An Introduction To Insights-led Engagement

What is Insights-led Engagement?

Insights-led Engagement is the modern marketer’s way to deliver better customer engagement by evolving from a campaign-centric approach to a customer-centric approach. This approach helps build a delightful and memorable customer experience, leading to the prevention of customer churn.

The Insights-led engagement flywheel has three major actions which contribute to its momentum and determine success:

1. Analyze & Segment

Marketers need to collect actionable insights by analyzing customer behavior to identify which set of customers need to be engaged, what the right type of campaigns to be used are, and how the product can be improved to provide a delightful customer experience.

2. Engage

Next, to improve customer satisfaction, marketers need to create personalized and relevant experiences that span across communication channels such as emails, push notifications, web notifications and banners, in-app messages, SMS, social media, and more.

3. Optimize

Lastly, marketers should leverage machine learning to optimize their engagement strategy and maximize reachability and conversions.

Customer Insights & Analytics

Customer-centric brands are proactive in their approach to customer engagement. To make your customers realize that you “get” them, you need to understand them well before you roll out your engagement campaigns.

Following this customer insights process will help you build personalized customer experiences.

Examples of Customer Insights & Analytics

1. What channel does my customer prefer?
2. What category of product/content does my customer love?
3. Which set of customers is most likely to go dormant or churn?
4. Which segment of customers is price sensitive and loves discounts?
5. What time of the day is the best to send our marketing communication?
6. Which set of customers is loyal and more likely to be my brand advocates?

How to Gain Customer Insights the Right Way

With close to 1 million registered players, Classic Rummy, India’s favorite online card gaming website, adopted a customer-centric approach to player engagement through personalized alerts.

Here are the customer data insights Classic Rummy gathered:

• Player activity within the gaming app
• Most responsive time of day to send messages and notifications
• Preferred channel of communication
• Actions performed within the gaming app after receiving communication
• The time taken to make the first deposit and the drop-off points
• Player actions before uninstalling the app
• The long-term impact of player engagement on business goals

Thanks to these key customer insights, Classic Rummy observed customer behavior and tweaked its engagement strategy. The team saw an uplift in the following metrics:

Customer Journey Analytics & Insights

Understanding customer journey analytics on your platform plays a key role in controlling customer experience and tweaking it for maximum engagement.

Examples of Customer Journey Analytics & Insights

1. Where in your customer journey are you losing most of your customers?
2. How are customers navigating on your website or inside your mobile app?
3. Which customer cohorts are not converting and what actions are leading to this?
4. What steps in your journey are leading to the highest customer churn?

Gathering and Leveraging Customer Journey Insights to Grow the Right Way

For over a million Brazilians, the most reliable investment consultant isn’t a person – it’s an app. With close to 2 million readers and 400 thousand subscribers, the company aims to help retail investors have the same returns as a professional by delivering investment recommendations.

Empiricus analyzed their customers’ onboarding journey in the mobile app and noticed a significant drop-off during the journey. Using customer journey analytics, the team decided to run an A/B test that involved changing the onboarding journey steps.

Campaign Insights

Lastly, you need insights into how your customers respond to your campaigns and communication and the long term impact of each of your campaigns on key business metrics. This includes behavior-based email campaign insights, location-based push notification campaign insights, in-app message insights, and more!

Examples of Campaign Insights

1. What is the long term impact of customers engaging with your campaigns?
2. Which customer segments are engaging well and which aren’t for a specific campaign?
3. How do your A/B tests uplift revenue, engagement, and retention?
4. Are you sending too many notifications to your customers? If yes, which set of customers are these?

Gathering Qualitative Insights on Campaigns With Advanced Analytics

The team at Alodokter, Indonesia’s leading healthcare super app, realized that reaching out to customers at the right time using the right message was essential to increase active users, reduce churn, and boost retention.

The team ran experiments to optimize campaigns based on

• types of content topics like pregnancy, child upbringing, and beauty
• message variants sent via push notifications
• novel app features like chatting with certified medical professionals and booking doctor appointments

By gathering the right campaign insights from various customer feedback surveys and by running experiments, Alodokter saw the following results:

What Does Insights-led Engagement Mean to Online Brands and Enterprises?

Internet-first brands and enterprises need to deliver better customer engagement to increase North Star business goals such as revenue (LTV) and retention. Brands can achieve this by creating memorable and delightful experiences.

Knowing your customers, understanding their journeys and behavior, and analyzing how your customers respond to campaigns are three important components of insights-led engagement for online brands and enterprises.

Here are the steps to follow:

• Step 1 (Who): Advanced segmentation (based on RFM scores, Affinity, and Propensity) to identify customer cohorts.
• Step 2 (What): Recommendations (product, top category by revenue or purchases, messaging, and offers) based on insights.
• Step 3 (When): Communication (best time to send, most optimum delay after an action is performed, best channel to use) intelligence.

Insights-led Engagement Versus Current Customer Engagement Practices

Current platforms are restricting the growth of customer engagement by not considering the most vital element – the customer.

And modern marketers and product managers have realized this.

Marketers and product managers that embrace insights-led engagement – that seek to build long term value for their customers – are delivering an immediate impact on customer LTV (revenue) and retention.

The essential differences that separate current customer engagement and modern insights-led engagement platforms are: