Product-led journeys or Customer-led journeys? What’s your pick?
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We feature D2C operators and CRO experts with a story worth sharing.
Rony Vexelman is an experienced, well-rounded B2B marketer who has led initiatives across messaging, go-to-market strategy, marketing analytics, demand generation, marketing automation, sales enablement, and more.
He has worked in global companies from various industries including cybersecurity, martech, and entertainment. He carries the experience of working with many different audiences, understanding their needs, building business cases, and ideating marketing messages that engage and convert.
Rony: A Product marketer works closely with different teams. As a PM, you could be working with the product team, R&D, sales, ideation, and sprint review meetings, to see how would the product that we are trying to build look like in the end. It could be a day full of soul searching trying to communicate what you are trying to communicate. There is no ideal day structure. My personal hack is that I don’t have any notifications on my phone or desktop.
Rony: Optimove is positioned as a multi-channel marketing hub with a strong CDP core. When we were re-branding, the design team came back with this brilliant idea that if we are a company trying to help our customers be data-driven, then why not build something that reminds you of that. Data can be a bit abstract sometimes and it is run by certain rules to be used effectively. So, what is used on our website is an affirmation of an algorithm that uses data and is put into shapes and lines to represent our brand. It is a high-risk move and we get a lot of good feedback around it.
Rony:We work with a lot of large B2C brands. We see that they have a lot of customer data. And, they want to use it to talk to their customers in their customers’ language. Both in B2B and B2C, we have product focused marketing which has got to do with what feature, or software or product needs to be sold. We also have customer-focused marketing which is focused on selling or giving something that my customer needs and is looking for. For us, hyper-personalized marketing means customer-focused marketing. This means to start your marketing from the customer—explore your customer, understand the insights, and create hyper-granular audience segments. Each segment could just have 10, 20, or 50 customers with a database of tens or hundreds of a thousand customers.
To be able to personalize at that granularity, you need to put in a lot of work. To orchestrate journeys for such hyper-granular audience segments, you can work with a tool like Optimove. And if you want to create and show that as a brand you care for your customer, then you have to take this granular hyper-personalization approach. And this allows you to give a very specific message at the right time and to the right person.
Rony: Let’s answer ‘why customer-led journeys’ by first answering ‘why not marketer-led journeys’. In marketer-led journeys, you are locking the customer into what you think is ideal for them and not ‘what is ideal for them’. In a customer-led approach you let the customer choose the path and what they want by creating granular moments that meet their needs. AI can create these moments instead of the marketer. All this is considered a broken journey.
But, it is different in cached journeys. In this scenario you could be activating parallel journeys that can crossfire and dilute the customer experience.
Rony: It is the ability to mix different data points. You need to be able to figure out what are the data points that should be used and work. And, data points should be transactional. Also add some predictive data points and metrics which could be risk of churn, probability to convert, or future value of the customer. You need to be able to combine all of them together to be able to create the secret sauce of personalization.
We see how our users are using the product and based on that we trigger campaigns. Look at how the features or capabilities would be used by users or customers at different stages of their own development. The user who came in yesterday would be different from the one who has been with you for one year. This is user lifecycle management. When you repeat it and test it, iterate it and prove it, you end up having a hyper-personalized marketing strategy.
Rony: It begins with understanding what is the state of mind of the recipient of the message. Once you understand the theory of the user, you become a lot more empathetic to them. You should be using your own platform to be able to create great personalization experiences. And, a lot of it is about having the emotional intelligence and understanding what your customer needs at that moment. Personalization is not about letting the person know that you know about them, but it is to be able to give in what they want. And, that’s where emotional intelligence comes into place. It is about understanding the pain that your customer has and helping them solve it.
Rony: No silver bullet answer. The right moment has nothing to do with the size of the company. We have a lot of customers and want to use a platform from day-1 and others who are around for many years and want to scale with personalization. It is about the mindset that says, “I want to do better for my customers.” It is about knowing your customers well to be able to create great campaigns. You need to look at whether or not you are doing personalization across channels and if you are doing connected personalization.
"Hyper-personalized marketing means customer-focused marketing"
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ronyvexelman/#/