The four pillars of customer engagement

Clients often ask us what platforms to use to manage their data and customer interactions. And it’s a really hard question to answer.

Should it be Salesforce, Adobe (Marketo), Hubspot, or Braze?

We’ve worked with all of them (and many more), and they all have their merits. But the truth is, this decision is not that critical to your success in customer engagement.

Don’t get me wrong, the platform you choose is important. You have to make sure it’s fit-for-purpose and right-sized for your business and integrate adequately with the rest of your technology architecture. But the platform itself is only part of the equation.

We’ve seen many businesses spend a lot of time and money implementing their shiny new CRM, CDP or marketing automation tool, only to be disappointed when their chosen platform doesn’t magically start delivering better business results immediately after going live.

That’s because they believed the platform was the answer. It almost never is. It’s what you do with it that counts.

So many digital and customer engagement teams get stuck on data.

Sometimes, there’s not enough of it to enable the use cases they’ve identified. And other times, there’s so much of it that they don’t know where to start.

It’s easy to get lost in a sea of complexity when looking at millions of data points and endless permutations with no obvious patterns or insights to bring order to the chaos.

The key is to start simple and build momentum.

Pick a use case—a structured onboarding journey or maybe a data-triggered churn intervention—identify the data points required to enable this use case, and make sure your platform has access to this data at the right cadence and intervals.

Build the experience. It might be an email, a push notification, a new landing page, an app experience, or a combination.

Start sending it to customers, learning from it, looking for ways to improve it, and then moving on to the next idea and applying what you learned.

This is where humans (and increasingly, AI) come into play.

Humans are there to find opportunities in the data to use it as inspiration for creative solutions.

This is usually the hardest part of customer engagement. Finding the insights your competitors haven’t yet found. Identifying the triggers that matter. Choosing the content and offers that are going to elicit the desired response. And execute it in line with your brand positioning.

This is where creative and digital partners, like Catch, can help. We bring cross-platform and cross-category experience to the table. We can also help build momentum for your team by introducing them to the ideas that work.

Data, insight and theory can only take you so far. The best way to learn is by doing.

And the key to this is compatibility between your people and technology. After all, there’s no point in buying a car if you don’t know how to drive or aren’t prepared to learn!

You need the right skill sets, the right mindset, and the right processes in place to be able to experiment with your platform.

Many digital teams don’t have these skills when the platforms are first put in. But they can be learned.

Give your people a licence to experiment. Encourage trial and error. Celebrate failure. Try stuff and see how customers respond.

Everything you deliver is an opportunity to learn and improve.

So, where have we seen this done well?

We recently helped Burger King design a trigger-based onboarding and nurture journey in Braze for their Royal Perks loyalty programme.

BK uses Braze to deliver a combination of email, push notifications, and in-app messages that educate, engage and stimulate members to take advantage of the Royal Perks benefits.

The foundational design was well thought through, but the focus on continuous improvement, driven by customer engagement data and insights, sets this programme apart.

The BK marketing team constantly uses this data to refine and improve the experience with champion/challenger testing on subject lines, content components, and new offers to stimulate customer action.

It’s sophisticated stuff, made possible by the usability of the Braze platform and the marketing team’s willingness to experiment and learn.

While we’re technology agnostic at Catch, our team loves working with Braze. It’s user-friendly, feature-rich, and great value.

It’s a platform that allows brands to create genuinely data-driven and personalised customer experiences, and it allows you to bring imaginative use cases to life quickly and efficiently.

Another excellent example of the power of personalisation in Braze was AA Smartfuel’s Year-in-Review campaign that Catch delivered at the end of 2022.

Thousands of members got to experience a unique, data-rich road trip inside the AA Smartfuel app that summarised their past year of engagement with the programme.

We used Braze to call on millions of customer data points in real-time to create a journey that was genuinely unique to each member. The permutations were infinite, and no individual had the same experience.

These are great examples of the four pillars of customer engagement in action—a usable platform, access to the right data, imaginative execution, and a willingness to test and learn.

If you’re looking for the secret sauce, keep playing with these ingredients and watch the magic happen.

If you’d like to explore how to better engage your customers and get the best out of your marketing automation tech, get in touch with carl@catchdesign.co.nz