Natasha Cleary, Author at CACI

Adopting a Customer-Centric approach: How truly valuable is it for both your business and your customers?

Posted on: 16 May 2022

Brands are increasingly finding more ways of communicating to their customers by using extended methods of personalisation to grow customer retention and overall profit. The end-to-end process from learning and understanding your customers through to developing personalised communications is often complex, however adopting the right principles from the outset can ensure that the right steps are taken to achieving the wider goals of the business.

Understanding Your Customers

Understanding your customers commonly begins with an exercise in segmentation, allowing you to build a view of your customers’ interactions with your brand through the lenses of different audiences. A customer journey map then allows you to visualise each of these interactions in a linear journey to evaluate this view across several life stages and touchpoints.

What is the value added to your business?

By putting the customer at the heart of all decisions and communications and adopting a customer-centric approach, it will allow you to fully understand their behaviours, needs and expectations. The key value of a customer journey map is that it allows you to do this by considering all available data in context, rather than risking looking at information from fragmented sources in isolation. Being aware of these elements will enable you to create an end to end strategy based on a holistic data view.

Additionally, a customer journey map allows you to improve internal collaboration and alignment within your business amongst different departments (marketing, sales and operations). Together you will understand which activities to prioritise that make an impact on your business and your customers and will eventually cut counterproductive costs.

What is the value added for your customers?

The fundamental value it brings to your customers is that it leads to the creation of personalised experiences and in turn, customers will build more trust and gain a closer relationship to your business and your brand.

What happens if I ignore this step?

Failing in doing so will cause your brand to risk in sending communications to customers that are not reflective of the truth or their needs. It only takes one bad interaction with a customer to turn them towards competitors…

Talking to your Customers

A contact strategy is a visual representation of a planned communication strategy which creates a clear step by step plan of communication content, channels and time frequencies. It gives you the ability to deliver the right message, at the right time, to the right audience across a range of different channels. Essentially, it translates aspirational customer journeys into actionable campaigns.

What is the value added to your business?

To achieve better outreach, repeated visits and overall customer advocacy, it is important to plan the content, frequency and channels that are most effective for a given audience. While it allows the planning of cross sell and upsell, it also allows the nurturing of new and current customers through automated and/or triggered campaigns tailored to each customer profile.

What is the value added to your customers?

Planning and organising the communication flow avoids overwhelming the customers with unnecessary communication as each message is triggered according to the client’s prior behaviours and preferences, at the right time and through the preferred channel.

What happens if I ignore this step?

Communicating without a contact strategy relies more on frequency than anything else. Bombarding customers with fragmented communications can in turn damage the ROI achieved from each campaign as well as generating low traffic to your platforms.

There is clear value in going through the necessary steps to understand and communicate with customers in the right way. At CACI, we specialise in taking clients through this journey and our team of consultants can help you build your own. If you’d like to schedule time with our marketing consultants to discuss how you can create a customer-centric marketing strategy, please get in touch.

The new FCA Consumer Duty – CACI is ready to help

Posted on: 20 April 2022

The new Consumer Duty is an important directive from the FCA to protect consumers. It recognises the need to focus on consumer outcomes and to put these outcomes at the heart and centre of the organisation.

For financial services organisations to achieve the requirements of the Consumer Duty, there is a need for change. Change will require overcoming common obstacles around data, communication plans, marketing goals and working practices.

To be in line with the Consumer Duty, firms need to know their customer, adapt their products, and use data to drive messaging.

CACI is here to help

The result is that Financial Services organisations will need to improve consumer understanding, have a complete view of the consumer lifecycle and journey, revisit the selection and messaging used in communications, and establish new means to measure.

Operational siloes, fragmented data, incomplete consumer profiles, product-oriented campaigning, and slow/linear working practices all create barriers to achieving the FCA’s directives. Our experience has been that firms may be dealing with several of these blockers at one time, requiring more holistic solutions than a traditional agency or consultancy can provide.

