Personalizing Email (and Websites) Can Drive Customer Engagement and Loyalty - A Case Study with Soma Water
In this article, Mark Johnson of Loyalty360 draws our attention to a case study involving Soma Water - which eschewed traditional email blasts by implementing technologies to support customer insight processing and tailored/targeted email activities at a very personalized level. It requires enormous amounts of work to write the right content; it takes a lot of technology to process the data; but in the end, the ability to create highly personalized experiences, customer journeys of one, are helping Soma Water win over loyalty, bloggers and more. The Guiding Star team buys into this - with a website-based technology for mobile devices that we use called QRomium.
The Far Side of Customer Loyalty - "The Invested Customer"
Jim Tierney of Loyalty360 reports on an interview with InMoment CEO John Sperry, who offered some really intriguing thoughts about the differences between customer service, customer experience and customer loyalty, and who speculates on customer investment. Says Sperry, "Customers want to have very different relationships with companies than in the past, one that may be something beyond even loyalty. They want to engage with brands. They want to talk and listen. They want to help companies improve and to be more successful. They crave authentic, reciprocal interactions. We're moving beyond the empowered customer to the invested customer."
Remember, every interaction impacts your brand. Act appropriately.
Consumers not feeling "Well Known" in most business relationships
Personalization of customer experiences - in fact, personalization of anything - is becoming more an expectation rather than a nice option. It's a long given in sales, even in this time of the "Zero Moment of Truth". And for digital experiences, we live in a time with big data that really should enable token efforts towards personalization on the web. There is a problem, obviously, given the survey results reported within. Part of the problem is knowing how to integrate big data in the enterprise - how, for example, do you integrate your CRM's information about a client with your web analytics' data about browsing behaviour, and then roll that all up, in nanoseconds, into a website that is personalized for you and your interests. It remains a problem we must solve; but some web vendors appear to be making some headway. Some of this as well is tied up in a loyalty program - and we should be thinking more about these, intelligently designed, as we lurch forward into a brave new world of integrated technology and "segments of one".
