Engage or fade: How meaningful customer bonds outlast fierce competition

Building valuable relationships that create a lasting bond with your customers is more important than ever. Your every customer engagement must be meaningful across the customer lifecycle. It can protect you from fierce competition and their attempts to win your customers over.

Let’s take a look at this with an example of Wayfair, the American e-commerce player.

Wayfair offers an SMS alert feature that notifies its customers whenever an out of stock product they are looking for is available for purchase again. This feature keeps its customers engaged and hooked to the brand even if they haven’t made a purchase. On the other hand, its competitors struggled to turn their engagement opportunities meaningful due to the absence of such a feature.

Target, tool, tactics

Marketers know they must create quality SMS strategies to elevate their brands. However, understanding the complex customer lifecycle to connect with them properly isn’t always possible or made a department priority. This must change.

Indian marketers send over 4,000 crore SMS messages a month to their audiences. How do they ensure these communications are timely, impactful, and justify the cost incurred? This also applies to WhatsApp messaging, which has gained popularity in India over the years. Although costly, experts call it the most effective business communication channel.

Campaigns must stand out and marketers should understand how and when to deliver attention-grabbing messages that connect with customers. These interactions should enable to effectively engage, acquire, convert, or retain customers across the lifecycle.

Human touch, personalisation, and trust are, arguably, the three must-have elements in SMS and WhatsApp campaigns that help optimise the customer lifecycle. Today, these efforts can be fuelled by AI and powerful CRM platforms.

Adjusting the strategy

Can a messaging campaign be effective when the customer lifecycle isn’t well defined? The answer is, ‘hardly ever’. The right usage for communication channels can be difficult to prioritise without a clear go-to-market strategy and activities.

In the case of SMS campaigns, it may amount to carpet bombing of messages which fail to create a positive impact. In the case of WhatsApp campaigns, it translates into choppy two-way communication that frustrates target customers.

Choosing the right communication channel is critical to achieving successful customer engagement. For example, while SMS can be effective for one-way marketing campaigns to engage new customers, WhatsApp can help retain them by delivering 24x7 customer service. Knowing the expected response rate or engagement rate is key to leveraging the right channel.

Working with a good omnichannel communication technology provider is invaluable to understanding performance expectations and key benchmarks for success. Their tools will help evaluate your messaging campaigns for performance and measure them against industry standards to optimise every communication—this is where SMS and WhatsApp campaigns can begin to shine.

Personalised and conversational

When companies begin to grow, they may lose sight of their current customers as they chase the new ones. It becomes difficult to maintain personal and valuable engagements without expanding team sizes or budgets. But in the past 12 months, AI has been enabling companies to build conversational and personalised communications aligned with the customer lifecycle and individual preferences.

Nowadays, marketing and CRM platforms have been offering specialised AI chatbots that make SMS and WhatsApp communications conversational and available round-the-clock. As a result, generalised messages and robotic-sounding automated responses are being replaced with valuable experiences—making customers feel seen and cared for.

AI has become advanced enough to know when customers might cancel a subscription or need a product renewal, alerting the teams to take necessary action. Data collection and machine learning are making this personalisation possible at scale. CRM and other customer platforms gather information from the entire customer lifecycle, which AI models can use to predict needs and suggest products, delivering this information via targeted SMS and WhatsApp campaigns.

As these platforms retain interaction record they know about a customer’s history with the brand, recognising how to proceed to conversion, retention, acquisition, and so on.

Personalisation at work

Today’s consumers don’t want ordinary experiences and advertisements anymore—targeted offers are more appealing. They understand the trade-offs of personalisation. In fact, over half of the consumers in a recent survey said that they were willing to share personal information if it meant receiving personalised offers. Customers expect brands to use their data responsibly to cater to their needs, whether that is adjusting to their taste, economic standing, phase in life, and more.

For instance , instead of sending a standard, bulk message reminding customers to pay their insurance premia, insurers can personalise the communication specifying the premium amount, due date, and payment assistance if a client has missed payments in the past. Similarly, retailers can launch personalised campaigns on birthdays, wherein customers are offered special discounts on the products they like as their birthdays approach.

This also applies to offering outstanding customer support. Through WhatsApp, AI chatbots can gather and implement user data to tailor conversations around customer needs. This may include order status update, store hours during holidays, or more information about their insurance coverage. Inquiring through a WhatsApp chat is convenient for both, the client and the brand.

Building trust

Companies must find ways to earn their customers’ trust and confidence—a mammoth task when communicating on a large scale. Tailoring messages around a customer’s needs may make them feel heard and help build engagement, satisfaction, and trust. However, a small data security breach can violate that trust, ruining all the hard work done.

In India, 82% of customers say data protection is crucial to trust building. Companies must be transparent about their data usage and protection when communicating via digital channels and using AI so that clients see them as trustworthy organisations. This is even more relevant in industries like healthcare, financial services, and insurance, which constantly deal with sensitive information.

For example, before starting an SMS conversation, brands should send a disclaimer on data usage to inform customers about company privacy and storage practices. For WhatsApp, they can send a ‘terms and conditions’ link for customers to read before starting a chat. At a minimum, companies must also include data policies on their website for legal purposes.

Messaging compliance and regulations are getting stricter by the day. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has imposed stringent anti-spam regulations that require companies to whitelist any URLs, APKs (Android application package), and OTT (over-the-top) links sent through SMS or face hefty fines. This helps instil customer trust as all hyperlinks received through SMS will be protected under this regulation—provided, a company is compliant.

Including opt-in and opt-out options for messaging channels and ensuring their communication consent is always honoured is another way to reinforce customer trust. If a brand continues to message customers after opting out, they will certainly feel overlooked and frustrated.

Taking important steps to safeguard communications will help customers feel safe. This will encourage them to send messages to your business, welcome your promotional texts in good measure, and help you to be aware of what type of information to share via SMS and WhatsApp.

Marketers today are in a great position to rely on their CRM and marketing platforms to support efforts to take care of their customers throughout their lifecycles. With advancements in AI, customer engagements are even more effective across interactions—freeing up time for marketing teams and increasing their efficiency in each campaign.

Working with your communications platform providers is instrumental for your customer lifecycle, improving trust, maintaining the human touch, and catering to specific needs and preferences in an assertive way.

 - Nitin Seth, founder and CEO, Conversive.