Mastering moments based marketing
The CMO’s playbook for captivating customer experiences
Discover the tactics behind connecting with customers in real-time.
Table of contents
Introduction
In today’s mobile-first world, capturing the attention of your audience means delivering the right message, at the right time. Moments-based marketing is an innovative strategy that helps you achieve this goal by creating personalized and timely messages that resonate with your customers. By understanding and leveraging the context, intent, and emotions of your customer in real-time, you can create highly engaging and memorable experiences, ultimately increasing conversions, loyalty, and satisfaction.
This whitepaper provides a comprehensive guide to mastering moments-based marketing, encompassing key elements like leveraging real-time data, implementing personalization, and cross-channel engagement. Adopting a moments-based approach will help you gain a competitive advantage in the rapidly changing marketing landscape.
Explore this new marketing approach that empowers you to connect with your audience in ways that create lasting impressions and positive outcomes, reaping a wide range of benefits, including higher engagement, increased conversions, better ROI, and a competitive edge over your peers.
What is moments-based marketing?
Moments-based marketing is a marketing approach that focuses on delivering relevant content to audiences at the precise moment when they are experiencing a need that can be fulfilled by your brand’s products or services. It aims to provide personalized and timely messages that resonate with audiences by understanding and leveraging their context, intent, and emotions of them in the moment. Ultimately, this leads to increased conversions, loyalty, and customer satisfaction with your brand’s customer experience.
Key elements of moments-based marketing
By emphasizing relevance and timeliness, moments-based marketing can generate a wide range of benefits for marketers, but what does a moments-based marketing look like?
Here are some key elements that make up a moments-based marketing strategy:
Micro-moments
Micro-moments are the customer touchpoints where your audience expects immediate answers, discovers something new, or decides to make a purchase. These moments are crucial to engage customers in the moment and deliver a memorable experience. Being able to identify and understand micro-moments will enable you to build an effective moments-based marketing strategy.
Real-time data
Access to real-time data is vital for brands looking for relevant content during these micro-moments. Real-time customer data such as location, device, and browsing behavior help you to better understand the context and intent of a customer. This makes moments-based marketing possible.
Personalization
Once you understand what your audience is looking for, you need to turn these moments into personalized customer experiences. Turn real-time data into perfectly tailored messages to create an effective, engaging, and memorable customer experience.
Cross-channel engagement
You must consider all potential touchpoints and channels if you want to adopt a successful moments-based marketing strategy. Customer journeys are complicated, spread across multiple channels and devices including email, SMS, website, and social media on mobile and desktops. To provide a comprehensive and cohesive experience that delivers results, you need to implement seamless cross-channel marketing.
Agility
Agility and flexibility are a core part of successful marketing. To implement a winning moments-based marketing strategy, you must be prepared to react quickly and adapt your plans in response to changes in customer behavior, market trends, or the competitive landscape.
Why is moments-based marketing important?
Adopting a moments-based approach to your marketing strategy has benefits for marketers and customers alike.
Benefits for marketers
- Higher engagement: Delivering relevant and contextual content increases the level of engagement with your audience. It effectively captures their attention and improves the chances of a successful outcome for your marketing efforts.
- Increased conversions: Personalized content that resonates with your audience during micro-moments will ultimately lead to higher conversion rates as customers are more likely to act when they receive a message that is timely and meaningful.
- Better ROI: Targeted marketing improves your return on investment (ROI), it’s as simple as that. Moments-based marketing helps you better use your marketing budget as it makes every message sent more likely to convert.
- Building brand loyalty: Consistently delivering relevant, personalized, and timely content builds trust and credibility with your customers. In turn, this improves brand perception which helps keep you top-of-mind during the decision-making process. Customers will keep returning because they trust your brand to deliver what they need when they need it.
- Competitive advantage: Always stay one step ahead of the competition by reacting and adapting to real-time insights, capturing and keeping customer attention for longer. By leveraging the opportunities surfaced by adopting a moments-based approach, you can gain a competitive advantage in the rapidly changing marketing landscape.
Benefits for customers
- Relevance: Customers want contextual content that is tailored to their preferences and actions. moments-based marketing delivers highly relevant messages based on real-time insights into their actions and interests.
- Timeliness: You will deliver the information and offers customers need, when they actually need it when you adopt moments-based marketing. This simplifies the decision-making process, making the whole experience less time-consuming for the customer.
- Reduced noise: By creating personalized and targeted marketing messages, moments-based marketing helps reduce the noise created by irrelevant marketing produced by your competitors. This provides customers with a more enjoyable and clutter-free experience.
