Capability: Marketing Solutions

Level up your digital marketing

Posted on: 24 June 2021
Level up your digital marketing

How exactly should you innovate, be super-creative AND maintain quality and consistency, to meet surging consumer expectations?

Orchestrating multi-channel digital campaigns is an intense business. To keep up with consumer expectations for personalisation, you’ll no doubt be working with a range of customer personas across many customer journeys, aiming to deliver the most engaging experiences across all the channels you command.

In practice, that means a very large – and ever-growing – volume of content hitting down every day, landing in inboxes, on social platforms and on websites, through chat and media services. Your campaign deliverables are being viewed, shared and discussed. Consumers are seeing your propositions across multiple channels and pursuing their journeys from one campaign to another.

Creativity and constraint are uneasy bedfellows

With all this activity going on, you need to keep consumers’ attention and interest, but you also need to portray one brand across multiple channels. There’s a fine balance to achieve between creative expression and brand consistency. The same content works differently in different media: optimisation is key to make sure your customers and prospects have a friction-free experience, with no glitches or rough edges that could undermine your brand values.

Our creative optimisation team knows all about staying agile and alert to all the pitfalls and challenges of high-volume, multi-channel, multi-brand campaign design and execution. Achieving flawless delivery for our clients demands a systematic approach, as well as a finger on the pulse of the latest creative trends and smart design. Here’s an example of the details they consider for every variant of every email campaign before it goes out:

  • Is it mobile-first?
  • Are the fonts optimised?
  • Are images formatted in the right resolution?
  • Are the images sized to display immediately, without a lag?
  • Will the headers avoid spam labelling?
  • Is the pre-text correctly formatted?
  • Is the call to action in the first screen?
  • Does the branding comply with corporate guidelines?
  • Is the recipient greeting correctly personalised?
  • Are all the legally mandated elements present?

You have to automate for control when there’s so much going on

There’s nothing magical about these criteria – they’re well-known best practice for campaign execution. The challenge here is applying them consistently, across every single item that goes out. Our template management platform, Email Studio, is a crucial tool to make this happen: you need the power of automation for quality control when you’re dealing with such high volumes. Email Studio spots and flags any inconsistencies, missing elements or poorly rendered content so they can be corrected before anything goes out.

Blink and you’ll miss it – the rules and formats keep on changing

When they’re designing individual campaign items from scratch, your formidable creative team will always come up with the goods. Issues tend to creep in when you seek to drive the most value from the content by using it across multiple channels and formats.

It’s just not as simple as sharing a TV ad on YouTube and posting the link on Instagram. Video and sound formats need to be checked and re-optimised for different platforms. Character counts and post formats vary. Distorted images and inappropriately cropped thumbnails are quickly called out by digital audiences used to high standards.

And of course, new channels are constantly emerging to form part of your customers’ journeys. You need to disseminate your content into them quickly – with a whole host of new parameters and conventions to apply. You need to know what will work best in each medium, how audiences are engaging with the latest content and what cumulative effect you’re creating from your multi-channel presentation.

Can you supply matching luggage for every single journey?

We often talk about matching luggage – you need strong, consistent branding and intelligent optimisation of your creative content across every item, however differently it might be sized, shaped or used. The goal is that whatever combination of luggage your consumers pick up for their journey, they’ll have a great experience with their own coherent set.

Keeping on top of all this change and variety is intense. You need to be plugged in to rapidly evolving trends and tech. You need to be able to update your campaign templates and executions fast. You need to keep ahead of competitors who are striving just as hard to deliver compelling customer journeys to the same target audience.

You can do it… but you’ll need to be thorough, eagle-eyed and ever vigilant. That’s why many clients choose to use specialist customer engagement campaign automation tools, resources and consultants to support, build, maintain and continuously improve their creative campaign execution operation.

At CACI, we’re dedicated digital marketing campaign experts, working every day with leading marketing organisations. It’s our business to know the latest best practices, consumer trends and emerging technologies… and to share them with you. Get in touch if we can help.

Adobe Campaign Classic 8 and Adobe Workfront – Sometimes it’s the Little Things

Posted on: 26 May 2021
Adobe Campaign Classic 8 and Adobe Workfront – Sometimes it’s the Little Things

CACI is an Adobe partner with experience of implementing, optimising and running Adobe’s Experience Cloud for our clients. We’ve been following the developments in Adobe’s product development and will be sharing our insights here. In this post, David Moore shares his view of the integration between Adobe Workfront and the new version of Adobe Campaign.

Watching the introduction to Adobe Campaign Classic 8 in this year’s Adobe Summit I was taken by JJ Haglund’s top 10 innovations. Sitting at number 10 was the “close integration with Adobe Workfront”, a product Adobe acquired in 2020. It sparked an immediate interest. Why? Let’s go on a journey.

