Data-driven NBO Marketing of the future
The conventional Customer Journey in the digital change
In the age of digitization, customer communication based exclusively on the conventional customer journey (customer acquisition, retention, churn) is no longer suitable. Due to the increase in online channels (e.g. social media, interactive videos, apps), touchpoints between customer and brand have multiplied. In addition, the customer increasingly interacts via several touchpoints in parallel. He searches via Google, informs himself on the website, posts in social networks and uses the service hotline for questions. Meanwhile he demands for an individualized and need-oriented dialogue at any time and on any communication channel. As a commodity customer communication is expected to be fast, simple, relevant and omnichannel-enabled.
Individualized + context-specific + automated = NBO Marketing
The so called “Next Best Offer” Marketing (NBO) is the answer to meeting these customer expectations and demands. NBO represents a personalized customer dialogue including the right information at the right time with the right content via the right channel covering a need-oriented product/service delivery and/or the suitable digital advertising (e.g. text, image, video). Its crucial success factor is the individualized mapping of communication channel, medium as well as content, tonality, title and timing to a specific customer.
To enable an individualized and need-oriented customer communication, it is crucial to identify buying patterns as well as products and services the customer typically demands for – even beyond company borders. Therefor all customer-related information needs to be gathered, merged, consolidated and stored (preferably on a central platform) across the relevant touchpoints. A comprehensive analysis of historic customer interaction data, CRM data and any other available information (e.g. purchasing power, creditworthiness) results into the “Single Customer View”, meaning a holistic view of the individual customer, his behavior and needs. Thereby the respective data analysis can be rather simple (e.g. manual segmentation, unidimensional filter logic) or – as in the case of personalized campaigns – highly complex (e.g. self-learning algorithms).
Based upon these analysis results NBO measures are derived and automatically implemented by means of so-called “activity triggers”. For example, if a customer indicates a residential removal, a removal-specific offer can be triggered. Complex analysis algorithms can furthermore tailor the offer to the customer by promoting only those products for which the customer has proved a high purchase probability.
A successfully implemented NBO platform is not only applicable for a campaign-based marketing approach, but also integrates all communication from and to the customer. Analytically derived NBOs with corresponding content can be generated using the an integrated data platform (“Customer Interaction Hub”). This enables a personalized communication for simple service requests, campaigns and digital advertising to be addressed and processed towards the customer. In order to efficiently monitor the performance of the NBO Marketing implementation, it is crucial to apply an automatized monitoring and reporting process via the platform.
Opportunities and Challenges of the new Customer Dialogue
By implementing a customized and automatized NBO Marketing, companies significantly increase their customer satisfaction and proactively prevent churn activities. Satisfied customers are loyal and less price-sensitive, whereby companies are enabled to exploit sales potentials via price premiums. Furthermore, NBO Marketing improves the lead management process and leads to a significant increase in conversion rates. Prospects are effectively processed through the lead funnel towards closing. Cross-departmental offers realize cross- and up-selling potentials. Furthermore, opportunities of NBO Marketing are not only limited to the customer-facing perspective. The automated marketing process even realizes savings in time as well as marketing and service costs. Employees are enabled to focus on crucial moments within the customer dialogue while the adequate operation of self-services realizes further efficiency benefits.
In summary, the NBO Marketing potential can be exploited to its extent if the following requirements are met:
- Design of a Single Customer View based on the respective data (sourcing) strategy
- Development of a „Customer Interaction Hub“ integrating all relevant communication channels
- Implementation of an analytical infrastructure for data enrichment
- Involvement of creative departments into the campaign development process
- Implementation of an integrated campaign monitoring system for systematic monitoring of campaign performance