- Added value: The experiences you deliver are considerably more valuable when they address the customers’ needs in the moment. Contextual, relevant, and personalized moments-based marketing is guaranteed to improve customer satisfaction with your brand.
What is a moment in marketing?
The customer experience is made up of a series of moments. These moments are the points where an individual interacts with your brand to get what they want immediately and in context. Where these moments take place will depend on where they are in the customer lifecycle.
Key moments to capture
Sometimes key moments can seem small or insignificant to you but personalizing them will have an unbelievable effect on the customer’s experience. Small micro-moments can be divided into four main groups.
1. I-want-to-know moments
In these moments, customers and prospective customers are looking for information. They want to know about your brand, products, or services. Intent indicators include:
2. I-want-to-go moments
I-want-to-go moments are location-specific moments. Customers may be looking for a shop, restaurant, or business nearby. They are looking for convenience and immediacy. Intent indicators include:
3. I-want-to-do moments
These are some of the most crucial moments for your business. It will reveal your customer’s intentions, allowing you, in turn, to meet their needs. At this stage, you should be serving customers helpful information about how to do something or how to meet their goals. Intent indicators include:
4. I-want-to-buy moments
This is not only applicable to commerce companies; this is the point where a customer is ready to convert. At this moment, customers may need help deciding what or how to buy. Indicators include:
Micro-moments
As well as the moments above, micro-moments are the little touches to the customer experience that makes customers feel seen, rather than just another address on your mailing list. These can be personalized with a little effort and will significantly improve customer loyalty. Micro-moments can be:
Prioritizing moments that matter
Once you have identified the key moments in the customer journey through customer journey mapping and found the moments that are significant to your business goals through CX mapping, you need to decide which ones to begin developing experiences around. To help you prioritize, use an impact matrix that assesses the ease of implementation and the potential impact of each moment on your marketing strategy.
The impact matrix consists of four categories:
- Quick wins – High impact, low effort. Prioritize these moments, as they will yield notable results while requiring minimal resources.
- Big bets – High impact, high effort. Allocate adequate resources to these moments and plan for their implementation, as they have the potential for substantial positive outcomes.
- Fill-in jobs – Low impact, low effort. Deprioritize these moments, as they yield lesser returns and take up valuable time and resources.
- Thankless tasks – Low impact, high effort. Avoid these moments, as they consume considerable resources but offer insignificant returns.
By focusing on quick and easy implementations first, you can showcase the benefits of your moment-based marketing strategy and secure necessary budgetary investments for more significant initiatives down the line.
How to identify moments in marketing
Moments-based marketing isn’t possible without marketing tech that enriches and elevates customer data.
A successful moments-based strategy requires you to reach customers at the precise moment when they’re most engaged. It also requires you to connect with them on multiple channels at any one time. Simply put, having the right tech is essential.
Customer insight data
Customer insights are the foundation of a strong moments-based marketing strategy. Collected throughout a customer’s journey with your brand, every interaction is stored to give you a more comprehensive understanding of your customers.
These insights, which range from order (e.g. purchasing histories) to customer wishlists, web behavior tracking (e.g. web page visits), and custom insights (e.g. membership or subscription type), can then be used to personalize content across all communication channels using features like dynamic content and product recommendations. What’s more, this data is invaluable as it is used but AI to predict behaviors but it also offers you deep insight into customer preferences.
Real-time data analysis
Real-time data analysis is crucial for capturing key marketing moments. Customer journey mapping allows you to understand the vital moments that you should be targeting, but what use is that if you can’t identify and act on them in the moment.
Real-time analytics helps you identify customer intent. Dotdigital customer experience and data platform (CXDP) has a wealth of real-time insights that make moments-based marketing possible. Our opportunity dashboard segments your audience according to the real-time engagement levels of your audience and their RFM score.
This helps you better understand where customers are in their lifecycle. What’s more, our persona movement tracker keeps an eye on customer behavior for you. If a ‘high potential’ customer slips from ‘highly engaged’ to ‘lightly engaged’ you can act quickly to re-engage them.
Predictive analytics
It’s not just real-time analytics that allow you to reach customers at exactly the right time for conversion. AI-powered predictive analytics analyzes reams of customer data to give you insight into their next purchase dates and churn probability rates. This enables you to be proactive as well as reactive with your marketing messages.
