When 22 percent of consumers would rather spend a night in jail than deal with customer service, according to a recent Twilio survey, you know there’s a problem.

Slight hyperbole? Most likely. But it’s a fair point. Frustration with customer service is a real thing, and it can make or break a business—particularly when customer feedback is as ubiquitous as it is today.

According to the same survey, 62 percent of people said they would stop buying from a company after having a bad customer support experience. And 80 percent of respondents were more likely to be loyal to a brand if their experience was positive.

The survey, which polled 2,000 Americans, also revealed that customers spend 42 minutes on hold each time they contact customer service, which they do on average three times per issue. But a resolution is reached only 46 percent of the time. Moreover, 65 percent said it wasn’t worth it to get the issue resolved given the time and effort that is required.

Back to unpleasant alternatives to customer support interactions… Nearly a quarter of respondents would prefer to shave their heads rather than speaking with customer service; 30 percent would prefer doing their taxes; 28 percent would rather visit the dentist; and 25 percent would choose the DMV over the interaction.

Purchasing Habits

Not surprisingly, these issues affect buyers’ purchasing habits, decisions and outcomes. A total of 66 percent delay reaching out, for an average of 16 days, and as a result may get stuck in unwanted contracts (46 percent), miss the return window for a product (44 percent) or lose money on a service (41 percent).

Pain Points

When considering major pain points to the customer support experience, respondents said the most bothersome aspects are having to repeat the details of an issue to a new representative after being disconnected or transferred (45 percent), needing to contact a company multiple times to resolve an issue (42 percent) and having just one channel, such as email or phone, with which to reach out to the company (40 percent).

Potential Solutions

So how can marketers proactively approach the negative perception surrounding the customer support experience? Survey respondents revealed several ways that companies can alleviate these frustrations, first and foremost by ensuring that representatives have access to relevant information about their issue so that they don’t have to repeat themselves (54 percent). A close second was being able to resolve the issue without requiring a phone conversation with a live person, but rather through text, live chat or another online channel, coming in at 52 percent.

Other solutions include enabling multiple ways to contact customer support (51 percent); having access to clear directions on connecting to a live person quickly (47 percent); and being able to resolve the issue online (39 percent).

Featured image courtesy of Twilio

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By Laura Apel, SVP of Marketing, Mitto

Today’s consumers are more connected than ever; the average U.S. household has 25 connected devices. They’re also more impatient than ever. With such tech ubiquity, we’ve lost any remaining patience with inefficiency. Nearly two bakers’ dozens worth of connected devices in our homes and a growing number of channels through which we can communicate has greatly heightened our desire for efficiency. From the palm of our hand—and likely on the same device—we can order food, check our finances, communicate with friends and family and, increasingly, foster meaningful conversations with brands. With so much tech at our fingertips, why go into a store to check if an item is in stock or dial a number for an order status when your favorite brand is already right there on your device on your preferred social media app?

A new survey by Mitto found that 70 percent of adult U.S. consumers have increased their overall social media use since the pandemic began, with 58 percent reporting their messaging with brands via social media has also increased. Today, 87 percent of consumers use social media apps to message with brands. What is it that consumers like so much about social media messaging with brands? Convenience (72 percent), speed (61 percent) and personalization (50 percent) topped the list of benefits.

With brand-consumer social media messaging on the rise, brands have yet another valuable communications channel for effective customer engagement. Let’s take a closer look at the research insights to learn how consumers are using social media messaging to interact with their favorite brands.

Influencing Purchasing Decisions

Social media messaging with brands influences purchasing decisions, with 55 percent of people reporting a brand’s social media messaging had influenced a purchase via the website, followed by 42 percent directly in the social media app and 39 percent in store. With a direct impact on sales, brands will want to ensure social media messaging is part of their omnichannel consumer engagement strategy.

Delivering Customer Support

People are using social media as a way to get help and answers from brands over other communications channels. Seventy-seven percent have used social media to contact a brand’s customer support with 79 percent reporting a positive experience. Further, 58 percent mentioned they prefer that brands use social media to communicate versus other methods, such as email, call or text. Enabling two-way communication on a variety of channels is a great way to enhance the digital experience of a brand’s customers.

