Raise the bar with customer intent

Digital engagement is on the rise. Marketers are marketing more, and in turn, consumers are engaging with more digital content than ever.

Online event engagement is a great example of this. Event management platform Eventbrite reported that in 2020 nearly 75 million people registered for more than one million virtual events, logging an impressive combined 100 million hours in attendance. By November 2020, we were spending 34x more time attending online events than in January of the same year.

Similar trends can be observed across email engagement and purchase behavior too. We analyzed Dotdigital customer data in June last year and found that some industries (healthcare, utility providers, technology hardware, and apparel & fashion in particular) are seeing triple-digit increases across their email opens and clicks.

To top it all off, this is translating into increased online purchase activity too. With online sales growing by 46% over a single year. All sounds great, right? These statistics don’t tell the full story of course. We’re all consuming more content digitally, but (in most cases at least) our wallets and minds are the same ‘size’!

So this means that more brands are vying for that same share of mind and share of wallet. We’re spending more time looking at content from the brands we love (according to Yotpo 31% of consumers now claim to be loyal to 6-10 brands versus 26% in 2019), but this doesn’t always translate into a readiness to buy.

New channels and tools can offer an excellent return on investment, but only if you’re targeting the right people (the ones that are really ‘into’ you and your product, then and there). Another interesting thought by Wang and Head (2005) in the “Innovative Marketing Journal” raises that the consumer market is non-contractual, and customers may not value lifetime relationships as we think they do. All of these trends combined can be expensive to marketers.

Marketers can however afford to be choosier with who they remarket to, and through what means. There’s a need to better qualify what we class as ‘engagement’ and better identify propensity to act or buy.

Drumroll, please…

By all accounts now is no time to be resting on our laurels, the latest Dotdigital release is hot off the press and brings all our customers new ways to uncover meaningful, profitable opportunities as they arise.

Uncover emerging opportunities.

With eRFM. Understanding when it’s time to act requires insight into the purchase cycles of your customers, and an ability to act on the high-intent signals that they give you. Retargeting for loyalty is possible, but you need a workflow that will help you identify previously missed opportunities as they arise. And this is where eRFM and the new Opportunities dashboard come into play.

eRFM is a holistic behavioral model that presents you with customer personas which are graded based on levels of purchase intent and intent signals. At the core of the model is the notion of a customer decision window. What a customer viewed on your website yesterday is far more relevant (to you and them), than what they browsed six months ago.

The Opportunities Dashboard is where your customers are displayed in a highly visual and actionable way, grouped together based on their purchase profile and how likely to buy they are. The dashboard lets you find tomorrow’s customers today, and drive a more profitable customer segmentation strategy.

Deliver next-gen shopping experiences.

With PWA for Magento. The number of Magento stores going ‘headless’ is on the rise, and for good reason. PWA storefronts as they’re known, deliver on a host of shopping experience improvements. From increased mobile usage to improved site speeds (read: improved conversion rates), PWA implementations help merchants deliver better online experiences all-round and in turn impact marketing ROI for the better too.

With our latest product release, Magento merchants running a headless storefront can now benefit from the same #1 integration, regardless of their chosen implementation.

Seamlessly manage shared experiences.

With Eventbrite. Eventbrite is one of the most used events management and ticketing services around and has helped a number of industries (particularly those hardest hit in 2020) continue to deliver engaging experiences to their audiences.

So we couldn’t pass up on the opportunity to add not one, but two Eventbrite integrations to our Integration Hub. With it, marketers can seamlessly manage events marketing and after-event experiences. The ability to capture attendees as they check-in or -out makes it an incredibly powerful way to engage in-the-moment. This allows marketers to follow up post-event with an email containing highlights and next steps, or even an SMS containing a voucher for that coffee you promised as a Thank You for their time.

Dotdigital gives you all the tools you need to act when it matters most. To find out more about our latest product release, you can get the full low-down here.