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How to Use Martech to Improve Your Relationship Marketing

Posted by Emily Hegland on January 1, 2020

In a noisy digital world, it's more challenging than ever to engage with customers, give them a positive experience and cement a lasting brand-customer relationship. Consumer behavior has changed — and now most customers prefer companies that understand who they are as individuals.

Years ago this would have been nearly an impossible ask. But with the advancements in marketing technology, it takes less time, effort and manpower to understand who your customers are. Read on for three ways marketing technology can help improve your customer relationships.

DATA

Making data-driven decisions has always played an important role in marketing, and today marketers have more opportunity than ever to collect data, analyze and apply data to build stronger customer relationships. Tracking tools like Google Analytics 360 track customer actions on your sites to help better understand who's browsing, what they're looking at and what they want to purchase. Additionally, many apply machine learning and AI to provide insights into your customers so you can make improvements or curate the content your users want to see.

Collecting your customers’ data on your website is one part. But as modern consumers spend so much time online, their digital footprint is larger than ever. It may seem daunting to analyze and break down all this data. However, software like Tableau can help visualize data. A system like Tableau connects to many different databases and platforms, then creates dashboards and visualizations that can help marketers make strategic decisions that will improve customer relationships.

PERSONALIZATION

Once the data is collected and insights are gathered, the next step is to create individualized experiences. This hyper-personalization is key to your ultimate goal: build a more meaningful relationship with each customer.

There are many tools that can deliver a personalized experience to each website visitor. Say your store sells coats. A customer runs a search for "rain coats." You could use dynamic content to have that page display a relevant headline like "Stay Dry," featuring a waterproof rain coat. Meanwhile, another customer that you know based on past purchases lives in a colder climate and tends to purchases parkas and puffer vests. This customer might see a headline that says “Stay Warm,” featuring a down-filled puffer.

Tools like Optimizely, Hubspot, Marketo and many others can help deliver this one-to-one experience for customers. Of course, email personalization has been around for a while, but it has evolved over time. You can target cart-abandoners with specific products, highlight recommendations based on past purchases and even trigger weather-based promotions to certain locations. Many of these marketing automation tools have already implemented AI and machine learning to make this even more effective. 

CONVERSATIONAL MARKETING 

Here's another major evolution in marketing: the way we directly communicate with customers. Customers want answers quickly, so the days of sending them to a call center, sorting through options to find the right department and then speaking with a representative are outdated and over-complicated. Even companies who move to online chat to answer customer questions and build relationships still don’t always connect with them as quickly as people expect.

To remedy this, marketers can now move to conversational marketing that uses AI to ask the customer the right questions, guide them to the right follow-up questions and provide them with answer they are looking for. Tools like Drift and Conversica help guide customers to automatically ask common questions and get answers based on their purchase history, the page they are viewing or even other customers' behavior. This takes upfront analysis and thoughtful planning to ensure you are set to ask the right questions and guide the customers in the right direction, but it ultimately helps you create relationships with your customers at scale.

Are you interested in improving your customer relationships? Reach out to J&C for help developing an exceptional relationship marketing plan.. 

Topics: Digital Marketing, Personalization, Relationship Marketing

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