Personalization and In-the-moment messaging for B2C Marketers

In this Research NXT Interview, the CEO of WebEngage, Avlesh Singh, talks about how brands can engage with customers using personalized and in-the-moment content. He ordains out how a single view of customers and personalized messages can help B2C marketing teams compete and win in this digital age.

In conversation with Research NXT, Avlesh sketches the transformation of consumer engagement marketing tactics and an influx of marketing technologies in it over time. With customer centricity taking center stage in the marketing landscape, Avlesh’s expert inputs are certainly insightful for the new age marketers.

Key takeaways from this Research NXT interview:

  • A lowdown on the evolution of B2C consumer engagement.
  • The edge and impact of marketing automation in B2C marketing.
  • And, what’s new at WebEngage

Avlesh’s views on customizing direct messages and how it helps B2C marketers amplify their reach:

Avlesh, to set the context, how has consumer engagement evolved over the last few years, and what do you attribute the evolution to?

Avlesh: To understand this, we would need to look back into history and understand how marketers perceived marketing automation as a tactic. It was always about leads, and it worked well in the B2B scenario. However, for B2C marketers, that was not the case as the consumer engagement model here is way different. Unfortunately, this reality was only noticed very recently when the B2C consumer engagement landscape started getting consolidated, and the strategies around it were taking shape.

With the shortage of dedicated marketing automation options for B2C marketers, they started investing in point solutions like bulk email blasting services, push-notification, and standalone analytics services. The brand engagements with this set up were non-uniform across channels and devices, and the dire need for one-stop platforms was felt. Everyone started looking out for solutions that could provide a unified view of the customers across multiple touchpoints.

Hence, the most significant evolution was consumer brands starting with solutions designed for B2B marketing automation, moving to B2C point solutions, to eventually to multichannel single user platforms like a Customer Data Platform for more targeted and qualified connects.

Could you give us a sneak-peek into any upcoming exciting projects at WebEngage that you’d like to share with our readers?

Avlesh: Yes, we are working on something exciting, and we will launch that in our upcoming event EngageMint. It’s a very different take on engagement and an extension of what WebEngage has built already that would address more business use cases in the B2C space.

Since thousands of people use our platform every day to activate, engage, and retain their users, it led us to a unique perspective on how teams across different industries accomplished their goals using our marketing automation dashboard. While 58% of all campaigns are sent on an ad-hoc basis, only as little as 26% are sent using automated journeys even though automated journeys get better engagement, improve campaign effectiveness, and team efficiency.

We saw a dire need to automate these critical, highly repetitive use-case and hence are developing a workflow engine that helps brands automate communication with consumers based on business events (Business Events are actions that take place in a business that impacts the end-consumer experience). With it, marketers would be able to automate personalized campaigns. Product managers could automatically send new feature/app updates, and developers would be able to outsource all kinds of product communication to WebEngage. More on this in our upcoming EngageMint event in Dubai next month.

What is your goal with the research study on the GCC market that you are conducting with Research NXT and how do you think the report is going to help achieve that goal?

Avlesh: GCC is a fast-growing market and has some early adopters of the WebEngage suite. Marketing technology enablement in the region is still at the scaling stage, which demands the right mix of marketing talent with sound technical skillsets and the right vision around consumer engagement. So, with this study, we aim to close the gaps in terms of understanding of consumer engagement, retention, and available enablement technologies. More importantly, we would like marketers in the GCC to refer to this study as a benchmark report while measuring and creating consumer engagement strategies until we come up with the next version.

Thank you, Avlesh, for sharing your thoughts. We hope to talk to you again soon.