Customer experience will be a key theme for brands in 2017, especially to stop the rise of ad blockers, set to grow by 24 percent in the US alone this year. Programmatic marketing offers several solutions to improve customer experience across channels, devices and the buying process. We took a look at several of these solutions in a whitepaper MediaMath France recently produced called “Enhance consumer experience with programmatic.” Below is an overview of each.
1. Adopting an omnichannel strategy
An omnichannel marketing strategy allows marketers to design a coherent messaging on all marketing channels (display, video, mobile, social). Brands can take into consideration a consumer’s interaction on a channel to adapt their strategy on other channels to create more relevant and consistent messaging.
An example of how it improves customer experience: A skippable video a consumer views in its entirety is a strong signal that they are interested in what you are advertising. Make use of this data by retargeting this user on display with a very engaging message to trigger a purchase.
2. Clarifying data usage
A study conducted by the Harvard Business Review shows that consumers react very positively when they understand why they have been behaviorally targeted. Being upfront about how data is collected and used goes a long way to building consumer trust.
An example of how it improves customer experience: Initiatives like the AdChoices icon in EMEA help consumers to regain control over the use of their data.
3. Building connections between advertising (adtech) and marketing technologies (martech)
In most brands’ organizations, media teams use adtech (such as DMPs and DSPs) and focus solely on prospecting, while CRM teams use martech (e-mails and CRM tools) and focus on existing clients. Most of the time, these two teams do not collaborate with each other and perceive the same consumer as two different people, creating inconsistencies in the messaging. To tackle this issue, adtech and martech providers have developed connections between their technologies to help marketers obtain a unified view of users.
An example of how it improves customer experience: Advertisers will be able to better monitor their frequency capping by excluding from their display campaigns users who have not interacted with e-mails they received a few days earlier.
4. Onboarding CRM data on digital
CRM data is a gold mine for advertisers, yet it is rarely used on digital campaigns and often leveraged only for e-mails. The past few years have seen the development of “CRM onboarding” technologies that help bring this data to bear through a strict anonymization process—across all marketing channels. Advertisers can now distinguish their customers from their prospects and, thus, improve the consistency of their messaging.
An example of how it improves customer experience: Advertisers can exclude their customers from their prospecting campaigns and instead suggest an upselling offer better suited to that audience’s expectations.
5. Segmenting users depending on their engagement with the brand
By segmenting their audiences with a DMP, depending on where their consumers are in the purchase funnel, marketers can address the changing behaviors of their users so they can target them as they evolve.
An example of how it improves customer experience:
- Creation of an audience that has never interacted with the brand and exclusion of users who have already visited the brand’s website —> using a generic creative.
- Creation of an audience of users who have visited the brand’s website between two and five times in the last 30 days —> using a product-oriented creative.
- Creation of an audience of users who have visited a product page more than twice in the last three days, without converting —> using a creative offering a discount for this product.
6. Using cross-device identification technologies
The development of new identity management technologies enables marketers to identify the same consumer regardless of browsers and devices (desktop, tablet, mobile), allowing them to follow the user throughout the purchase funnel.
An example of how it improves customer experience: Brands can better monitor their frequency capping across devices. Marketers can exclude from their mobile campaigns users who have already been exposed to ads several times on their desktop (without interacting), thus limiting the repetition of the same messages over and over across devices.
7. Using non-intrusive formats
For a long time, marketers have overused rich media formats and favored short-term KPIs like click-through rate, contributing to consumers’ disengagement with advertising experiences.
An example of how it improves customer experience: Explore native formats that are better integrated with the publisher’s content and overall look and feel. Focus on true business KPIs like ROI instead of shallow, proxy metrics.