Facebook: Preferred Social Media Messaging App

With over 2 billion monthly active users, when it comes to social media app preference it’s no surprise that 78 percnt reported using Facebook regularly to message with brands, followed by Instagram (57 percent) and Twitter (45 percent). Looking at which social media apps consumers prefer for engaging with companies from different verticals, Facebook remained the top app of choice consistently, with 68 percent preferring it for messaging retail/ecommerce, 55 percent for finance/banking, 61 percent for travel and 61 percent for food/delivery service and 58 percent for gaming.

Preferred Message Types

The types of messages consumers would like to see from brands via social media include promo codes (70 percent), sales (61 percent), customer support (54 percent) and order updates (52 percent). When crafting these types of social media messages, brands should consider adding personalization, a call to action or a sense of urgency to enhance consumer engagement.

How brands can integrate social media messaging into their omnichannel communications mix today:

While there are a wide variety of communications channels available, it is important that brands adapt their messaging strategy to meet consumers where they’re at. Clearly social media messaging is a critical channel to enable brands to reach consumers (and vice versa), increase engagement and impact purchasing decisions.

Working with a company like Mitto, a leading provider of global omnichannel communications, brands can implement an integrated omnichannel experience across a variety of communications channels all within one platform, which is critical in providing one holistic voice of the brand and personalized messages no matter which channel the customer is using. This enables marketing teams to increase the chances their marketing messages get read and land well, and customer support and experience teams to immediately reach or respond to customers in a natural, personalized two-way conversation.

Social media has come a long way from simple life updates and photo sharing among consumers, now serving as a strong place of engagement between brands and consumers. Brands that evolve their digital customer experiences to meet consumers where they’re at will be more successful in winning over customers.

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As Director of Marketing Insights for the brand, Sweezey researches consumer behavior, media changes, fluctuations in experience delivery and technology to inform the brand’s strategy and customer experience. Now that the marketing landscape has irreparably shifted in the face of a global pandemic, those insights become even more critical.

Sharing his team’s view that the short-term is more uncertain than the long-term, Sweezey says marketers need to focus on the new normal and the next normal—and follow a different strategy for each. First, he recommends constant communication with the marketplace. How exactly should brands be communicating with stakeholders during this time? Sweezey suggests six ways for brands to communicate effectively: connect, inform, support, teach, entertain and provide.

But it’s all about the context of the moment, the key tenet of his book, The Context Marketing Revolution: How to Motivate Buyers in the Age of Infinite Media. “You have to make sure that what you’re doing fits inside of these things because that is what is contextual for the person right now. This is what their needs are, this is what they need help with,” he says. “Brands need to find ways to work with their marketplaces, not search out creative ways to then force messages on to their marketplaces.” Following are a few examples of how brands are approaching communication with customers effectively.

Connect. Connection doesn’t necessarily refer to connecting your company with customers, Sweezey says. You can connect them to other people instead. “Rather than saying, ‘how do I push an idea onto my market,’ think about how you connect the ends of your marketplace together,” he says. He cites a recent example: a nursing home that adopted a clever way to connect its patients digitally who can’t leave the physical facility with those outside the home through an “adopt-a-grandparent” program. The response the business received was overwhelming. Hospitals face a similar scenario, Sweezey says. “There’s your marketplace at large, but also all of the people out there who will need your services at some point in time. And then there’s the people inside your walls who are currently receiving your service. Think about ways that you can connect those two people. You can create value for them right now.”

Support. Purpose-driven marketing is actually a stakeholder initiative rather than a social justice initiative, Sweezey says. “Making sure that you are supporting all stakeholders is what purpose-driven marketing is about.” He points to Budweiser’s campaign in England as an example, whose stakeholders are restaurants and bars that have faced closure due to the coronavirus. As a way support them, Budweiser encouraged consumers to pre-buy beer at their local British pubs with gift cards, and in turn the brand would match the donation dollar for dollar.

Entertain. If entertainment is your product, this one is a no-brainer. But other brands can get creative by thinking about the specific context customers find themselves in. An example is some innovative thinking from training software company Lessonly. To reach customers who are in their homes right now rather than their offices, the brand sent printer-friendly coloring books to parents who are most likely looking for diversions for their children. “That’s a massive amount of value that you can create in someone’s life. You don’t have to entertain them. You’re entertaining their kids. It was supporting them and building a deeper relationship with their brand,” Sweezey says.

