Takeaways from Braze’s 2021 Global Customer Engagement Review
Customer engagement is on the minds of most marketers this year. After a year of upheaval, digital innovation, and necessary shopping adaptation by cooped up people around the world, brands are now reconciling how the pandemic has permanently altered the consumer landscape. In the Braze 2021 Global Customer Engagement Review, the customer engagement platform argues convincingly that mobile’s post-pandemic influence on eCommerce requires most brands to rethink their channel communications.
As the report notes, “Ace” brands–those organizations that combine a sophisticated martech stack with integrated teams that encourage collaboration between marketing and mobile app stakeholders “commit to deeper levels of personalization” including real-time 1:1 mobile messages. In fact, 83% of Ace brands use APIs to activate the most up-to-date personalization.
Personalization is just one factor in creating the new customer experience. In their introduction, Braze states that customer engagement is “the secret weapon that differentiates exceptional, enduring companies.” Brands around the world know the power of Movable Ink’s integration with Braze, and those organizations are now prepared for an evolution in customer experience.
Prioritizing and Investing in Customer Engagement
Even though the pandemic has subsided in many areas of the world, COVID-19’s impact on mobile shopping and eCommerce is likely permanent. Brands must now retool their customer engagement strategy to reach consumers across multiple channels, including email and mobile. According to Braze, 48% of tenured companies and almost 40% of new, mostly digital organizations see customer engagement as their top investment opportunity in 2021.
Customer expectations are growing, but many brands are still struggling to define success when building strategies to reshape their marketing to the new digital landscape. The report states that “only 26% of marketing leaders say their firms have a shared, company-wide definition of success when it comes to the customer engagement plans.” Yet the best brands know exactly how important engagement and personalization is. Those brands that rated their customer engagement as “excellent” also exceeded revenue goals at a higher rate than brands that rated their practices as “good” or “fair/poor.”
Building a Collaborative Environment
One place Braze identified as a growth opportunity for even the best brands is cross-team collaboration. A brand’s mobile app is often owned by product while marketers are responsible for mobile messages, personalization, and customer engagement. Braze found that only 12% of Ace companies had a “dedicated cross-functional digital team.” Unlike email, which is often solely owned by marketing, mobile apps require higher levels of communication across teams that don’t often work together.
That lack of communication hinders innovation and experimentation, causing the mobile channel to remain stagnant. Though a driver of revenue and better customer journeys, personalization is often lost when brands struggle to communicate. Personalization and “customer engagement (are) a company-wide initiative,” Braze writes. “Messages originating from different parts of the organization throughout the customer journey can lead to disjointed experiences.”
Creating a more personal journey
Customers engage with brands more when marketing is personalized to their needs, the information is up-to-date, and mobile messages are built with empathy. Braze places a special emphasis on API-driven, real-time data. Only 10% of brands use APIs to create real-time personalization, presenting unique opportunities for organizations willing to invest the time and resources to create sophisticated mobile messages that display up to the second information.
One brand Braze works with saw a 39% repeat purchase rate when deploying personalized product recommendations. Mobile messages are a valuable commodity–especially when people have to opt-in to notifications–but consumers do not want to be inundated with spammy notifications that have little to do with their unique interests. Marketers can utilize real-time, data-driven personalization to send the right message, at the right time, every time.
Want to know more about how Movable Ink can personalize your customer engagement? Request a free demo today.