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

What is the basis of New Age Customer engagement in today’s Digital world?

• In today’s digital context, its all about making the Audience life cycle journey simpler and making your conversion funnel optimized. So that your dropout rates across the stages are controlled and managed in an effective way. Leading to lower Acquisition costs and Higher ROI on your marketing campaigns.
• However, the most important basis of engagement starts with identifying and tracking audience as Segment of One – which would mean that as a marketer – you treat your audience as an individual to understands and respond to a specific needs – rather than treating them as a group of audience depicting similar traits
• The third most important basis of new age engagement is about engaging in real time or with lowest time lag.

What is this segment of one Approach?:

• Segment of One is a behavioral stack and unlike the customer stack can be tracked right from the moment the visitor is on your site or storefront – even if the visitor is in anonymous state.
• It is also about keeping all the behavioral data associated with a customer at one single place this includes the behaviour across channels – be it web, offline, mobile, email, social, phone or SMS behaviours all tagged as one entity.
• Segment of one is also about building on to this behavioral stack of preferences, transactions, behaviours throughout the life cycle of the customer

What are the benefits of Segment of One Engagement marketing?

Segment of Engagement would mean providing the right content, at the right place , in the right context, at the right time and through right medium to :

• Decrease the Audience effort – or making it incredibly simple to become your customer
• To increase the customer experience & Delight –
• To Improve the funnel conversion rate
• To make the customer move to the next stage of the funnel faster.
• To Automate the content & Messaging
• To maintain consistency and sync across messaging channels

What are the use cases of Segment of One Engagement marketing?

Segment of one throws open a host of opportunities for creative communications and marketing folks because it involves increase in conversion through know the audience at an individual level. Some of the use cases being

• Eg. 1 : Imagine you are walking across a book store and you get a message on your phone saying that the book you were looking at on our site 3 days ago is now also available at our store 400 ft away.
• Eg. 2: Imaging you are visiting a site for the first time – the site starts recommending products and services – basis on the products pages seen by you till now and even throws in a limited time offer – to ensure you convert immediately
• Eg. 3: Imagine you are visiting a site on your birthday or anniversary day and the website recognises your visit and changes the homepage banner to wish you, welcome you and even reward you
• Eg. 4: Imagine that you have dropped out of shopping cart from a site – and that instant – you get a message on your browser saying – a special coupon of 20% off is available exclusively for you

• Eg. 5 : Imagine – you walk into your favourite fast food outlet and the store front display screen welcomes you for coming back – it even places your regular order even before you reached the order counter
• Eg. 6: Imagine – you have gone to an online jewellery store and the website Recommends you the designs & brands; that perfectly fits into your budget range – basis your answers on a survey taken few visits ago or basis the price of products / brands you are currently looking
• Eg. 7: Imagine you visit your online apparel store after 2-3 months – and the home page of the site addresses you as “ Hi ……………….., Welcome back, we missed you since last 40 days”
• Eg.8: Imagine you reach a site from search engine – using a keyword – “best cab service” and the home page of the website you reached says – “your search for the best cab service ends here”

Similarly there can be millions of use cases that can achieve high level engagement at a one to one level in real time – which can not only enhance the audience experience but also make them move to the next stage of the conversion cycle faster and in more confident manner.

What are the requirements of a Segment of One Engagement?

Segment Of One engagement Marketing has 4 minimum requirements

• Segment of One behavioral Stack– Which is Knowing everything about the audience behaviour throughout their journey at a single point
• Creating and enabling an engagement Strategy : Enabling a seamless content strategy that addresses the segment of One audience needs
• Effective and contextual Content: Highly simple and effective content that helps the audience take the next step
• Fastest or real time Delivery of Content & Messaging: Faster the relevance- faster the result . Real Time – is the most optimal time

This would mean – knowing everything about the behaviour of the audience / person – in front of you (be it on web, storefront, mobile, email, social, phone) and using this data to trigger messaging & personalization’s in real time depending upon the state or lifecycle or situation associated with the person

How does this next generation of “Segment of One” engagement mean for today’s marketers & Advertisers?

The segment of one approach would mean:

• Fundamentally recognizing every audience as a customer – even if he is in anonymous state and recognizing them as individuals and not as part of a segment.
• Radical Shift in Hit & Hope model of Marketing and moving towards engaging audience at the doorstep of conversion rather than delivering or driving traffic to the doorsteps of a website or a storefront. It would also mean that Marketers would allocate more of their spends in effectively engaging with audiences & customers.
• Most importantly it would mean reducing your marketing funnel conversion time, funnel conversion rates and also bridging the gaps between a marketer and a potential customer
• It would also mean High ROI and effectiveness for your regular campaigns as well as engagement campaigns
• Needless to say , its really an exciting opportunity to build dynamic content and messaging for the behavioral stack or segment of One stack across Audience touch points.

For Any questions feel free to reach out to me at pavank@decisive.in or Hear Me live at Global Advertising & Marketing Week 2015 – Click here for more details