4 steps to achieve innovation in digital messaging

84% of executives say that innovation is important to their growth strategy. Yet, innovation often lacks when it comes to tried and true approaches that have continued to perform well through digital transformation.

Innovation must play an active role in your customer experience and digital messaging strategy to effectively engage today’s consumers and enable 1:1 communications. For a tried and true channel like email, we view innovation as a journey.

Consider these four steps to ensure your digital messaging strategy continues to evolve:

Know:

In order to be innovative, you need to know your customers. The right data is a must.

Our clients gain the most comprehensive view of their customers using first-party data sources from across their organization and marketing channels. As a next step, customer profiles can be enhanced with seamless access to our proprietary insights, including profile and transactional data for 200+ million consumers spanning 7,000+ person-level attributes and millions of cross-device IDs.

Combining multiple datasets forms deeper, real-time customer profiles, and this true understanding of your customers will allow you to communicate with them on a 1:1 level.

Personalize:

Developing and incorporating a personalization strategy into your marketing campaigns is no easy task.

Through our digital messaging platform, Agility Harmony, brands can personalize every component of their message, including audience, content, offer, timing, location, device, recommendations, subject line, sequencing and more.

For example, Coach partnered with us to test the impact that deeper email personalization would have on improving customer connections. Each customer profile was matched to modeled attributes and data-driven insights, and categories were identified for the selected audiences.

From there, Agility Harmony’s machine learning and decisioning engine informed recommendations for individual subscribers and delivered 1:1 inbox content to test audiences. The more personalized approach drove real results for Coach, including a 3.7% lift in overall average order value.

Learn:

When it comes to innovation, machine learning is at the forefront.

Agility Harmony’s adaptive machine-learning environment is built to process our depth of customer insight by learning how each individual responds – with more than 1 trillion real-time updates daily – and factoring those decisions into the subscriber experience.

The technological advancements of machine learning continue to develop, but the need for humans remains essential. Because machine learning is automating the process, humans (marketers, product managers, etc.) can better focus on their marketing strategy instead of managing campaigns.

There’s a dynamic shift with what people are doing in marketing. As marketers, we need to let the machines take over the mundane processes, and remember the importance of the human component in more strategic endeavors.

Measure:

Oftentimes marketers think with an innovative mindset but don’t follow through on it, so they struggle with measuring their innovative programs and tying them back to revenue.

Agility Harmony helps clients easily identify high-performing campaigns and segments based on benchmarks the user defines. Clients have more control over messages when customers are least likely to respond or convert, reducing waste and deliverability risks.

But innovative measurement must go beyond clicks and opens. To effectively measure, it requires a strategic process (and data is essential) that provides insights into persona reporting and digital activity and customer value scoring.

Understanding your customer’s engagement levels through the VAP (Value, Attrition, Potential) strategy increases marketing effectiveness, identifies opportunities in your customer base to inspire growth, deepens relationships with existing customers, and helps to drive activation, upsell and retention.

With today’s technology, brands can use customer insights and machine learning to automate content and lifecycle personalization through email. So as you’re evaluating your digital messaging platform (and strategy), understand the value of innovation through automation.

Epsilon’s Agility Harmony consistently receives high ranks for service and client satisfaction by delivering powerful and engaging experiences for clients. In the July 2018 report, “The Forrester Wave™: Email Marketing Service Providers, Q2 2018, Forrester cited, “Epsilon demonstrates an unmatched balance of strong technology and professional services.” For the full report “The Forrester Wave™: Email Marketing Service Providers, Q2 2018” click here.

Epsilon was recently named the best email marketing services provider by ClickZ and best email marketing company by DMN.