When planning the customer journey, chances are you’re never going to be able to predict everything that a customer encounters along the way. It’s a problem that is impossible to solve manually, and that only gets worse as you scale.
The good news is that with advancements in technology, marketers are getting pretty close to solving the ultimate CRM challenge.
This is how we do it.
Harmonizing Human and Machine
One way to approach the challenge is by allowing marketers to focus on setting the framework and developing the ideas, creatives, and messages that trigger an emotion (and thus set the customer into action). In other words, to send out a very specific, personal message to a customer who is in a specific state of mind/point on their customer journey.
Imagine a birthday campaign, a “30 days since last purchase” campaign, etc.
The next step would be connecting all those possible actions into journeys. And that’s already beyond human capabilities. Because, who’s to say which customer should go where on their next step? We cannot connect the entire puzzle, of all the possible moves/migrations, draw the possible lines, and build endless journeys.
What helps in connecting those lines is Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI).
ML and AI can dictate the best message for every customer at every state, every time, so that marketers can do what humans do best – evoke emotions.
Self-Optimizing Journeys (SOJ)
Optimove’s smart, AI-driven engine has been designed to encourage customer migration (from one lifecycle stage to another – for example, from “new” to “active,” or from “churn” to “reactivated”) towards maximum lifetime value (LTV) by identifying the best-campaign for each customer at any time. The one that will most likely encourage the customer to make an action that will move them to the best lifecycle stage (according to predictive future value metrics.)
And so, when a customer is eligible to receive more than one email campaign or promotion simultaneously, the SOJ will decide as to which one to prioritize and send out – which is something no human marketer can do, let alone in realtime and at scale.
These campaigns have the testing built into them from the get-go: they constantly compare between several competing actions for every touchpoint and aim to deliver the most relevant and effective message for each customer at that moment in time.
But to take full advantage of self-optimizing journeys, marketers need a robust engineering foundation to really make smart decisioning.
Optidata
Optimove’s next-gen realtime customer data platform (CDP), Optidata, seamlessly combines Batch Processing (via Snowflake – the main database that runs Optimove) with a state-of-the-art Event Streaming framework
It leverages each framework and technology to do what it does best and achieve what you ultimately want. And, as a result, brands can seamlessly share all the up-to-date unified data with any internal system, leverage it to enhance proprietary models, or access it to create any desired custom attribute. It’s what enables the AI to map CRM journeys and the personalization-at-scale that comes along with it.
Optidata actually spans across the entire spectrum of the CDP Tech Stack, as shown below:
Conquering the CRM Challenge with AI-Powered SOJ
Optimove’s CDP provides a persistent single customer profile for marketers, serving as the foundation for insight discovery, customer segmentation, and multi-channel campaign orchestration.
To unite all your campaigns and the different systems you use in your organization to send them, you need to take advantage of all the wonders that ML and AI offer.
Only then can you greet every customer with the right message at the right time and, as a marketer, focus on the fun human things, like emotions and stuff.