Marketing is no longer the free for all it was. You can no longer sell Snake Oil and get away with it (apart from hi-fi industry see footnote *). Especially in the UK, marketing is now closely regulated and in certain verticals such as financial services, energy, telecoms there are external bodies who have the authority to audit a company’s marketing and apply fines if they find inappropriate marketing practices.

As such for any marketing campaign, organisations in these sectors, must have an audit trail for a campaign including the assets that makes up that campaign and the audiences selected to receive the campaign. For example, in the retail finance sector the principles of the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) include explicit and implicit guidance on the fair treatment of customers. This fair treatment defines six consumer outcomes that firms should strive to achieve. Three of these are: –

  • Products and services marketed and sold in the retail market are designed to meet the needs of identified consumer groups and are targeted accordingly.
  • Consumers are provided with clear information and are kept appropriately informed before, during and after the point of sale.
  • Where consumers receive advice, the advice is suitable and takes account of their circumstances.

So, the selection criteria for customers to be included in an email, SMS, DM, outbound or push marketing campaign needs to include a justification for the selection of the audience, including sign-off, to be recorded for audit purposes.

Also, all the assets chosen for a campaign such as the images and copy need to go through an audited approval process, passing through both the marketing management and legal teams to ensure that customers are being treated fairly. Every sign-off needs to be recorded in case the FCA come knocking and pick on some campaigns to audit. Also, we must remember that a campaign is not just email/SMS/push/DM, but also billboards, TV, YouTube, social media, radio, off the page. All the assets making up the overall campaign, across all distribution channels, need to go through the same process.

So, I’m really excited about Adobe Workfront integration into Adobe Campaign. For our regulated customers (and regulation across the marketing industry is only set to increase) Adobe Campaign and Adobe Workfront looks like a real winner. I’d certainly have ranked it higher than 10. And if you also have Adobe Experience Manager then Workfront integrates with that as well ensuring all assets have been built, reviewed, and tagged appropriately.

An interesting story. I was involved in a pitch to a large regional financial services organisation. We were invited to pitch the two best marcomms tools (Adobe Campaign and Unica) at the time, our presentation was to cover both the campaign management and asset audit management capabilities of the tools. At the time Adobe excelled in Campaign Management but was flawed in Asset Management, Unica was also good in Campaign Management (though poor in delivery integration) and we thought was OK in Asset Management but not a class leader. Which won?

Neither. Unica came close but could not handle radio, TV and social media assets. The company went purely with an audit asset management tool and to my knowledge have still to buy a campaign management tool.

(* cables that are directional: Really?)

If you are considering what the announcements from Adobe Summit mean for your business, please get in touch and we can arrange an initial consultation to help.

What can the water sector learn from other sectors to improve customer experience?

Posted on: 5 May 2021
What can the water sector learn from other sectors to improve customer experience?

Identity Resolution, customer segmentation, and real-time multi-channel communication tools have the ability to surprise and delight water customers in the UK. What can be learnt from the success of other sectors?

The dreaded “Beast from the East” of February and March 2018 left over 200,000 consumers in England and Wales with little or no water and resulted in OFWAT releasing their “Out in the Cold” report – measures and requirements to prevent something like this from ever happening again.

Then, Covid hit. When whispers of a distant virus first circulated in the UK, I don’t think anyone truly anticipated just how serious it would be. Over a year into it, everyone is still trying to make sense of the changing consumer habits and how household and non-household consumption will change moving forward. Regardless of anyone’s opinions on how the future might look, one thing is clear – demand is high.

If you’re not familiar with the nuances of demand forecasting or operations for the water sector, you may be thinking “well of course demand is high, everyone is at home”. However, the consequences of this are much more far reaching – from consumers completely changing peak usage as a result of later waking times due to mass non-commuting, to children not being at school during an unseasonably hot Spring in 2020, causing paddling pools to be filled across the nation. This caused a big headache for many departments within the water sector – such as diverting water supplies to meet demand for those at the extremes of reservoir distance, adjusting pressure times for household consumption, and massive concerns about the size of pipes being too small to deliver the demand of water at peak times.

One thing was clear, water companies needed to ask consumers to consider how much water they were using. Nothing as extreme as a hose pipe ban was required (yet)…but considering not filling up your paddling pool every day, not having a bath every evening because you’re in lockdown or reconsidering whether the car needs to be washed every. single. day.

CACI is in the fortuitous position where we work across multiple sectors with the sole focus of enabling organisations to “do amazing things with data”. So, what can the water sector learn from other sectors to enhance their communication with their own customers – not only improving engagement, but ensuring consumers are contacted in channels that appeal to them.