Provide. Salesforce itself has provided for customers through creating a $5 million-dollar fund for small business grants, building a free product suite called Salesforce Care with solutions for companies to stay connected to stakeholders, making its data analytics platform Tableau a free resource for real-time information on the pandemic, and more. It also created the “Leading Through Change” program with influential leaders—from Mark Cuban to Brené Brown—who provide thought leadership, education and build a forum for conversation.

Another brand example is Uhaul, which—as part of its standard playbook when disaster strikes—offers free storage for 30 days in locations affected by the disaster. As a way to support college kids, it extended the same policy to them nationwide. The problem with Uhaul’s gesture, though, is that it doesn’t cover the length of time college students are expected to be away from campuses. Sweezey warns against applying an established playbook to a new scenario. “Old playbooks can guide you forward, but make sure that you are being empathetic,” he says.

—

Like so many other B2B brands, Salesforce has continued to communicate with customers by pivoting its in-person events to virtual ones. It did so most recently with the Salesforce World Tour Sydney held in early March, which was originally expected to attract 10,000 attendees. Here are the key learnings from the digital adjustment, according to Sweezey, which ultimately garnered 1.5 million views.

Reimagine the experience. “If you’re going to redo it, you first have got to reimagine what that now looks like for the individual in this new point in time,” Sweezey says. It’s about reimagining what would make a good virtual experience for someone sitting in front of a screen. “Most to all of our events were programs for on stage. The formats are designed for on stage and in person. They’re not designed to be great experiences behind a screen,” he says.

Think new content formats. Existing formats call for a single speaker and slides, which doesn’t work very well for a virtual event, Sweezey says. “We realized that switching in between a lot of things means dead air time, because people would normally be walking from one session to another. They’re not walking, they’re staring at a screen and that has nothing on it. That meant filling that dead time with content.” The brand looked to the medium of television for inspiration, aiming to produce many different segments strung together for a cohesive show. That meant transitioning stages into TV studios, ensuring the technological capability to deliver was there and finding ways to engage the audience.

Cut down the content. The sheer amount of content Salesforce had planned to distribute was no longer feasible. “We realized that there’s no way that you would pivot a giant, multi-track, hundreds-of-sessions thing to a [virtual event]. You just can’t keep it all. So, we cut a lot of stuff to make it fit into a more seamless, smaller event,” Sweezey says.

Embrace decentralized decision-making. According to Sweezey, it’s crucial to act “radically fast.” In fact, the Sydney team had just 10 days to put the virtual event together—so, alacrity was absolutely necessary. That means giving people “the ability to make decisions quickly without having to pass it all the way up the chain and all the way back down. That’s allowed us to be very agile, so we can reimagine what we’re going to create and deliver that,” he says.

A few years ago, Salesforce realized that the brand’s massive Dreamforce conference had tapped out with on-the-ground attendees. Simply put, there was no way to make it any bigger. So, digital delivery as a means to enhance a live event was already on the brain.

“We’ve already been testing the waters of digital delivery and had some prior learnings and key pieces of technology in place that we could just easily ramp up,” Sweezey says. “You’ve got to realize that digital is now a key piece…Every event moving forward in the next normal will be hybrid. There will be multi-tiered pricing, there will be multi-options.”

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Customers today are seeking security, service and localized experiences based on local language and culture, according to the CMO Council’s new report, Reshaping Global Engagement Operations.

The challenge comes as marketing operational structures may actually be keeping the customer and brand apart. The report, produced in partnership with Worldwide Partners, a global network of independent advertising and marketing services agencies, also revealed that:

• Marketers are missing the localization mark before campaign deployment. Eighty-two percent say local market intelligence is just ‘OK,’ while 10 percent admit their local intelligence is actually highly deficient

• Without access to local intelligence, opportunities will continue to be missed. Fifty-seven percent believe lack of localized market insight has had a negative impact as 37 percent say the lack of local knowledge is partially to blame for stalled relationship development initiatives

• Organizational structures may be partially to blame for the intelligence gap. The study investigated three specific operational structures: fully centralized (27 percent), fully decentralized (30 percent), and hybrid structures (30 percent) with local teams executing on strategies from a centralized leadership group.

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• Thirty eight percent of marketers operating in a fully centralized organizational structure believe that efficiency of spend and allocation is their top benefit. The downside to the model, according to 37 percent of respondents, is a lack of local market understanding and proximity to the customer.

