by: Judith Aquino, 1to1 Media (Excerpt)

How to better engage the connected customer with mobile-first experiences, personalization, and more.

Customer engagement is no longer a series of one-off conversations; in this digital age, it’s an ongoing dialogue spanning myriad channels and devices and requiring specific skillsets to enable seamless interactions.

Consequently, isolated, impersonal customer experiences are quickly becoming a liability. Customers expect companies to know who they are across channels and show very little patience for irrelevant messaging and ads. As such, companies are under immense pressure to leverage data to deliver personalized messages and customer experiences. […]

Wine Enthusiast Drinks in the Contextual Data

Customers today are driven by three things: intent, context, and immediacy, observes Brian Solis, principal analyst at Altimeter Group, a Prophet company. “The digital-first customer has very little brand loyalty; if your solution meets his needs at that moment in time, he’ll choose you,” he says. “That’s why contextual data and insights have become very important for businesses.”

Glenn Edelman, vice president of e-commerce at Wine Enthusiast, agrees that contextual data is critical. At Wine Enthusiast, which “sells everything but the wine” the company strives to ensure that it’s providing its increasingly digital-first customers with personalized and timely information, he says.

“Our typical customer will engage with our website before speaking with one of our consultants,” Edelman notes. “And since email is a major channel for us, we also have to make sure we’re making our emails as engaging and relevant as possible.”

Last year, Wine Enthusiast set out to tie its customers’ online behaviors more closely with its email campaigns. The company selected Bluecore, an email marketing automation vendor, to help it build a behavioral real-time email program. The email program was designed to identify meaningful customer touchpoints, provide up-sell and cross-sell functionalities, and ensure customers didn’t get too many emails.

Within a week, Wine Enthusiast was able to deliver personalized messages to email subscribers with the Bluecore Window Shopping solution. The program generates a line of code that the company places on each of its web pages to keep track of customers’ click-through behavior, as well as inventory and pricing details. The program then identifies the customer’s points of contact across each page to find the most pertinent product recommendations to highlight in the email.

Therefore, if customers return to a certain page more than once or abandon their shopping cart, they’ll receive an email reminding them of those products. All the triggered emails are prioritized in real-time and frequency-capped to ensure that customers received relevant emails and not simply more of them.

The program’s success, which includes a 16 percent lift in Wine Enthusiast’s email channel revenue, demonstrates the importance of delivering personalized messages across channels, Edelman notes. “We’re constantly looking at our customers’ behaviors to identify patterns and trends so that we can better serve them,” he says.

Staying in communication with customers is also important for setting realistic expectations. As consumers become accustomed to receiving online orders within a day or sooner from sites like Amazon, “we need to help our customers understand we’re doing everything we can to get their orders to them as quickly as possible but it’s not the same as ordering from Amazon,” Edelman adds. When a customer orders a wine cellar, for example, a representative will call the customer to review the size of the cellar and ensure it’s the right size. Customers will also receive emails updating them on the product’s delivery status.

Practices like this are necessary at a time when companies are competing with the customer experiences of other companies that may not even be in the same industry, Solis observes. “Companies that compete intentionally, sincerely, and transparently can still succeed but they would have to recognize where expectations aren’t met to find ways in which they can compete effectively,” he says. […]