If I was the Director of Customer Engagement at a water company, what would I do?

By following the four below points you’ll be enabling your organisation to trust that you’re speaking to the right customer, with messages that resonate with them, via the right channel.

MAKE SURE MY CUSTOMER DATA IS IN ORDER

If I look at myself, I have multiple email addresses, my surname is frequently misspelt (thanks Rob Brydon), I have two mobile phones with different numbers, even my postal address frequently appears incorrect on certain address look-up providers, which means I’m sometimes on edge as to which of the three incorrect addresses my parcel will be sent to (thank god I live in a little village with a local postie)! Data can get messy. With customer data stored in disparate databases, customer engagement/customer services are often the teams that get the brunt of customer frustration.

Typically, you’ll find a customer who’s disgruntled needing to phone a call centre to complain, to then be asked for their non-sensical account number (which often needs to be found on a letter or via an online account – a whole other kettle of fish trying to log in there), to then be directed to a different team, to then be put on hold. It’s a sure way to reduce C-SAT scores and irritate your customers – probably escalating that complaint and making it harder to resolve.

Now, imagine a world where you can link all customer data and ensure that it’s correct. So, if a customer phones into a call centre with a complaint you’re able to quickly and effectively go to one customer record, with all their contact history. That would improve their experience immediately!

The ability to connect online and offline data in real-time already exists. So, this problem could be a distant memory. Read all about it here.

BE PREPARED IN AN EMERGENCY

If the past has shown anything, having the ability to communicate to customers in real-time across channels is vitally important. The great news? There is already tonnes of technology out there to enable you to do this. Imagine the water supply is being cut off in an area due to a burst main. Well how about if you could:

  • Immediately send out a text or email to all residents affected
  • Provide them an update once the issue has been resolved and direct them to an information hub if they need any further details
  • Send them a letter/email 7 days later apologising for the disruption and informing them of customer service information should there be any further problems.

That’s just in an emergency, imagine if you could set up customer journeys for all sorts of other reasons, e.g planned engineering works, hose pipe bans etc – rather than the typical letter consumers receive.

All this technology exists in the market already and is used very successfully for marketing campaigns. The utilities sector is pretty unique in the requirement to contact customers in these situations – why not take advantage of this powerful technology?

MAKE SURE YOU HAVE THE TOOLS TO COMMUNICATE THROUGH CHANNELS THAT APPEAL TO THEM

Emergency communication is one thing, but consumers are expecting you to provide them with interesting content. We’re already working with lots of water companies to understand financially vulnerable customers and providing the tools to inform them of social eligibility tariffs, for example, but a key area is understanding what channels a consumer is going to respond to, and having the campaign tools in house to deliver this content.

Customer journeys are used widely within sectors such as auto, retail and leisure – there is no reason why the water sector shouldn’t also embrace this to drive engagement (and increase the C-MEX and C-SAT scores).

David Sealey from CACI, interviewed Gareth Ballard from Braze in April last year, and it’s definitely worth a watch if you’re looking to form human connections with your customers.

MAKE SURE I REALLY UNDERSTAND MY CUSTOMERS AND THEIR NEEDS

We talk about this all the time at CACI – segmentation is our bread and butter. I can’t re-iterate enough – understanding your customers is so important. How would you feel if you received a letter asking you to stop watering your garden so much in a lockdown when you’re in the top floor flat in 30 degrees with no access to outside space? Not great.

Trying to encourage behavioural change can be supported further when we add attitudinal information to a rich demographic segmentation. Lessons can be learnt from EDF’s Smart Meter Roll Out programme, where CACI built out attitudes to understand the drivers for people to get a smart meter, and then built an integrated communication journey to encourage change.

How could this work for the water sector? Well, perhaps something like the below:

  • Creative One (Environmental Families): Content around family activities to encourage water saving.
  • Creative Two (Frugal Flat Owners): Content around the money individuals can save around the home by engaging with their water provider, e.g free toilet flushing water savers + a water meter
  • Creative Three (Nosey Neighbours): Use demand metrics to say how much water a neighbourhood is using vs another within the area – or simply provide a number of free water saving equipment delivered within the area to encourage uptake.

Does any of this resonate? I’m very happy to talk you through any of the above as part of an Art of the Possible session and bring in Subject Matter Experts to really drive forward your customer experience. Just get in touch and I can set up a 45-minute session with you today.

Five challenges of personalised marketing

Posted on: 10 August 2020
Five challenges of personalised marketing

PERSONALISATION IS A CHALLENGING TOPIC

Some organisations just don’t get it. How do you change things at your company?

Almost two thirds of consumers expect to receive personalised offers as standard and 63% of consumers would stop using companies who provide poor personalisation. Effective personalisation presents a huge opportunity for marketers who can master it. The rewards are potentially great. But so are the risks of delivering it badly.

