Zeta

THE HIGHLIGHTS

Use ‘agile intelligence’ to keep pace with a digital world

Sponsored by zeta Global

In the last two years, the digital ecosystem has changed drastically, as has the way customers engage and interact with digital platforms. Yet currently too few companies are managing to keep up and reflect this ‘new normal’. So, what’s the solution?

The pandemic proved a major catalyst for digitised lifestyles. Be it hours spent on smartphones, ordering essentials online for the first time or signing up to brand-new online platforms, the restrictions brought about as a result of Covid-19 spurred on huge leaps forward in customer relationships with their digital devices. As a result, it spawned reams of new real-time data to organisations too. Yet, currently, far too few companies are able to leverage the power of this data. More than three quarters of companies (76%) say they lack the ability to transform raw data into actionable insights that could improve customer experience, according to recent research by eMarketer.

Hunter Harritt

Highlighting this research during a Festival of Marketing session, Stephanie D’Sa, Zeta Global’s vice-president of strategic consulting, pointed out this inability to match the pace of change in customer behaviour was holding organisations back. “Although customer behaviours are changing so fast, most companies are not able to change with them as fast as they could,” she said. In particular, the landscape of customer data platforms (CDPs) is very solution-orientated rather than customer-orientated. A Gartner survey found the average organisation uses 4.7 different CDPs, which inevitably creates silos. “Our view is that we need to bring together data in a unified way, to [enable] democratisation of data that serves for all different functions of the business, rather than having four or five tools in different areas,” said D’Sa. Zeta Global calls this approach ‘agile intelligence’. “Agile intelligence is taking the business decisions you make every day but enhancing them with customer-, market- or location-based insights, and bringing that together in a real-time way to help activate decisions, be it in the marketing, operations or analytics team. It’s a portal of insights serving in one common way to different teams for their different purposes.”

Zeta Global's Stephanie D'Sa on consumers' changing digital relationships

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Real-time intent signals This approach requires a view of three key areas of data, she explained. Location data extends beyond the physical: “Which devices are being used and where are we seeing customers across the digital landscape? “For market intelligence, what can we see of the market? What movements are happening? Where are customer motivations going? Intentions are changing all the time and we need to see that move in the moment. Finally, having intelligence of what they're doing and how they're shifting – the customer. Those three components give the sweet spot to make the best decisions.” Using this approach has a material impact on the engagement and conversion rate across customers, both online and offline, added Florian Grouffal, managing director and senior vice-president of European sales at Zeta Global. In multiple retail categories, for example, the opportunity to acquire customers using real-time intent signals has led to engagement increases of 117% in recent acquisition email campaigns. At French retailer Loewe, using real-time data to analyse its website and content boosted engagement 300%. In financial services, agile intelligence has been used to boost conversion, explained Grouffal. “Based on a recent Zeta study, only 18% of respondents prefer to use a digital-only bank. So my question is, what do we do with the other 82%? “We have worked with companies on improving the user experience, to push maximum conversion online but also spot those users that won't buy online and need an offline experience or journey. We used agile intelligence to identify highly engaged users who won't convert online and push them to a call-back option from call centres.” To start exploring the potential of agile intelligence in their own organisation, D’Sa challenged brands to start small and go from there. “It's about defining use cases. Let me step out my comfort zone and speak to another department, and let's start to challenge each other. Ask questions. Define some common use-case goals. Then trial its effectiveness and prove the value and impact, before using that to scale up.” The digitisation of lifestyles isn’t going anywhere and it isn’t about to stop evolving. Organisations need to start integrating efficient real-time data solutions or get left behind. Click here to learn more about making faster and smarter marketing decisions.

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