• Thirty five percent of marketers in a fully decentralized organization say the top benefit is the elimination of corporate politics over execution and decision-making. Forty-eight percent admit the top drawback is not having a clear vision of the brand engagement strategy.

• According to marketers in hybrid operational structures, the top three benefits of their operations include a heightened understanding of the local customer, a crystal-clear understanding of strategy and goals, as well as heightened efficiency that optimizes impact of spend. Drawbacks still pop up, but are largely centered around timeliness of decision-making across the organization.

“Chief marketers embarked on organizational transformation in the name of efficiencies. Modern CMOs must now refine that transformation in the name of the customer,” says Liz Miller, the CMO Council’s SVP of marketing. “We fought hard to bring rigor and accountability to operations. Now we are asking old processes and operational structures to align with a customer that doesn’t see silos or functions. They just understand their own context and reality, steeped in culture and spoken in their own language.”

Agency alignment

Only 17 percent of marketers believe their operational models totally aligned with their agency partners, forcing some leaders to question the value and the impact of the relationship. This has led marketers to look for partners with the ability to scale quickly, be in closer alignment with business goals, and be a resource for skills and new capabilities around the globe.

Even so, 64 percent of respondents believe their relationships with current partners will stay in place over the next 12 to 18 months. Those who do foresee shifts anticipate they will bring content marketing (28 percent), customer intelligence (26 percent) and demand generation (21 percent) in-house. Functions likely to shift externally include public relations (21 percent), advertising creative development (24 percent), media buying (21 percent), and live event and experiential engagements (26 percent).

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1. Omnichannel proliferation and digital complexity

Gartner forecasts that 8.4 billion connected things will be in use worldwide by the end of 2017, up 31 percent from 2016, and will reach 20.4 billion by 2020. That’s a lot of channels for marketers to keep up with, potentially resulting in hastily integrated tools and channels to existing digital ecosystems and unmanageable digital complexity.

Instead of buckling under the complexity of creating and delivering digital experiences across all of these channels, AI helps marketers by streamlining omnichannel processes so individualized content can easily get to consumers, anytime, anywhere in a synchronous manner.

2. Data and a holistic view of the customer

According to Forrester, “Marketers have reached a point where their ability to capture data has exceeded their ability to take data-driven action.”

Data is the great untapped goldmine of the 21st century, and unifying data is the siren song for digital marketers everywhere. Without question, access to data is the biggest challenge for marketers responsible for the customer journey.

AI solves this issue elegantly, enabling marketers to unify data sources from across disparate departments and regions of an organization. AI can surface insights and drive actions by bringing together data sources such as:

• behavioral data (e.g., page views and other digital footprint data by your customers on you website)
• internal data (e.g., CRM); and
• external customer data.

The result is completeness of customer data for more intelligent content targeting. Marketers now have the ability to deliver personalized content in an automated manner to a countless number of micro-segments instead of relying on high level, superficial personas to compel users to action.

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3. Personalized customer experiences

Boston Consulting Group (BCG) asserts that “brands that create personalized experiences by integrating advanced digital technologies and proprietary data for customers are seeing revenues increase by 6 percent to 10 percent—two to three times faster than those that don’t. As a result, personalization leaders stand to capture a disproportionate share of category profits in the new age of individualized brands while slow movers will lose customers, share and profits.”

What does this tell us? That digital experiences are a high stakes game. Personalization is a powerful use case because AI is so effective at engaging customers by individualizing each interaction across any channel, whether website, mobile device, wearable, IoT smart device or app.

4. Real-time customer engagement

One of the hardest things for marketers to do today is understand what’s going to drive that next positive customer interaction, and then to act on it in real time. Data will do marketers no good unless it is available in real time to change a customer outcome. Unlocking your data and using it as fuel to power real-time customer interactions across multiple channels is another one of the great opportunities AI presents. Combined with the power of unified data, AI can deliver winning combinations of content-rich, targeted digital experiences that create micro-moments of influence—which according to Google are intent-rich split seconds when decisions are made and preferences are shaped—vital for marketers looking to influence customer behavior and gain a competitive edge.

