In this Research NXT interview, the CEO of WebEngage, Avlesh Singh, talks about how brands can engage with customers using personalised and in-the-moment content. He sets out how a single view of customers and personalised messages can help B2C marketing teams compete and win in this digital age.
In conversation with Research NXT, Avlesh sketches the transformation of consumer engagement marketing tactics and the influx of marketing technologies into it over time. With customer centricity taking centre stage in the marketing landscape, Avlesh's expert input is certainly insightful for new age marketers.
Key highlights
What this conversation covers
- A lowdown on the evolution of B2C consumer engagement.
- The edge and impact of marketing automation in B2C marketing.
- What is new at WebEngage.
We would like marketers in the GCC to refer to this study as a benchmark report while measuring and creating consumer engagement strategies.
To set the context, how has consumer engagement evolved over the last few years, and what do you attribute the evolution to?
To understand this, we would need to look back into history and understand how marketers perceived marketing automation as a tactic. It was always about leads, and it worked well in the B2B scenario. However, for B2C marketers that was not the case, as the consumer engagement model here is way different. Unfortunately this reality was only noticed very recently, when the B2C consumer engagement landscape started getting consolidated and the strategies around it were taking shape.
With the shortage of dedicated marketing automation options for B2C marketers, they started investing in point solutions like bulk email blasting services, push notifications and standalone analytics services. The brand engagements with this set-up were non-uniform across channels and devices, and the dire need for one-stop platforms was felt. Everyone started looking out for solutions that could provide a unified view of customers across multiple touchpoints.
Hence the most significant evolution was consumer brands starting with solutions designed for B2B marketing automation, moving to B2C point solutions, and eventually to multichannel single user platforms like a customer data platform, for more targeted and qualified connections.
Could you give us a sneak peek into any upcoming projects at WebEngage that you would like to share with our readers?
Yes, we are working on something exciting and we will launch it at our upcoming event, EngageMint. It is a very different take on engagement and an extension of what WebEngage has built already, that would address more business use cases in the B2C space.
Since thousands of people use our platform every day to activate, engage and retain their users, it has led us to a unique perspective on how teams across different industries accomplish their goals using our marketing automation dashboard. While 58% of all campaigns are sent on an ad hoc basis, only as little as 26% are sent using automated journeys, even though automated journeys get better engagement and improve campaign effectiveness and team efficiency.
We saw a dire need to automate these critical, highly repetitive use cases, and hence are developing a workflow engine that helps brands automate communication with consumers based on business events, that is, actions that take place in a business that impact the end consumer experience. With it, marketers would be able to automate personalised campaigns, product managers could automatically send new feature and app updates, and developers would be able to outsource all kinds of product communication to WebEngage.
What is your goal with the research study on the GCC market that you are conducting with Research NXT, and how do you think the report is going to help achieve that goal?
GCC is a fast-growing market and has some early adopters of the WebEngage suite. Marketing technology enablement in the region is still at the scaling stage, which demands the right mix of marketing talent with sound technical skillsets and the right vision around consumer engagement.
So with this study we aim to close the gaps in terms of understanding of consumer engagement, retention, and the available enablement technologies. More importantly, we would like marketers in the GCC to refer to this study as a benchmark report while measuring and creating consumer engagement strategies, until we come up with the next version.