CACI’s unique positioning in the market as part agency, part consultancy, part data provider and part system integrator ensures that we can really drive value for your business. Our services and data products have always been there to connect firms with their customers. Some of the ways we can help:

Enriching consumer data – Nationwide rely on CACI’s demographics and lifestyle data variables to provide deeper insights on who their customers are and the size of the market opportunity
Segmenting and insights on consumer audiences – the Money and Pension Service have used CACI’s services to build a profile of the nation’s wealth and indebtedness
Fixing data quality and fragmentation – working alongside their own data teams, CACI are improving the quality, latency, and reliability of the data that Bupa holds and uses in marketing
Improved marketing and communications tools – Virgin Money have invested in market leading communication tools, CACI has designed bespoke customer journeys to leverage this new technology
New reporting and measurement – from attribution through to complex propensity models, CACI can visualise and report on the KPIs that really matter
Efficient operating models – through improvements in the people and process side of marketing operations, CACI can strip out 80% of the time required to launch a campaign from idea through to results. This will enable you to send more targeted campaigns to the right consumers
Product insights – our Retail Finance Benchmarking services provide vital insights into the market for personal loans, current accounts, savings, and mortgages which supports and enables product design, proposition development, and provides an objective measurement of market performance.

The Consumer Duty is an important directive with vital intention to build trust between financial institutions and consumers. For help with your journey to compliance, please contact either Paul Sene or Cara Bramwell to find out more.

Activating data for a flagship customer experience project for the RAC

Posted on: 14 April 2022

The RAC provides complete peace of mind to more than 12.7 million UK personal and business members, whatever their driving needs. They’re famous for breakdown assistance, but they also provide motor insurance and a range of other services, including buying a new or used car, vehicle inspections and checks, legal services and traffic and travel information.

The Challenge: stepping up from outdated campaign tools

The RAC had outgrown its relatively basic campaign tool. They needed something more flexible and efficient to transform the existing manual and time-intensive process for campaign delivery. Their on-premise SQL solution was hosted by a third-party agency. Poor access to the data constrained the RAC marketing team, which needed to be more self-sufficient in campaign operations.

The RAC’s Data and CRM Strategy Leader, Ian Ruffle, says: “Because the legacy technology wasn’t efficient, it took over 48 hours to refresh the data. If it fell over, as it often did, because we were at the limits of the solution’s capability, it could take up to ten days from a customer being acquired to reflect that in the marketing solution. This was becoming a real problem.”

The Solution: future-proof MarTech and a flexible data platform

The RAC and CACI worked together to implement a suite of tools to transform the RAC’s marketing capabilities and to create the efficiencies and flexibility they needed. The first step was to build a single customer view (SCV) database using Snowflake. The pay-by-consumption processing function made it scalable and cost effective as well as future-proof. This gave the RAC direct access and control over their own data, which was a key requirement. Within Snowflake, CACI built a secure, accurate and compliant dataset, in line with the new GDPR requirements.

The database is hosted in the MS Azure cloud, and is refreshed and managed using Azure Functions, event triggers and DBT models. CACI’s resolution identity product, ResolvID also plays a part in the solution. It’s hosted in Amazon Web Services (AWS) and consumed in real time as event-triggered files are added into the database. This gives the RAC a complete view of each customer across multiple datasets and sources, allowing them to engage their customers in a more holistic way.

CACI implemented Adobe Campaign, Target and Analytics. The RAC and CACI worked together to migrate all their existing campaigns from their legacy solution into the new Adobe Campaign instance, automating everywhere that was possible.

The Benefits: self-sufficiency and an elevated customer experience

Ian explains:

This year we really have been enabled by the data activation project. We’re now self-sufficient to deliver campaigns and communications that meet the needs of our key business programmes. The solution has greatly reduced the time-consuming and manual tasks that the CRM team used to have to do, freeing them to work on more innovative projects. We’ve seen great results and are proud to have won the Data IQ Transformation with Data award.