5. Time to market and value

In an increasingly competitive digital world, time to market is not only essential, it’s critical. In fact, for many marketers time to market may be the only competitive advantage. Fast time to market is also difficult for marketing organizations to realize due to the time-consuming work necessary to delivering real-time digital experiences. Digital marketers need tools that reduce the time it takes to analyze data and gain actionable insights, as well as other manual, labor-intensive tasks such as preparing reports. AI algorithms delivered as part of software as a service solutions dramatically reduce time to market for common time-consuming tasks allowing marketers to spend their energy on what they do best—strategy, digital experience design, content creation, etc.—and let the systems do the rest.

Although there are challenges to using AI, many marketing pros are using it today and are often seeing an astonishing impact on digital marketing results. Marketers that take advantage of AI today will be able to accomplish exponentially more while expending less effort. They’ll be able to leverage customer data for more intelligent targeting and focus their energy on honing marketing strategies rather than doing work that AI can do better. And in doing so, they will realize a significant edge over their competition. The time to act and take advantage of this emerging phenomenon is now.

Michael Gerard is CMO of e-Spirit. He can be reached at Gerard@e-spirit.com.

This article was first published in February 2018 and has been updated regularly.

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Only seven percent of the over 250 marketers surveyed in a recent study by the CMO Council and RedPoint Global are able to deliver real-time, data-driven engagements across both digital and physical touchpoints.

And thanks to data siloed in disconnected systems, only five percent say they’re seeing the true bottom line impact of customer engagement in real time.

“We’re finding that marketers are still dealing with complex processes and offline data, which is delaying their access to the intelligence they need to create the next best action with a customer,” noted Liz Miller, senior vice president of marketing for the CMO Council. “[There’s] a lack of clear ownership over the customer experience strategy as a whole, with multiple teams battling for customer attention across a growing, fragmented landscape of data and engagement systems.”

The marketing technology stack continues to grow at a fast pace. In the past five years, 42% of marketers surveyed installed more than 10 individual solutions across marketing, data, analytics or customer engagement technologies, and nine percent have brought on more than 20 individual tools or solutions.

Many of the martech implementations for those surveyed amounted to “rip and replace,” reported the CMO Council: 44% indicated that they had spent more than a quarter of their marketing budgets replacing existing technologies. Still, only three percent believed they had true alignment between data, metrics and insights across all systems.

Who should be in charge? Perhaps not surprisingly, 77% felt the CMO should be the driver of data strategy. But, only 19% of respondents said the head marketing has this role today. Just over half are developing customer engagement strategies through individual teams throughout the organization, with a lack of agreement on how strategy should be converted into action.

The main roadblocks to implementing a true data-driven customer strategy include budget limitations (54%), failure to embrace a customer centric culture (43%), lack of c-suite support (32%) and lack of a solid data foundation in the organization (31%).

One thing that doesn’t seem to be lacking is data: 43% said they had enough data, but making it actionable was the real issue. A meager six percent of those surveyed felt they had a complete view of customers from all available data sources, and only seven percent were able to leverage analytics to drive real-time decision-making.

For a complete copy of the “Empowering the Data-Driven Customer Strategy: Addressing Customer Engagement From the Foundation Up” study, click here.

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Today’s buyers are more informed, their engagement heightened, and expectations increased; they require a unified customer experience across all channels and all front-facing departments—marketing, sales and support.

As a result, companies must look at customer engagement holistically, not as a series of handoffs across the front office, but as an end-to-end continuum where the relationship can be maximized. Customers today want the same level of personalization and service across all interactions with the company.

A new paradigm has emerged. It calls for a centralized way of managing the customer experience across channels, particularly the more that communications shift from one-way broadcasts to a two-way, multi-touch model.

This means an organization must have an integrated system accessible by all front-office departments, one that can draw a picture of a customer’s history with the company. Essentially, all front office functions (sales, marketing, and support) must be working in tandem and from the same playbook to deliver on this customer experience, and it must meet the needs of how the individual customer wants to be communicated with.

How do you get there? Though an open technology ecosystem.

Technology vendors need to work together to integrate applications, and ultimately adopt the mindset of an open ecosystem, looking to empower users to connect the systems they already have in place with other complementary systems, and make it easy for customers to leverage data from one app, pull it into the other, and further optimize its use and benefit.

