We all want to give our loved o… customers, I mean customers – the best, most personal, holistic experience. And, when we talk business, if we do it in an effective and efficient manner – all the better.
So, while personalization at scale is an incredibly crucial basic requirement in order to achieve this, it’s far from being enough. Because HOW DO YOU SCALE PERSONALIZATION? After all, no marketer, no matter how dedicated, brilliant, hard-working, and innovative, can manually design ALL THE POSSIBLE customer journeys that a true personalization at scale requires.
Luckily, there is a solution. It’s called technology. Better yet, it’s called AI. And it can take care of all the realtime prioritization, exclusion, and overall orchestration that your CRM marketing needs in order to go to the next level. That way, the brilliant marketer we just mentioned can focus on the things brilliant marketers are great at – crafting all those fantastic campaigns and messages, define channel mix, build relevant offers, write engaging copy, and everything in between. You know, all the things people can do better than machines. The AI will then make sure the best message reaches the right customer, at the right time, and through the right channel.
We call it AI-mapped CRM journeys. And it’s at the heart of the next-gen CRM tech that would deliver highly personalized communications across all customer touchpoints, and boost your customer lifetime value.
Being able to orchestrate marketing communications is a must when you try to significantly improve your CRM Marketing. You ensure customers receive a unified experience accounting for all interactions and behaviors with the brand – irrespective of the channel the campaign will be delivered by. That’s the dream.
But, while journey mapping and prioritization-and-exclusion methodologies allow you to tailor customer experiences for customer segments, marketers that are using these approaches face two difficulties.
The first is that these don’t scale well, as managing an increasing number of segments becomes an impossible task.
The second is that while you create customer journeys for each customer segment, you cannot create different journeys for each individual customer. The journeys are therefore mapped out based on the average or ideal customer within each segment.
Solving this difficulty starts by trusting AI algorithms that scale efforts towards personalized customer communications and experiences.
Optimove’s Self-Optimizing Journeys adapt to each customer’s unique characteristics and behaviors, effectively allowing customers to lead their own journeys.
Optimove’s Self-Optimizing Journeys – How it Works
The more segmented the customer base is, the more personalized communications are available, which increases the likelihood that a single customer will be eligible to receive more than one campaign on a given day.
Self-Optimizing Journeys identify all the campaigns each customer is eligible for and evaluate all journey possibilities, response probabilities, and potential impact on customer lifetime value, to determine and serve the next-best-campaign for each customer.
Relying on AI allows you to focus on what you do best – crafting campaigns, ideating new customer segments, and developing customer relationships. Compared to manually prioritized campaigns, marketers who’ve implemented Optimove’s Self-Optimizing Journeys saw a 37.4X increase in uplift per customer.
Additionally, balancing between the various orchestration methodologies in the customer journey mix is significantly impactful.
Self-Optimizing Journeys vs. Manual Prioritization and Exclusion
Marketers who choose prioritization and Exclusion as an orchestration methodology may find it difficult to determine the precise priority of each campaign – per customer. Let’s look at customers who are eligible to receive the following three campaigns on the same day:
A birthday campaign
Day-three of a welcome series
A cross-sell campaign
Typically, using prioritization and exclusion rules, marketers will try to determine which of these campaigns will result in a higher response, and thus increase CLTV.
For example, you might decide that the birthday campaign should be set to a higher priority, excluding customers from receiving the other two campaigns. However, although the birthday campaign may be best for specific customers, it’s not best for all customers.
As a result, you pay the price of generalization by setting the birthday campaign to the highest priority. In other words, missing out on the improved results and engagement from customers who would have preferred to receive the cross-sell campaign, for example.
AI-mapped journeys such as the ones created by Self-Optimizing Journeys autonomously prioritize campaigns for each customer by identifying which campaign will have the highest impact on each customer on an individual level. Doing so promises that the customer receives the ultimate, personalized experience on the way to maximizing CLTV.
Optimove Orchestration Approaches
Below are a few guidelines for when to use each orchestration methodology:
Message frequency and capping – as a rule of thumb, you should monitor message frequency and capping to ensure customers aren’t developing messaging fatigue.
Journey mapping – mapping out customer journeys is a great way to visualize the possible decision points customers may have along a time delimited journey, such as an abandoned cart sequence or a welcome series.
Prioritization and Exclusion – when it comes to non-time delimited retention marketing, you should assign priorities to the 10-20 campaigns that are critical from an emotional intelligence or brand-identity standpoint and ad-hoc campaigns revolving around special or important occasions.
Incorporating Orchestration Methodologies with AI
When dealing with hundreds or thousands of different segments and non-time delimited campaigns, assigning a priority accurately to each campaign is very hard. Therefore, you must allow an algorithm to prioritize all the campaigns that you did not manually prioritize.
At Optimove, we recommend blending the different methodologies to create the ultimate customer experience while maximizing CLTV and developing brand identity. And let AI do the rest.
Gabriella Laster is Product Marketing Manager at Optimove, responsible for prospect marketing and product messaging. Gabriella holds a B.A. in International Relations and English Literature and an Executive MBA from Hebrew University.