Find out more

To find out more detail on how RAC approached its data and MarTech transformation, and more of the benefits the organisation has experienced as a result of the project, read the full case study here. If you’d like support in transforming your own MarTech stack do get in touch.

Bring a young person’s story to life

Posted on: 19 March 2022

In many cases, the story behind young people in the youth justice sector gets lost in myriad systems and professional bodies. Information gets siloed, making it incredibly challenging for Youth Offending Teams (YOTs) to paint a clear and complete picture of each young person that comes to their attention. Without all the requisite information being readily available, and with several cases to work on simultaneously, how can YOTs be reasonably expected to discover and consider all the underlying issues?

Bringing all of the available information on each young person into one central source of truth is helping YOTs to navigate each young person’s story, using valuable insight gained across their cases to make informed decisions and interventions for each young person.

Using technology to improve outcomes in youth justice

Advancements in technology are really supporting YOTs in improving outcomes for young people in the youth justice sector. Aspects such as data mapping are enabling a new understanding of youth offending patterns, making it easier for YOTs to spot intervention points and improve their outcomes.

ChildView, CACI’s specialist youth justice management information and reporting system, is designed with this goal in mind. By providing a rich and accurate view of what is going on in the system, ChildView supports YOTs with all the latest multi-agency information and activity in one place.

By bringing together previously disparate teams and professionals, ChildView makes is easier to read and understand each young person’s journey.

Telling the youth justice story

Using a central database enables each young person’s story to be told and understood. “For me, what I like about ChildView is that it tells a story about the young person when they come to us,” says Sue Pattison, service and case support worker at South Tees Youth Offending Service. “For example, it informs us if they were released under investigation and what was attached to that offence. It enables us to record their story and its outcomes as a process and it just flows, making it easier to read and understand, meaning that we can make better informed decisions.”

Bringing together different agencies is a crucial step in telling each story. “We have moved two members of staff into each area team to support our prevention work, and they are to be supported by wider YOS resources,” explains Paul Harrison, partnerships manager at South Tees Youth Offending Service. “We have used ChildView for this as we want to keep every bit of information about the young person in one place. This means that we can review why that young person has required early help and what the outcomes of it were.”

Report and develop

Once a young person’s story has been understood and acted upon, it is vital to gather information on the outcomes in order to help identify similar issues in other young people’s stories and to understand how well each action and intervention has worked. Again, by recording all reports in a central system, YOTs can easily identify and review cases, using them to inform future decision-making processes.

“The reporting module in ChildView has enabled us to swiftly report on all aspects of our service, particularly the area of re-offending, which has allowed us to identify and characterise different groups of young people that we work with,” says Troy Hutchinson, performance systems and information manager at Luton Youth Offending Service. “As a performance manager I am able to develop localised reports that empower members of staff, whether they are case managers or practice managers, to complete their own specific reporting tasks and use the tools to support practice development.”

ChildView is supporting YOTs across the UK to gain a complete picture of each young person that comes into their services, enabling them to understand each story and focus on the outcomes.

Migrating your customer data infrastructure to Snowflake

Posted on: 12 January 2022

Snowflake offers unprecedented power for customer marketing and analytics use cases. Its separation of processing and data storage gives scale and accessibility unlike any other solution. The key benefit for customer marketing and customer use cases is that all data users can work from one up to date source of truth.

Migration to cloud data infrastructure is already on the agenda for many CDOs, CIOs and CMOs. With a potentially large cost for migration, and the risk inherent in moving platform, there are planning decisions to make.

Firstly, there are many different types of cloud migration, and you need to pick which one suits the needs of your business.

Broadly these migration options fall into:

Lift and shift cloud migration – exact replica of previous customer platform in a new data cloud for increased resilience and lower cost of ownership
Optimise and migrate route – largely replicating a legacy customer database to the cloud but taking the time optimise key components of your data infrastructure to take advantage of Snowflake’s features
Migrating through a full rebuild – creating an entirely new data infrastructure within Snowflake to give optimum performance

At CACI we have experience of the pros and cons of each approach and can advise brands on how to get the most from a Snowflake and cloud migration. For instance a full rebuild approach is going to be more timely to complete but will offer greater benefits. In other cases the choice to migrate and optimise will offer huge performance enhancement to critical data needs whilst avoiding the larger budgets.