Specifically, an open marketing ecosystem has become vital, as the role of the marketer has evolved into a true steward of the customer relationship. Think about it, marketing is the only department that makes significant investment in all stages of the lifecycle: awareness, acquisition, retention and expansion, and usually has the most objectives tied to the most lifecycle stages.

Marketing’s position is unique in that it is on the front line engaging with buyers when they are just a prospect, and remain in communication with the customers through advocacy and loyalty initiatives. This the technologies being leveraged by marketing also need to be made available by sales and support (and vice versa) as customers can be interfacing with all three simultaneously.

Organizations that fail to recognize these realities stand to lose customers, along with valuable opportunities for upsell, cross-sell, and retention revenue. As digital channels amplify, silos in a business are likely to become ever more apparent, and companies could well lose out on the opportunity to influence future customers.

Fact is, the day of the traditional end-to-end solution is over. Front-office technology vendors must realize they’re one star in a larger constellation of tools that includes CRM, marketing automation, CMS, sales force automation, support desk, and social media.

The future of business is about evolving into an integrated digital enterprise, empowered by data and connected through technology, with an understanding that the customer reigns king and has the power to persuade in the age of transparency.

Only in this way, with this new paradigm in mind, can companies truly deliver an unrivaled customer experience.

Atri Chatterjee is the CMO of Act-On Software.

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The Atlanta Falcons partnered with IBM to transform their customers’ experience by mapping out the early stages of their fans’ engagement pre-kickoff and nurturing those customers to the final on-site experience at games.

How can you identify and track the true business impact of a customer’s experience?

Join us Wednesday, Sept 9 at 2 pm ET for a live webinar with an in-depth look at the Atlanta Falcons’ engagement transformation with Shannon Miller
, the interactive experience
, North America sports and entertainment lead
 of global business services for IBM, and Brick Carley, client partner, IBM Interactive Experience.

Creating an exceptional customer experience is a game-changer. Digital marketing platforms, analytics, mobile channels and interactivity have all formed a huddle that impacts how better customer engagement can drive revenue.

“We know that creating the ultimate fan experience means meeting fans where they are, providing them with the platform to interact in a seamless way, and introducing them to new offerings that exceed expectations,” said Rich McKay, president  & CEO of the Atlanta Falcons in a statement. “IBM understands the commitment we are making to our fans and will help us reset the bar in terms of fan experience, technology and sustainability for sports and entertainment complexes globally.”

This isn’t IBM’s first time on the field. It has helped transform the fan experience at numerous major global sporting events, including Wimbledon, French Open, Australian Open, Masters Golf Tournament and the U.S. Open golf and tennis championships

“A live event is no longer about sitting in a seat and watching a game or concert, but a convergence of physical and digital experiences for today’s fans who are looking for the best way to get to a game or view highlights from their mobile phone,” said Bridget van Kralingen, senior vice president, IBM Global Business Services.

Learn more in our live webinar Wednesday, September 9.

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At this year’s B2B LeadsCon, we asked a panel of marketing experts to share 20 customer engagement tips in 20 minutes. Here are their ideas on ways you can connect with your B2B customer base.

Cyndi Greenglass, senior vice president, strategic solutions, Diamond Marketing Solutions

1. Pick up the phone: B2B telemarketing is really working well. Not just for lead generation, but as part of the overall cultivation strategy. We have seen success with international cultivation and nurturing through a highly personalized outreach. The phone call is a surprisingly low tech, high value touch. This outreach builds engagement and can allow you to identify obstacles and barriers to sale.

2. Gamification is not just for your teenager: Gamification is not just a buzz word, it is working for—and in some cases replacing—loyalty programs. B2B marketers are increasingly using gamification techniques to decrease abandon rates on surveys and forms, and to keep executives on their websites. They are also replacing traditional points based transaction loyalty by motivating and rewarding engagement activity.

3. Become a video gamer—or hire one: Follow the money! Product placement in games has been working for a while, but has not been embraced by B2B marketers. Remember that your Millennial B2B customers, buyers and prospects are active gamers and view eSports as entertainment. Think about how you can use product placement in-game to build recognition among key target audiences in manufacturing, technology and even operations. In fact, health care, insurance, and group benefits providers are even looking at how to use it as a way to build awareness among their broker channels.