Marketers are finding it harder than ever to reach and convert consumers across channels. So smarter targeted messaging is an absolute must to connect with customers.

Working with clients in a wide range of sectors, we’ve been helping marketers crack the conundrum. The most successful organisations are combining a range of technologies and expertise in data, campaign management and channels to achieve impactful results.

Typically, we find there are five main challenges to overcome in creating an effective and sustainable personalisation model that can continually adapt to changing customer needs.

  1. MULTIPLE VIEWS OF THE CUSTOMER

    Customer data is typically acquired over time and is kept in different repositories and formats. Multi-channel personalisation requires a complete and accurate 360 degree view of every customer. Identifying, matching, cleaning and integrating diverse records and information is a complex challenge.

  2. SEPARATE TOOLS AND CHANNELS

    Enterprise businesses currently use up to 91 different marketing cloud services. Marketing technology (even when it comes from a single vendor) is hard to connect, because different tools have their own unique data models and capabilities. To provide a personalised, seamless, omnichannel experience, tools need to work in harmony.

  3. DISCONNECTED DATA

    Many customers are willing to provide more data, if they can see that it’s being used to their advantage to provide more relevant communication. Around the organisation, there’s demand for different insights at different times, so teams collect new data from a range of sources to meet a particular need. It’s hard to funnel this relentless deluge of new data into the mix and making it accessible immediately, to match current behaviour and preferences.

  4. SILOED DECISIONS

    Communication decisions may be made by a number of different teams – from customer services, marketing and sales to IT and operations. Customers receive communications from several platforms – they can be contradictory and repetitive. This undermines the whole purpose of personalisation, creating an impression that your organisation doesn’t understand the customer and places little value on quality. To compound the problem, feedback from different campaigns isn’t built back into a central knowledge base. Effective personalisation strategies avoid this by using automation to combine technology and decision-making.

  5. OPERATIONAL INEFFICIENCY

    Collectively, customer engagement teams aren’t productive because they’re underusing the technology in the business. That’s typically either because of its inherent complexity or a lack of training. Through a single personalisation platform, you can integrate all your campaign and communications systems into a single marketing stack that gives more power and insight to everyone.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

We’ve partnered with Braze, Tealium and Snowflake to combine world-class technologies that create a powerful, user-friendly platform capable of high-volume delivery of sophisticated, personalised campaigns.

CACI’s Customer Personalisation Platform empowers marketers to model and deliver incisive and high-impact personalised campaigns. Our experts help clients customise and deploy it to start delivering ROI quickly.

An interview with Braze: Keeping customers engaged in 2020

Posted on: 20 April 2020

In the latest instalment of our Next Digital Decade series, David Sealey interviews Gareth Ballard, Vice President of Sales at Braze. They discuss the transformational changes that have occurred in marketing over the past ten years and how CMOs can harness these changes to drive the most value for their business over the next decade. Watch the full interview below.

Gareth explores how the exponential increase in technology over the last decade has dramatically changed the way that customers can interact with brands and what this means for your organisation.

“EACH TOUCHPOINT INCREASES YOUR CUSTOMER DATA, CREATING AN OPPORTUNITY TO INTERACT WITH YOUR CUSTOMERS IN A MORE MEANINGFUL AND HIGHLY PERSONALISED WAY”

He also discusses the trends that marketers should be leaving behind and those that marketers should be taking advantage of to retain their customer base, especially AI and machine learning.

“TECHNOLOGY SHOULD BECOME A CANVAS FOR CREATIVITY; NOT A LIMITER”

Braze recently published a report on how media streaming services have experienced a sudden increase in customers throughout March due to the amount of people who are now spending more time at home. These brands are utilising AI to predict their customers choices to work towards retaining these customers by impressing them with their customer experience so that they are not lost once this period passes.

Gareth gives his advice for how marketers can drive value this decade by stepping away from old techniques like batch and blast:

“MARKETERS NEED TO PUT THE EXPERIENCE ARCHITECTURE FIRST AND FOCUS LESS ON THE CHANNEL OR CAMPAIGN”

Gareth highlights the campaign that stands out in his mind as putting customer experience first – the Burger King Whopper Detour. Watch the video of this campaign to view how Burger King brought together a marketing stack, including Braze, to create this newsworthy campaign in the US!

If you haven’t yet caught up on our Next Digital Decade series, you can find part one here, where CACI’s Faye Dinnen discusses how digital marketing has evolved in the past decade.

In part two, we were joined by CACI’s Jon Ede, where we discussed how you can make the most of your marketing technology.

Coming up in our Next Digital Decade series, David will be sitting down with our Partner in Data Strategy, Ed Sewell.