Regardless of route selected there are key stages in successfully completing a migration of customer data infrastructure to the Snowflake Data Cloud. At CACI we’re helping clients along this journey to minimise risk, accelerate benefits and ensure that the needs of marketing are met:

Legacy audit – all organisations will have a pre-existing set of data sources and integration tools that need to be audited in preparation for migration
Identity and quality assessment – reviewing customer data quality to ensure individuals are clearly identified and that data quality is a priority
Impact preparation – preparing for the impact of migration to Snowflake and communicating this within the organisation
Use case execution – moving to Snowflake will enable greater applications of data and more users having access to data. We help you plan for that to ensure that you reap the benefits
End-to-end planning – when making a change of this scale you need to ensure that all functional and technical processes are covered including reporting using the new data.
Operating model and enablement – ensuring teams across IT, product and marketing are able to fully use the capabilities of the new platform
Benefit assessment – post migration, retrospectively ensuring that the migration has achieved its objectives

To hear more about how CACI migrated the RAC from legacy data infrastructure to the Snowflake Data Cloud, you can watch Ian Ruffle, CRM Capability Manager at RAC, and Jenny Cann of CACI speaking at our recent event.

For more on CACI and Snowflake you can read these blog posts

Adobe Campaign v8 – CACI achieves another first with Adobe

Posted on: 10 December 2021

CACI continues to stay at the cutting edge of marketing technology as they achieve an EMEA first for Telegraph Media Group.

Communicating with their subscribers and readers is an important objective for the Telegraph, with a need to stay relevant through fresh content and offers. To continue serving timely and personalised messaging, the Telegraph made the decision to upgrade to Adobe Campaign v8 and to implement Adobe’s Experience Platform.

Adobe Campaign v8 brings high speed performance for complex data selections and ensures that Telegraph are able to reflect the diverse interests of their readers in communications.

As a long-time partner of both Adobe and Telegraph Media Group, CACI were appointed to run the upgrade. Notably this was the first upgrade in EMEA to Campaign v8 and the second globally.

Speaking of the project, Dylan Jacques of Telegraph said “it is great to work with partners who understand our business so well and take a practical approach to delivery. Working with the teams at CACI and Adobe has been a pleasure and enabled us to deliver a complex upgrade.”

With an increasing array of options for marketing technology, CACI remain committed to our mission of assessing the best options for our clients and making value led decisions on what route to take. David Delbridge who leads CACI’s marketing technology practice said “every client situation is different which requires us to look at the use cases a client has and make decisions that deliver the greatest value for minimal effort & cost. Telegraph needed a powerful platform that could handle their complex data and Adobe Campaign V8 was the obvious choice. As longstanding partners of Adobe, we are proud to have implemented the first Adobe Campaign v8 outside of the US!”

Should you want to find out more about CACI’s work with Adobe and the support we can provide in selecting and optimising customer marketing technology, please get in contact.

Discover how we can help you with Adobe

Find out more about how we’re helping leading brands with Adobe in our case studies with Virgin Media, Bupa, and Legal and General.

‘I feel seen!’: The omnichannel experience – making a customer feel valued and building better relationships

Posted on: 27 August 2021

As channels multiply and customers seek out constantly evolving ways to communicate, the linear customer journey is long gone. Instead of a neat, predictable series of interactions, customers now bounce happily from one channel to another, merging online and offline, making the leap to purchase once they have built trust and confidence in a brand.

Win-win opportunity

An omnichannel approach isn’t just proving necessary for brands that want to stay ahead, it offers benefits for both business and customer. From a business perspective it can contribute to more efficient automation, it enables continuous refinement of systems, and aligns process and customer strategy to meet customer expectations. For the customer, real-time interactions and intelligent personalisation can enhance their experience in a meaningful way.