4. Progressive profiling: Do it, period. Today we are seeing less and less data capture upfront, and more and more unfiltered inquiries entering the pipeline. Without progressive profiling, you run the risk of harvesting coal along with the diamonds and passing unqualified leads to the sales team. You also need a way to capture over time valuable contact information so that you can execute multi-channel, integrated communications.

5. Get out of analysis hell: Pick three things you want to know, and stick with the basics. You will be surprised how much you can learn. I would start with the goals for a campaign and did the effort meet them. This should be a financial, measurable metric. Then ask yourself, what worked best and why, and what failed or didn’t meet expectations? And lastly, what will you do differently next time? Make sure your answers are insights from your data reporting and analysis and not opinions.

Ruth Stevens, president, eMarketing Strategy

6. 6. PPC Display: If you’re in a highly competitive category where SEM PPC prices are very high, you can use PPC display ads that offer an appealing piece of content, convert at a landing page, and nurture the inquiry.  The PPC costs on these kinds of deals can be as low as 15 or 20 cents.
7. Top Lead Nurturing Channels: The top media channels for lead nurturing programs are email, phone and mail.  But it’s a good idea to mix up your nurturing stream with event invitations, press releases, tweets, infographics, podcast, surveys or questionnaires, videos or newsletters to keep people interested. 
8. Clean Data: You can’t engage your customers if your data is wrong, and B2B data degrades at the rate of 3-6% per month.  The number one way to clean data—this will surprise you—is to key enter the data correctly in the first place.  Train your personnel to follow the input editing standards of your database, and use address-checking software at the point of entry to promote deliverability.

9. Customer Preference Centers:  Encourage your customers to maintain their own data on your website.  Build a password-protected Customer Preference Center, where they can manage the data you have on them, and indicate how they want to hear from you.  You might consider offering an incentive, whether better terms or a discount, to obtain higher levels of compliance.

10. Top Retention Channels: Make good use of the top media channels for customer retention communications —email, telephone, social media, direct mail and customer events, including webinars.

Lianne Wade, vice president, account director, Wilde Agency

11. Digestible Content: Provide at-a-glance, digestible value-add content, such as lists, infographics to prospects and customers. As part of this, provide content that is also usable and shareable with end users so B2B clients/prospects can be prepared to start a conversation with their clients.

12. Have a 360 View: Consider a 360-degree view of your B2B clients since they are people too, with both personal and professional needs and interests. Obtain insights to develop an effective strategy that will be personalized and relevant. For example, a personalized New Yorker cartoon sent to financial advisors spoke to their concerns and provided a great conversation starter.

13. Science! Employ the science of human behavior to motivate action since 95% of decisions are made subconsciously. How do you tap into these unconscious behaviors? Through triggers or short cut methods to making decisions, like cognitive fluency, social proof and the consistency principle.

14. Direct mail is not dead! Used in an effective manner as part of a multi-channel stream, it provides value. It is tangible, breaks through the clutter and provides staying power/reminder, great visibility. Consider high-impact dimensional pieces for high value prospects sent in a two-step incentive process—they get half the incentive in the mailing and the other half when they meet with the vendor.

15. Men and women process information differently: Women typically want to take care of others and are constantly trying to balance their work/personal life priorities. Men are competitive and respond to facts and figures. Test different approaches to cater to their unique concerns.

Samir Bagga, vice president, marketing, HCL Technologies

16. Customer Advisory Council: If 20% of your clients generate 80% of your revenue and future growth, consider creating an advisory council to tap into those valuable customers and facilitate peer-to-peer crossselling. HCL has CXO and CTO councils with members across the globe and they love giving advice.

17. Mentorship Programs: Show your clients you value them by making them your internal champions. Get them to come in and coach your teams on their industries. The more they feel invested in your brand, the more they will support you.

18. Gatekeeper program: Remember to show appreciation for the folks who can help you connect with their executives. They can have a huge influence on their bosses and provide valuable insight into the company. Consider sending tokens of appreciation on holidays and birthdays like gift cards or chocolates.

19. Give them an experience: Create a customer experience zone to help showcase technology that can help showcase how your solutions can solve their pain points and help them experience the brand.

20. Content Workshops: Client workshops where customers can meet their peers are invaluable. Whether you run one-day intensives or four-day events, workshops can position your brand as a thought leader on industry issues and give your customers ideas they can take back to the office. Nothing works like workshops.

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