The essential customer marketing playbook for 2024 & beyond

The customer marketing landscape is undergoing a seismic shift. Fueled by the rise of artificial intelligence, stricter privacy regulations, and tightening budgets, brands are forced to rethink their traditional engagement strategies. Adding to the challenge is a public that has become overloaded and weary of constant solicitations. (According to Pew Research Center, over half of email users distrust email due to spam.) 

To overcome these hurdles, brands must cultivate genuine connections – a feat reliant on personalized dialogues, not generic blasts.

This guide explores how consumer brands can navigate this evolving frontier. We'll delve into innovative strategies that leverage AI, navigate privacy regulations, and build meaningful connections with customers in a hyper-competitive landscape. We’ll also consider the tools and platforms needed to empower these strategies. 

Establish an evolving dialogue

For consumer brands, the key lies in fostering a meaningful dialogue with customers that evolves as the relationship deepens. (That's what customer relationship management is all about, after all.) 

One of the best ways to keep your campaigns both relevant and effective is to segment your audience by lifestage and engagement level. Focusing on the life stage allows you to customize the programs to address the needs of the customer based on their tenure.

When you’re speaking with a “prospect” (a new user who has never purchased), the focus will be on educational elements, such as the benefits of your product, how it works, and what other customers say about it.  

Once they make their first purchase and become an “active customer,” you’ll focus on ensuring satisfaction, encouraging repeat purchasing, and acknowledging and rewarding milestones to engender loyalty.  

Done right, your most loyal customers will become “advocates” who refer other customers to your brand. And, while you’ll work to keep folks loyal for as long as possible, it’s crucial to also segment for “lapsed customers” by tracking declining purchases, website visits, and communications engagement (email click-through, open rates, etc.).

For these customers, you’ll want to develop re-engagement programs based on what you know about their preferences and past behavior. For example, for those customer at the highest risk of completely churning out you’ll want to deploy your richest offer.

Importantly, each of these lifestages should receive different communications with different content, cadences, and objectives.  

Managing all that can be a tall order unless you have a CDP that allows for the creation of segments based on multiple data points. The good news is that once those data points are established, it becomes relatively easy to maintain those segments. 

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Then, the segments themselves become a helpful tool to monitor the health of your customer base by tracking the growth of your most valuable and most engaged segments as a percent of your overall customer base.      

Mobilize data to truly understand your customers

A common internet meme highlights the pitfalls of using data without understanding your customer. It shows two people with identical demographic profiles: men born in 1948, raised in the UK, wealthy, twice-married, and residing in castles. 

However, when their photos identify them as King Charles and rocker  Ozzy Osbourne, you realize how uninformed you can be if you don’t push beyond surface data.

Understanding your customer requires leveraging all the data you can muster. This includes sales history, website and app activity, category preferences, and engagement level. 

But you likely have additional data that is custom to your business.  For example, if you are in the pet space, the type, breed, and age of your customer’s pets are all invaluable data points.  If you’re in the coffee business, understanding whether a customer prefers cold brew, pour over, or espresso is critical to creating a customized experience.  

Armed with these datapoints, you’ll be able to create clusters that will make your programs sing to each and every customer because you’ll be playing their song (“Whether it be “God Save the King” or “Crazy Train”).

This is where AI can help in a couple of ways. First of all, AI tools can analyze all of this data with greater efficiency and depth than previously possible without a large data team. This allows you to uncover hidden patterns and identify nuanced segments that traditional methods might miss. Secondly, once these clusters are established, generative AI can modify text for each segment, working off your original copy but tweaking for each audience variation.

“Understanding your customer requires leveraging all the data you can muster. This includes sales history, website and app activity, category preferences, and engagement level.”

A crucial aspect of this strategy is ensuring that all data is collected in a single Customer Data Warehouse (CDW) or Cloud Data Platform. This will ensure that your data is as complete as possible, and that it can be structured for easy downstream manipulation. With this CDW at your disposal, you’ll be empowered to both define the right segments and customize the content to create a true 1:1 dialogue.

Speak to your customers wherever they are

Multi-channel marketing is not just about using the many channels at your disposal. It is about orchestrating a 1:1 conversation that is consistent across all those channels.  

If your emails to a customer focus on purchasing winter clothing, your push notifications are asking them to refer a friend, and your Facebook ads are offering 15% off the new spring clothing line, your customer is going to be confused, overwhelmed, or both.  