Stackable tech
With customers interacting with your brands across a cornucopia of marketing channels, understanding exactly where the customer is is essential. From websites to email, SMS, social media, and even in-store, you need a tech stack that integrates and communicates. Syncing customer data into a single source of truth will enable you to tap into deeper and richer insights. Never again will you miss an opportunity to connect.How to execute a moments-based marketing strategy
Even with customer data being analyzed in real-time, marketers don’t have the time to build reactive campaigns as behaviors change. Preparation is key.
By identifying your key marketing moments and tapping into your real-time customer insights, you have everything you need to execute a moments-based marketing strategy. All that’s left to do is build the experiences.
Cross-channel marketing automation
Dotdigital CXDP seamlessly integrates and syncs with CRM and ecommerce platforms to ensure you have the data you need, when you need it. Rather than diving into your customer data to build new segments and one-off campaigns, marketing automation allows you to build personalized experiences informed by intelligent insights at scale.
Enrollment triggers ensure that your marketing messages are always landing with the right audience. For example, did a customer abandon a web session in the past 30 minutes? Send them a push notification. Have they recently booked a visit online? Deliver a feedback request via SMS.
In today’s climate, you must go to the customer. There’s no time and no guarantee that customers will come to you – the amount of competition in every sector is huge. Being where the customer is will ensure you stay top-of-mind when customers are in the decision-making process.
Right channel, right time
Whether it’s SMS, WhatsApp, push, or personalized web experiences, offering a seamless cross-channel experience is vital. Your customer insight will reveal where your customers are. If you collect channel preferences, you’ll have clear, zero-party data informing you which channel you should be using. If you don’t, intelligent analytics and reporting will tell you where they most often interact with you.
No matter where they are, you should be thinking mobile-first. Customers are almost always attached to their phones. You need to constantly preview and test your campaigns to ensure that the mobile experience is as seamless as the desktop. After all, no one wants a personalized popover to result in a customer abandoning your site because they can’t dismiss it.
Automation tools will ensure you’re landing at the right time, but it’s down to you to pick what channel to use. Insights will surface information such as the fact a customer might have a higher AOV when using the app. It’s down to you to factor this in when building your moments-based programs.
Optimized conversion rates
When you meet customers in the moment, on the channel they’re on at the time, conversion rates can increase by over 20%. Personalization and real-time marketing allows you to create moments that convert.
Moments-based marketing is a truly customer-centric approach. It’s a way to demonstrate that your brand cares and understands about serving your customers needs. In the long term, this nurtures trust and loyalty. By tailoring content and offers to an individual’s interests, preferences, and previous interactions, you will create a deeper connection that leads to higher engagement and boosts conversions.
Conclusion
The marketing landscape is constantly evolving, and marketers need to keep up with the latest trends and techniques to be successful. Moments-based marketing is one such trend that has gained significant attention in recent years. There are approximately 6.84 billion smartphones in the world. That equates to nearly 85% of the global population owning a smartphone. As a result. customers have come to expect personalized and relevant content at every stage of their journey on every device. You need to adopt a moments-based approach to stay ahead of the competition and provide a seamless experience for your customers.
By leveraging real-time data, personalization, and cross-channel engagement, you can create a more effective and engaging customer experience. With research showing that personalized content can increase online revenue by 28%, moments-based marketing is essential to business success. Begin by identifying the crucial moments in your customer journey. You can then utilize AI-powered tools like ChatGPT to inspire innovative, personalized messages and creative campaigns. This will help save your team significant time, so you can focus on getting the strategy right.
By providing the right content at the right moment, you can capture the audience’s attention and increase the chances of a successful outcome for your marketing efforts. Together, this approach can also help build brand loyalty and improve customer satisfaction, leading to higher conversion rates and better ROI. Seize the opportunity to transform your marketing strategy with moments-based marketing and stay ahead in the rapidly changing marketing landscape.
How to put moments-based marketing into action
Explore how dynamic personalization and adaptive messaging can revolutionize your marketing results.
Methodology
The goal of our study was to determine whether customers are more engaged with email marketing content when it is delivered in a timely manner. To assess this, we compared the results of two types of email marketing campaigns: single-send campaigns and triggered campaigns. Triggered campaigns are initiated by customer actions, such as cart abandonment or newsletter subscription.
Our analysis relied on data from hundreds of Dotdigital accounts running campaigns between January and June 2023. To measure customer engagement, we focused on the time elapsed between the email being sent and the user opening or clicking on the content. Given that most opened or clicked events occur shortly after the send, we opted to use the median as our measure of central tendency, rather than the average. The median is more representative, as it is less influenced by a few much-later opens or clicks.