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Forbes Agency Council member Matt Ramerman is president at Sinch Engage, a mobile engagement agency focused on personalized mobile marketing and advertising technology for cloud communications company Sinch. Sinch Engage was born out of Vehicle, where Matt was CEO and co-founder. Prior to founding Vehicle, Matt was a principal with one of the largest privately held full-service agencies in the USA working with iconic brands such as AT&T, T-Mobile, HTC, and Microsoft among many others.
A quick Google search for the phrase “our customer is” returns a handful of honorary titles or aphorisms that intend to show respect — such as “king,” “always right,” “our most valuable asset,” and “our first priority.” In the era when companies competed on “faster, better, cheaper,” these sayings were aspirational — and probably rang hollow. If you lost a customer, there’d be others attracted by mass-market advertising. The customer was largely anonymous, someone with whom a merchant would interact when they were making a purchase — and rarely beyond that very moment.
So the idea of customer as king (or queen) — distant royalty treated with largely superficial respect — seems quaint now: you may think you know the queen, but do you really know them? The brand-customer relationship has evolved significantly, mostly because marketers have the potential to know their customers so much better than ever before.
Today, customer experience trumps “faster, better, cheaper” — and customer expectations have increased accordingly, and exponentially. It’s no longer sufficient to know your customer — you have to understand them, too.
What percentage of buying decisions are driven by emotion? Quantifying emotion is at best an inexact science, but there have been some attempts to measure emotion’s impact on spending:
- Reports have shown that up to 95% of purchases are driven by emotion, not logic.
- Customers are opening their wallets to brands with which they have an emotional connection; one survey found 70% of respondents will spend twice as much if they are emotionally engaged with brands, while less than 40% will spend any money at all on a brand if they lack an emotional connection.
- Consumers who are emotionally connected to a brand are worth two times more to a business than the average highly-satisfied customer because emotional campaigns are more profitable.
- Nielsen released a study, which revealed that ads with an above-average emotional response from consumers caused a 23% increase in sales compared to regular advertisements.
What drives a customer’s emotional response? The sense that a brand truly “gets” them — and has the ability to meet a specific need at just the right time. These needs are highly dependent on time and context, but customers are looking for brands that can meet them with authenticity: one study found 86% of consumers feel authenticity is important when deciding which brands to support. It’s critical to create a customer relationship that has both depth and range — customers will see straight through any one-dimensional attempts to make a connection.
Today, there is a convergence of technologies empowering marketers to act on fluctuations in the right moment. That convergence is found in personalized mobile video.
The value of mobile marketing is well understood, as well as the benefits of connecting with a customer through a device that’s always at arm’s length. But video messaging opens the doors to trigger emotions in ways that the 160 characters available in an SMS just can’t manage — while offering the same benefits when it comes to reach, read rates, conversion rates and scalability.
Personalized Video: Emotional Connections and Relevance at Scale
Let’s look at some potential scenarios creating a personalized, relevant experience by melding explicit customer data with implicit analysis:
Triggered by location data and previous purchase history, a customer receives a personalized video suggesting they visit the store right down the street for a special offer that expires in an hour.
With churn analysis that indicates a customer is exhibiting signals they may soon shop elsewhere, a retailer sends a personalized video with highly-compelling offers to come back and buy again.
An update in a CRM system flags that a customer has modified her agreement with a mobile provider, and instantly receives a video highlighting the highly-specific features and benefits of the program they’ve selected.
The process of personalizing videos takes the engagement and emotional connection that messaging offers to new heights, delivering five to eight times the ROI on marketing spend, and lifting sales by 10% according to McKinsey & Company. It’s a very powerful combination to reach and emotionally bond with your audience right now, with highly-relevant video content.
Video brings together two things that capture attention like nothing else: movement and sound — both play a significant role in conveying and simplifying complex messages. These videos are immersive, instantly understood and trigger emotional responses that help deliver on business, marketing and customer service aims like brand loyalty, retention and sales.
The customer as king or queen? Yes, but a potentially benevolent monarch who is open to connection, authenticity and relevance. Today, technology can provide the foundation for the emotional connections customers seek — connections that strengthen by highly-relevant, contextual communications. So the customer remains king or queen, but these royals want brands to understand and meet their needs at any specific moment.