What’s worse, you’ll have missed an opportunity to make a more impactful connection with that customer by delivering a consistent message across all the touchpoints they’re engaging with.

Multichannel marketing also ensures that no channel will be a single point of failure.  If someone misses your email, the SMS the next day will get their attention.  And if they don’t have time to respond to the text at that moment, the follow-up remarketing ads on Instagram or YouTube will serve as a third reminder.    

New research suggests the "seven-touchpoint rule" for customer purchases might be an underestimate.  So, leveraging multiple channels to accelerate the cycle makes good sense. 

This strategy can become particularly efficient when you stack your lower-cost channels (such as email and push) ahead of your more expensive remarketing channels, such as paid social or video ads. 

If you can manage all of these channels through a single CDP, and if that CDP is empowered with real-time data, you’ll be able to set up segmentation rules that suppress anyone who purchased from the email from the next day’s paid media ads. 

Personalize the customer experience

Personalized communications have been the goal of every good CRM solution for the past 20 years.  And yet, many brands fall back on the blast email approach, largely because it provides a quick hit by reaching out to your entire base with a single message (usually an aggressive offer.) 

However, that benefit is likely only a near-term win, and in the long run will burn out your customer base and undermine your communications program.

Instead, the best-of-breed brands, those that have a true 1:1 dialog with their customers, make certain that their campaigns are relevant to each and every user by deploying several personalization tactics from their marketing arsenal.

1. Product recommendations

Surfacing the right product when your customer is ready to purchase is a prime way to demonstrate that you understand their wants and needs.

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It makes their shopping experience feel intuitive and drives both near-term conversion and future engagement with your communications, ultimately leading to repeat purchasing. And with the growth of generative AI, the presentation can also be enhanced, highlighting not just the right product, but also why it is being recommended.  

2. Targeted offers

Your customers are not all alike, and your offers to them shouldn’t be either.  Customer A will respond best to a free gift-with-purchase, while Customer B is best engaged with a price discount (even if the offer value is the same in both cases).

Equally important is the fact that customers have different potential value to you, and so your offer should vary to maximize that value. Predictive AI can help you thread that needle by scoring each customer for likelihood to purchase and estimated LTV. 

This allows you to deploy the right offer to each customer, saving your richest offers for those customers with the highest potential value.

3. Customized content

Having the right data is only half the battle. The real unlock is to weave that data throughout your communications. Next-level marketers are baking dynamic content into each and every communication.  

A leading dog subscription service, for example, structures much of their communications around their customer’s dogs, creating headlines and copy blocks that dynamically insert the dog’s name, breed, and even playstyle and food preferences. 

While this would have required custom coding in every email a few years ago, some CDPs are leveraging AI so that marketers can define what they want in plain English within their copy blocks, with the custom data coding handled dynamically on the backend.

Automated journeys on steroids

With the right triggers set up throughout the customer experience, your CDP can serve as an “Always On” marketing solution, vigilantly watching for customer behavior and then firing up the right communications series based on that behavior.  

We already see the concept operate with common practices such as journeys for Abandoned Cart (triggered when a customer leaves the checkout flow before placing an order) or Abandoned Browse (sent when a customer spends longer than average time on a Product Detail Page, but doesn’t purchase.) Abandoned Cart journeys can be powerful revenue drivers, particularly when augmented by Simon Identity to include undocumented users.

However, smart marketers are looking for ways to expand the richness of triggered communications. For example, browsing three different espresso machines might trigger a drip campaign (if you’ll excuse the pun) on “How to Make the Perfect Cappuccino at Home,” weaving in guidance on how to choose the right machine along with coffee recommendations… and even a discount on your first purchase.  

This now transforms your brand from a storefront to a trusted advisor. And this concept can also turn your newsletter into a signal generator, using article click-throughs to trigger customer journeys as a follow-up.

Make authentic connections to build customer loyalty

So far we’ve talked about how to leverage personalization, multi-channel communications, and automated journeys to engage and delight your customers.  But none of that will matter if you don't focus on the long-term customer relationship. The foundation of that long-term relationship is trust.

As with any strong relationship, your customers’ trust hinges on transparency and authenticity. There is a heightened sensitivity to the collection and use of customer data because too many brands have abused the privilege.  

