert more influence over marketing organizations and business decisions in the next coming years. The most impactful functions of any business being marketing and Innovation – Marketers and Product managers would be the most impacted and effected with the raise of Social media. The impact could be positive or negative depending upon the way the organizations accept it.
Many organizations are now beginning to understand the impact and realities of social media, For starters organizations now understand that its not about technology, its about being human! and providing human experiences. Social media presents so much potential for new ideas, innovations and Progressions, and also if enabled wisely, social media can play multiple and complementing roles for the consumer viz it can play the roles of :

Social Media Rules of Engagement – Part 1

The power of Social Media has indeed excited a lot of marketers today and it has emerged as new way to communicate, share, collaborate, learn, make friends , have fun, party together or being together in solidarity just like in real world socializing ! except that this socialization is across the world wide web – it has the scale and volumes that were never imaginable – it has capabilities and potential to sync and organize itself into powerful groups, communities and eco systems that can influence Technology, economy, events, politics and just about anything that affects people. In the years to come, the power of social media would be anything but more influential.

Social Brand Equity – Every Brand Needs to Earn It

The Traditional Marketing basics tell us that the inherent trait of a brand is to stand apart in a crowd and invoke aspiration, positive associations and good word of mouth while in the process also create some natural brand assets like consumer loyalty, good recall, value & persona associations, price premium, etc. While in a real time marketplace where every product is competing for market share and consumer eyeballs at the shelf space level, a distinctive brand that stands apart does garner some attention among its consumers and once it does that it eliminates the fear of unknown thereby making them feel comfortable with the brand.

The DNA of a Social Group

The Building Blocks

The building block of a group begins with the creation of purpose. This purpose provides the direction and defines its core. By default the nature of the social groups is to spread or grow of its own kind ( especially the ones with a purpose) . Autonomy & purpose are the core traits or the nucleus of the group, the concept of  growth and Sharing form the Double helix of their DNA and their basic building blocks/ bases that genetic code is defined by their

Social Groups – The Origin of a New Species

Social Groups – the origin of a New Species

A new phenomenon called social networking has caught up with the world in as recent as last 5-6 years. It has caught the fancy of a ever agile marketing professional looking for an opportunity and reason to sell more of his products and services as well. No doubt Social media is growing fast, it has large no of users, Progressive minded individuals available in a single place (the web); who are sharing serious and non serious conversations, opinions, apps, videos, pictures, insights and knowledge.  Maybe marketers today are induced into this exciting phenomenon with the ever reliable technology of smart tracking tools, browsers, social platforms, Analytics, CRM tools and some great opportunity tags fixed on the foreheads of social media.