A valuable experience

‘Experience’ is often talked about as the ultimate objective for omnichannel marketing, but what does that look like in reality? When done well, omnichannel marketing can move the customer beyond one-dimensional, one-way interactions, to an experience that adds value and fosters brand affiliation that can be long lasting. For a truly positive experience across channels, marketers must put the focus onto the customer, and ensure their experience is consistent, coherent, and forges a connection.

Consistency

As humans, we thrive on certainty. A brand that meets your expectation instils trust. Whether visiting a website, scrolling past an Instagram post or receiving an email, consistency is key to customer confidence. One way to do this is to create matching luggage. This approach optimises content to ensure it fits the channel and brand flawlessly, whatever journey a customer takes.

Uniformity should apply to both branding and tone of voice, providing customers with a sense of security in knowing who the brand is. A unified approach should also eliminate conflicting information across channels, helping to boost the brands credibility. For a completely consistent experience images and videos need to be formatted for each platform, ensuring assets are appropriately represented cross-channel. Treating each channel as the unique opportunity it is allows content to reach its full potential. Brands who repurpose content across channels without making adjustments, or paying attention to the messaging and character count, will stand out for all the wrong reasons.

Coherence

We all want to feel like we matter, and these days we expect brands to recognise us as individuals. It’s not just that inputting your details every time is frustrating and a drain on your precious time, but when a brand shows recognition of our personal tastes and preferences or our previous interactions, it humanises the experience and signals that the brand care.

By harnessing the capability of customer data platforms to continuously enrich a customer profile it’s possible to create a seamless experience across channels, allowing customers to pick up where they left off, wherever they touch in. A Single Customer View shifts the focus onto the customer not the channel, facilitating a holistic picture of the customer and enabling effective personalisation that will resonate. Using data insight to develop a deeper understanding of the customer serves to strengthen the customer relationship. The more customers feel seen, the more inclined they are to interact, and the more they interact, the better you know them.

Connection

What do we mean when we say ‘experience’? Often what we are pursuing in an experience is a connection on an emotional level, a deeper level of understanding of you as a customer and your needs. Omnichannel marketing provides more opportunity than ever to connect with the customer, because it meets them wherever they are. But to genuinely engage with a customer requires showing an understanding of their pain points, desires and motivations, all wrapped up in a visually stimulating, user-friendly design.

Good design can make a brand stand out, but satisfying design can solidify a customer’s brand commitment. Paying attention to accessibility, with appropriate text size and optimisation for dark mode, can stop a scroll in its tracks whilst meeting the needs of a sizeable portion of the population. Image selection must consider the channel to achieve maximum resonance, ensuring it fits the tone, look and feel to reinforce the message and chime with the audience.

Alongside visual elements, messaging can give insight into the brand culture and value that a customer can connect with. Key to this is an understanding of the customer demographic and which channels they use and using appropriate messaging that fits, so it feels authentic to the channel whilst staying true to the brand.

If done right, omnichannel marketing has the potential to be a powerful force in engaging customers, but only when they remain at the centre of the experience can that potential be realised.

One size fits none: why the future of effective digital marketing must speak to the individual

Posted on: 10 August 2021

In a world of multiple channels and differing formats, is it really possible to deliver brand-consistent flawless campaigns whilst communicating on an individual level?

Everyone loves pizza, right? Meet the Taylor family. Three generations of pizza-enthusiasts. Louisa is 15, obsessed with manga, baking, and social media. Her mum, Ellen, 44, loves running, and uses apps to manage her busy life, and her running times. Louisa’s granddad Mick, 71, is never happier than when fishing, and likes to catch up with his pals via email or text. As self-confessed pizza fanatics, loyal to their number one brand, they all want to know when the latest pizza has landed, or about a great deal on their go-to favourite. But should their beloved brand communicate this information in the same way, on the same channel? In short, no. Because which channel could possibly reach them all? And even if there was a single, magic channel, what single message would get them all interested?

