“We always innovate” — that’s one of our core values at Emarsys. It’s not just an empty platitude, or something we say because it sounds cutting edge and martech-y. We say it because we are continuously in pursuit of innovation. Why? Through innovation, we ensure our clients stay at the top of their customer engagement game, no matter how the demands, trends, and rules of their industry change.
In order to succeed in innovation, it’s crucial to anticipate what will happen in the future and plan accordingly. That’s why we continue keeping one eye on the here and now, and one eye on the future.
Emarsys CEO Joanna Milliken recently sat down with Gerry Dick, host of the Inside Indiana Business video series, and shared her vision for the future of customer engagement, and how Emarsys helps brands navigate that future to accelerate business outcomes.
Let’s look at three areas of focus that Joanna discussed during their conversation.
It’s a Tough Time to Be a Marketer
“It’s a tough time to be a marketer. And the average tenure of a CMO is the lowest it’s ever been. So our customers are stressed, and really working hard to meet the demands of COVID and what’s happening in the retail industry. Of course, that presents an opportunity for us to help them.”
To fully understand where the future of customer engagement marketing lies, it’s important to understand what’s happening now. And we understand that, right now, if you’re a marketer tasked with engaging and retaining more customers, times are tough.
The reasons are myriad: Marketing’s responsibilities are growing, budgets are shrinking, teams are being asked to do more with less, COVID-19 has turned retail on its heels, customers are more demanding and more savvy — the list goes on.
However, the goal shouldn’t be to just alleviate the pain you’re feeling as a marketer. You want to ensure you never have to feel that pain again. How? By giving yourself more power. Power-up by finding an omnichannel customer engagement platform that gives you more time back, more sophistication in your marketing execution, and more 1:1 personalization in your customer experiences.
When you’re more empowered as a marketer, you can consistently win more customers, and make more of a positive impact on your business’s bottom line. The pain relief and satisfaction you’ll feel from knowing your marketing efforts increased growth and revenue for your brand is better than any aspirin you can take.
Easily Connected Data Means Improved Time to Value
“[Emarsys] provides marketers the ability to gather and collect data in a really permission-entrusted way, and use that [data] to personalize [their] marketing campaigns across all channels. And so what we do [in our] platform, though, that’s a little different than some is that we’re really, really hyper focused as a team and as a product on [supporting] outcomes, and really helping marketers get time to value more quickly than they can [otherwise].”
Personalization is top-of-mind for most business owners and marketing leaders thinking about the future of customer engagement. Whether you’re an up-and-coming e-commerce brand focused on improving single-channel campaigns, or a global retailer looking to create highly sophisticated, complex cross-channel journeys, the ability to provide personalized 1:1 experiences is vital to your success. As your business grows, you’ll need to scale this level of personalization.
If your data is siloed or disconnected from your marketing platform, this task is virtually impossible. And if you’re spinning your wheels trying to get your data to play nice, dealing with IT, or struggling to navigate data permission issues, you won’t be able to achieve your marketing objectives.
Going forward, the brands that can easily connect their data — internally and with their external partners — will be the ones with the greatest success in omnichannel customer engagement.
With your data fully integrated into your platform, you’ll be able to execute and scale the kind of 1:1 personalized experiences that lead to greater customer growth and revenue. You’ll get greater insight into the efficacy of your marketing (especially when your data is tied to your critical KPIs). And if you use a customer engagement solution like Emarsys that lets you share and connect your data easily and quickly without the need for IT involvement, you’ll save loads of time and realize the value of your investment sooner.
Marketers Need to Be Empowered to Engage Customers Globally
“Emarsys has been growing on its own pretty significantly year over year, and with SAP, we can supercharge that growth. But also, [this merger] gives us an opportunity to expand our reach. So we have an opportunity to extend into new industries, new geographies, and really bring our mission and bring that power back to the marketer, as we call it, more globally and all over the world, [further] than we already do today.”
Your customers are all over the globe. They could be connecting with your brand through a laptop while snacking at the kitchen table in their pajamas, or on their mobile device while riding the train to work. The future of customer engagement necessitates brands expanding into new geographies and new channels in order to meet customers wherever they might be. That means, for us to serve our clients, we’ll also expand into new geographies and new industries.
A huge step in that expansion happened when Emarsys became a part of the SAP Customer Experience portfolio. Inclusion in the global SAP family means we can offer clients a greater breadth of solutions to drive their business forward with the best omnichannel customer engagement platform and the best martech solutions available.
Get Ready
The more opportunities and solutions we provide our clients, the more empowered marketing teams will be to succeed. If your brand is focused on customer engagement (as they should be), make sure you have a partner that can take you into the future and help you deliver the highly sophisticated 1:1 experiences that lead to growth and revenue.
The future is never as far away as it seems. We can talk about the future of customer engagement as if it’s a distant abstraction, but the truth is: it’s right around the corner. So get ready.
At Emarsys, our job is to help usher you into the future. That means looking ahead as the retail and e-commerce industries evolve, and consumer expectations rise. When it comes to customer engagement, we continue to innovate and prepare you for whatever may come — no matter what changes your industry faces — so you can deliver personalized 1:1 experiences under any condition, and across any channel.
See how Emarsys can bring your marketing to the forefront of innovative customer engagement by scheduling a demo.
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