However, successful companies are fostering trust by being upfront about where and how they gather customer information. Crucially, the data is then used to enhance the customer experience. A good rule of thumb? Only request data if it has a clear benefit for your customers. And then hold yourself accountable for delivering on that benefit. 

By using data to create relevant opportunities and personalized connections that delight your customers, you can truly differentiate your brand.  

Respect your customer and compliance will follow

While customer data is the lifeblood of the modern marketing program, it brings with it challenges and responsibilities in the rapidly evolving area of privacy and compliance.  

Navigating regulations like CCPA and GDPR can feel overwhelming. The key to balancing data-rich personalization with compliance lies in three core principles: 

• Prioritize user consent
• Be transparent about data collection
• Ensure robust data security everywhere, within your company and with partners like your CDP

Privacy concerns are also impacting the targeting options available to you in ad networks. In a nutshell, ad networks have traditionally used third-party cookies (a tiny piece of tracking code left on a user’s browser) to collect data on that user’s internet activity, which, in turn, would enable marketers to target certain users in that ad network.

For example, a wine subscription service might look to target folks who have visited other wine and spirits sites. However, due to the recent increase in privacy concerns, third-party cookies are largely being phased out, rendering this strategy ineffective.

The good news is that this is where a robust CDP can come to the rescue. Properly collected “first party” user data (the data you collect and observe directly from your users) will allow you to create segments that you can feed directly into Facebook, Instagram, Google Adwords, YouTube, and other platforms for remarketing (advertising to those users)or the building of look-alike audiences (advertising to new users who are similar to your customers.)   

Test, learn, deploy, repeat

Given the many changes and opportunities in the evolving world of marketing, experimentation should be standard operating procedure. A best practice is to test all new concepts: personalized content versus generic, 1:1 recommendations versus site-wide best sellers, and automated campaigns versus no follow-up.  

Even if you feel strongly that a concept will work, you can structure the experiment as a backtest, where 80% of the audience gets the new treatment and only 20% receives the control. 

This increases the impact of the new treatment while still quantifying the results (whether positive or negative). That quantification is invaluable because it allows you to project impact if you expand the program, calculate ROI if additional investment is needed, and look for additional areas of improvement.  

For example, if a test campaign delivers higher revenue-per-email, it is still important to understand if a conversion rate improvement or an average-order-value increase drove that.  If the conversion rate increases but AOV drops, you can further optimize performance by focusing on the offer or the merchandising on the landing page to increase AOV.

Ensure the proper measures of success

While open rate, click-through, and click-to-open are traditional CRM measures, they should not be the measures of success for your program. One reason is that open rates have become inflated since Apple rolled out its Mail Privacy Protection controls to users in 2021 (which preloads the tracking pixels for any user who has privacy turned on, regardless of whether the email is opened or not.)  

More importantly, none of these metrics address the business impact that you are crafting these programs to drive. They have clear value as diagnostic tools to understand program engagement and creative effectiveness, but they are measuring just a step in the process, not the overall success of the program.

Instead, you’ll want to ensure that your CDP is well integrated with the sales data that drives your business and can tie it back to individual campaigns. 

This enables you to report on your programs’ true success measures — such as conversion rate, revenue, and average order value — at the campaign and program level. These true business metrics should also be leveraged as the success measures for A/B testing, ensuring that your impact drives business growth, not just improved CRM engagement. 

“While open rate, click-through, and click-to-open are traditional CRM measures, they should not be the measures of success for your program. None of these metrics truly address the business impact that you are crafting these programs to drive.”

But instrumentation shouldn’t stop there. Your CDP should also provide broader views such as customer LTR (Lifetime Revenue) and predicted LTR. This enables you to understand and maximize the health of your entire customer base.

To achieve all of this, data integration is key. It is important to choose a CDP partner that can efficiently integrate with the leading data platforms, including Snowflake, and that provides a level of trust and transparency in managing those datasets in their platform, given the sensitivities to customer privacy and financial confidentiality.

The promise of a new frontier in customer marketing

It’s not an overstatement to say that customer marketing is experiencing a period of change not seen in several years. The rise of AI, the impacts of privacy, and the tightening of budgets are all contributing to a landscape that will require new paths forward.  

But with change comes opportunity, and those marketers who prioritize a 1:1 dialogue with their customers, who work to build relevance, trust, and loyalty, and who leverage the scale and efficiency of a leading-edge customer data platform will find themselves on the winning side of the current marketing revolution.

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