Making sure matching luggage doesn’t become lost luggage

The beauty of the digital customer marketing evolution is that products or services with mass appeal can now speak to the masses, individually. Meeting them where they are, and talking their language, so to speak. It’s now eminently possible to make the biggest splash with each interaction by delivering the right message, on the right channel, at the right time.

Whilst it’s crucial to have brand consistency and content to be optimised across channels, we mustn’t forget the nuance that ensures your communication isn’t just a shot in the dark. Receiving generic content that doesn’t fit with your own lived experience or lifestyle is going to be a miss every time. If we start to shift the focus to making an emotional connection, we begin to reframe the expectation that communications can be as unique as the individual receiving them.

To hit the mark requires a level of understanding. You’ve got to know who you’re talking to, you’ve got to appreciate their motivations, and understand the channels you’re working with, to make the message work. Fed by data-led customer insight, a comprehension of your audience enables dynamic content to work at its hardest and humanise the communication. Personalisation can permeate far beyond their name, it can be their latest purchase, their location, even the weather at their location. Analysis of consumer behaviour not only leads to the most appropriate channel, but also aids an understanding of the most effective incentives, that inform the tone and language that will trigger the desired emotion and ultimately create a connection.

Making the connection, one slice at a time

The explosion of digital data makes a connection with customers, in theory, more possible than ever, but is dependent on having the right approach and using tools that are up to the job. Using a data platform such as Tealium to blend data sources, can layer an understanding of each customer. As a result, the creative can be tailored using platforms such as Moveable Ink, to leverage messaging for maximum impact. Harnessing the power of a cross-channel solution such as Braze, will ensure each individual receives a compelling, real-time, personalised experience on each channel.

So, what does an individualised approach look like in practice? Let’s take the example of Louisa’s family and a brand-new meal deal. Reaching Louisa on Snapchat, using localised references to create resonance, and quirky, interactive content that compels her to share, helping get the word out that it’s that time of the week. For Ellen, a rich push notification encouraging her to ditch cooking in favour of a takeaway is positioned as the solution she needs after a busy day. And for Mick, a text to remind him of the tasty pizza he had last week and nudging him to share another with a friend, could be enough to down his fishing rod and place an order.

Of course, the family are most likely to engage with the brand over several channels, necessitating a seamless omnichannel experience. The building of intelligent data profiles through CACI’s consumer segmentation tool, Acorn, can make it easy to recognise your customers, so they can feel seen, making it more about the customer than about the channel.

What can we ‘takeaway’ from the example of the Taylors? As we become ever more saturated in media and our methods of communication diversify, the need for consumers to feel they are the only person in the room becomes ever more pronounced. Moreover, with the right tools and understanding, it is infinitely possible.

Getting the message: the art of communicating content that will connect with your audience

Posted on:

More than ever customers expect brands to speak to them, not just literally, but with content that they relate to. It’s not enough to have a phenomenal product, a killer marketing strategy and an arsenal of digital tools – if the messaging is off, it could all be for nothing. Your content is the most direct route to connecting with your audience on an individual level, so using techniques including emotion and narrative, as well as making sure the message fits the channel, is vital to maximising every valuable opportunity.

Sorry, do I know you?

The key to on-target messaging is knowing your audience, and it all starts with the data. Once you’ve collected profile data and created meaningful segments through Tealium and CACI’s consumer segmentation tool, Acorn, you will have a deeper level understanding of who you’re talking to. You can personalise content effectively, far beyond first names, using their last interaction or other details to bring a conversation to life, effectively mimicking one-on-one communication. Knowing a customer inside out means you can signal the values that align with theirs or share their vision for a better life. And the more data captured, the more sophisticated and creative the personal touch can become.

Once upon a time…

Once you have an idea of your audience, how can you effectively capture and hold their attention? Evolved over thousands of years, storytelling is the most powerful tool you can use to compel the brain. It has the ability to communicate so much, including, by using the brand as the personality at the centre of the story, who the brand is. Good storytelling uses the power of language and, where possible, causes you to pause and reflect, making it more likely to stick in the memory.

