How To Onboard And Retain Customers Better With SAP Marketing Cloud

By Valerie Nechay, Itransition

Customers are getting more informed and connected by the hour. To attract and retain such customers as well as make them your brand’s advocates, you need to build a customer experience and engagement strategy that makes it possible to deliver highly customized and memorable micro-moments.

Let’s look at how SAP Marketing Cloud can help you target and retain your customers better by launching successful marketing campaigns.

Among The Leaders

According to the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Marketing Hubs (MMH), SAP came out on top as a market leader. The research has found out that 87% of the surveyed customers use their MMH solution daily, which makes MMHs one of the most deployed marketing technologies.

As a multichannel marketing hub, SAP is distinguished with its AI-driven predictive decision-making powers as well as the emphasis on customer data and profile management. With SAP Marketing Cloud as a part of the SAP Customer Experience suite, you can bring more efficiency to these key marketing domains:

• Dynamic customer profiling
• Segmentation and campaign management
• Customer loyalty and advocacy
• Lead management
• Customer attribution

Let’s look closer at how these applications of the SAP Marketing Cloud apps power customer acquisition and retention strategies and make multichannel personalization possible.

Dynamic Customer Profiling

SAP Marketing Cloud was designed to help businesses analyze customer behavior holistically and level up their customer experience management through establishing highly personalized relationships. This platform brings together dozens of interconnected data sources and provides a single view of each customer and their journey in real time.

With SAP Marketing Cloud, you also can manage customers’ permissions and consent, track sentiment, get smart insights about your customers’ behavior and social engagement, and analyze the history of their activities and channel-specific journeys.

Advanced filters allow users to drill down into each customer interaction. For instance, you can analyze customer activities over a specific period and tweak your actions accordingly.

Segment-Specific Campaign Management

To create personalized messages and make sure they reach the right audience, you need to segment your customers into target groups. Here are a few ways to do it with SAP Marketing Cloud:

• Apply filter attributes such as age, location, channel, etc. to create segments that you can further fine-tune by merging, intersecting, excluding, etc.
• Apply geolocation clustering and view your customers’ distribution on the map, with the indication of clusters with high and low numbers of people and segmentation by radius.
• Filter by buying propensity is calculated using predictive algorithms to target customers who are more likely to buy a particular product.

With this kind of intelligence, you can run highly contextualized email campaigns that eliminate randomness. With SAP, it’s possible to create target lists and tailor email campaigns to those who respond and those who don’t, with real-time results that are easy to analyze and re-use in the future.

Loyalty Generation

Today loyalty programs are getting highly inefficient as loyalty bonuses and perks are frequently irrelevant to customers, making them switch brands all the time. To make loyalty programs drive the customer lifetime value up, you need to create micro-moments targeting specific segments. For example, a frugal customer makes a buying decision based on such factors as price, convenience, and location. To get closer to this type of customer, you would need to lower the price and make it easier to purchase your product or service.

SAP Loyalty Marketing allows creating multi-tier loyalty programs with customizable bonuses and setting up rules to reward online advocacy in a relevant way. It’s possible to group brand advocates by their membership levels and automatically award points in exchange for ratings, referrals, and reviews. SAP Loyalty Marketing can be integrated with eCommerce systems and marketing automation tools.

Lead Management

The SAP Customer Experience lead management tools provide marketing and sales teams with marketing insights necessary to generate and nurture leads. The solution can shape your strategy for the digital world, where customers expect you to make them feel rewarded, important, and influential at every touchpoint. It gets possible due to the intelligent use of data that helps personalize marketing campaigns.

What’s more, SAP Customer Experience brings sales and marketing together to grow customers and generate more revenue. Sales reps can benefit from intuitive lead management dashboards where they can navigate through detailed customer profiles and relevant context as well as track benchmarks and KPIs.

The solution allows sales reps to narrow down leads using advanced filtering, and look up leads’ details, such as a company name, contact name, qualification level, activities listed, and more. While on a call with a lead, a sales rep can take notes about the lead’s needs, requests, and expectations in the call log. By getting more details, it’s possible to refine the choice of the most suitable products or services and update the lead’s profile accordingly.

Having a 360-degree view of leads, sales teams can easily generate engagement scores, update lead statuses, and nurture leads through the sales funnel.

Customer Attribution

SAP Customer Attribution app helps businesses build intuitive campaigns based on the insights from attribution and proactively calibrate their marketing efforts. The solution creates a single view of the brand channels and customer touchpoints as well as monitors their performance in each particular case. This way, it’s easy to discover which marketing techniques convert audiences into paying customers and which should be discarded since they don’t bring desirable outcomes. As a result, you can effectively organize and manage data and prevent it from being locked up in silos, unstructured, scattered, or inaccurate.

SAP Marketing Cloud is designed for measuring marketing activities and their impact on customers, with predictive algorithms playing a big part in providing a personalized and intelligent brand response. Using data visualization, predictive dashboards can outline how new and existing customers will react to a certain trigger, suggest related actions, and reveal what you can change to improve future marketing outcomes.

A Perfect Choice For Marketing Strategists

As you can see, SAP Marketing Cloud comes as one of the most powerful tools for targeted marketing campaigns. By streamlining marketing and sales operations, brands can achieve more conversions and higher customer retention while turning customers into genuine brand ambassadors along the way. In turn, customers can enjoy a better experience, benefit from targeted, more relevant campaigns, enjoy straightforward loyalty schemes, and feel valued.

About The Author

Valerie Nechay is MarTech and CX Observer at Itransition, a Denver-based custom software development provider.