Multichannel Engagement for the Experience Economy: What Does It Mean for Marketers?

We are living in a time where consumer interaction with brands is no longer a one-way channel. Every interaction a company has with its existing customers has moved from being a transaction to an experience.

Brands are taking a more holistic approach to engaging and retaining customers because it’s not just one point of interaction that matters, it’s everything else that leads up to and follows that engagement. Welcome to the experience economy!

What does this mean for marketers? For one, the job has become a lot tougher. Second, the boundaries within which the role of marketing operates have expanded and now includes being a data scientist, technologist, and business driver — not just enabler. Customers are adopting new ways to communicate and interact, and brands need to be there.

Individual Siloed Touchpoints No More

When looking at channels of outreach individually, we form a point of interaction experience versus evaluating the spectrum of channels that the consumer is using and taking the opportunity to create a more holistic experience.

Ninety-eight percent of marketers overwhelmingly agree that personalization helps advance customer relationships. This means reaching them on the right channel, with the right message, at the right time.

Having a multichannel engagement strategy — the ability to reach customers via SMS, email, in app push, and social channels seamlessly— is imperative today. It’s not an “either-or” decision, it’s about the “and.” Social channels are ever increasing in reach and adoption, with roughly 1 million new users daily. Brands need to be able to complement traditional with new and build out their reach for delivering the right experience.

The Right Partner Matters

Like in every good relationship, the right partner is necessary for the marketing engine. While this holds true for agency relationships, it should extend to technology partners too. Because the solutions and platforms used form the nerve center of routing and delivering messages throughout the customer experience journey.

Evaluate a technology partner for reliability, reach, and security; these are foundational to establishing customer trust and engagement. Sixty-seven percent of customers who have a poor brand experience will never come back.

With more channels and opportunity to form deeper engagement with customers comes the need to ensure systems, people. and processes are geared to deliver in the experience economy.

Bring Your Multichannel Strategy Alive with SAP Social Channels 365

Adding to existing messaging services such as email, SMS, and push notifications, SAP Digital Interconnect customers worldwide are now able to connect to consumers globally through Facebook Messenger, WeChat, Viber, Line, and Telegram.

The SAP Social Channels 365 mobile service comes integrated with a decision engine that allows use of a single API connection to integrate multiple channels. The decision engine for SAP Social Channels 365 powers engagement across social channels, brand apps, and SMS using one API to connect and communicate with consumers. Allowing users to send marketing and promotional offers and other messages directly to customers using the channels they prefer.

Arti Yadav is director and global head of Marketing for SAP Digital Interconnect.