But storytelling doesn’t need words, visual narratives are equally effective and better suited to social media. Videos can prompt a stronger emotional response and are more likely to be shared, whilst imagery can solidify feel and focus. User-generated content can help tell stories whilst having the added benefit of generating trust in the brand. Storytelling in this way isn’t a hard sell. It takes the approach of content marketing, that is, nudging behaviour through being thoughtful, relevant and engaging.

Once more with feeling

Humans are fuelled by emotion – we feel first and think second. Using language that triggers emotions we are hard-wired to respond to can be very effective. Love, fear, anger and guilt are all primitive drivers of behaviour. By knowing your audience, you can speak directly to their individual joys, fears and pain points, and ultimately inspire them to take action. For example, a car’s anti-lock braking system may help you have more control whilst driving, but if you say it helps keep your family safe, it taps into a desire to protect your loved ones and is more likely to resonate.

After the turmoil of Covid, most people feel the need for connection more than ever. The global pandemic has reminded us that we all crave the very human experience of bonding.

Using emotion to cultivate a sense of belonging can establish a connection which is more impactful and longer lasting. It goes beyond selling, it’s a way of bringing authenticity to a brand’s identity and helps the reader buy into the brand values and ethos.

Mixed messages – making the message work for the channel

Increasingly consumers take different pathways to making a purchase, having different touchpoints along the way. Whilst it’s important messaging is consistent, it doesn’t have to be adhered to rigidly. With an awareness of which audience uses each channel, the message can be creatively tailored using a tool such as Spirable to have the most impact on the target audience.

For example, Instagram is more likely to be used by Millennials or Generation Z, so messaging needs to align with their interests and needs, and the tone will be more assertive and dynamic. Email marketing provides an opportunity to pique interest through weaving more narrative, focusing on messaging that resonates with the demographic, whilst push notifications can use real-time content to engage and visuals to bring a message to life.

There’s no one quick fix to creating a message that connects with your audience. But a combination of personalisation, focus on tapping into an emotion and telling a story are more likely to make your reader sit up and take notice, and make sure your message doesn’t get lost in the noise.

Accelerating value realisation with CACI and Braze

Posted on: 6 July 2021

Braze’s recently published 2021 Global Customer Engagement Review is a report worth reading for customer-oriented marketers. Through research and in-depth analysis of customer experience data, Braze has gleaned vital insights into what separates brands that deliver a poor experience with those that excel (Braze titles these the “Ace” brands).

One stat that particularly caught my eye was that Ace brands are 56% more likely to exceed their revenue targets. And this is across all areas of customer activation, conversion, monetization and retention. They are leveraging all the features of Braze’s real-time customer engagement platform to improve the customer’s experience which in turn leads to more customers spending with the brand.

Set out below are the differences between brands delivering legacy customer experiences, and how Braze’s Ace brands are performing. It’s clear that Braze is enabling customer focussed organisations to create experiences and communications that resonate and connect with the recipient.

At CACI we’re helping brands to get the most from Braze. We’re a trusted partner at implementing, optimising, integrating and running Braze for our mutual clients. The work we’re doing with brands who want to be classed as Ace has highlighted five areas where value realisation can be accelerated:

High quality implementation of Braze – without this there may be challenges accessing or relying on the data that Braze holds
Real-time data integration – to deliver meaningful in the moment experiences, Braze requires fresh data
Optimisation not migration – when migrating campaigns from your old platform, take the time to optimise them based on Braze’s capabilities
Accelerate personalisation and optimisation – change business practices to enable more continual improvements to your campaigns and comms
Have the right model of expert support – whether it’s for creative assets or execution of CRM activity; you need the right type of agency relationship

CACI has now developed a set of Braze Accelerators designed for CRM teams who need to achieve greater results in a reduced timeframe.

If you’d like to find out more about how we could enable your brand to achieve more with Braze, get in touch and I will send you a copy of the presentation on our accelerators.

Author: Natasha Cleary