The offer is right with Offer Decisioning

Have you ever gotten a reminder about your loyalty rewards expiring after you just redeemed them or a product recommendation for something that’s sold out? It’s frustrating, to say the least. Consumers expect more from brands. Consumers expect brands to know who they are, how they shop, and what they want. And when brands don’t meet these expectations, they can easily switch to other options.

With every message or interaction, brands have a unique opportunity to add value to their customers’ lives. The “offer” in each message is the value or purpose for that interaction. For example, a bank might save a homeowner money by sending the customer a refinancing offer for a lower interest rate, or an auto service center might send a customer a text reminder for their annual car maintenance that allows the customer to book the appointment directly via SMS. These examples save customers money and time, ultimately delighting the customer and adding value.

Brands are making strides in delivering the personalized, relevant experiences consumers expect. In fact, 33 percent of companies are spending more than half of their digital marketing budget on personalizing content. And 25 percent of marketers are personalizing next-best offers. So, if brands know what consumers expect and are making the necessary investments in technology to meet these demands, where’s the disconnect? Why are consumers still frustrated with irrelevant, untailored offers?

The challenges

The truth is that creating personalized experiences at every point of the customer journey in real-time and at scale is challenging. To do this right, brands must make the right decision, using the right data and be able to automate this process at that moment in time. Winterberry Group defines this practice as determining the who, what, when, where, and how a brand communicates with its customers.

Most decisioning technology today isn’t necessarily meeting the needs of marketers and their organizations. In fact, only 14 percent of companies are very satisfied with the contribution and value that their decisioning solutions have brought to their organizations. But the reality is that a decisioning solution alone isn’t enough to create and deliver the real-time cross-channel experiences customers expect. People, processes, and technology all play a role in the success of decisioning.

And when it comes to offer decisioning, the complexity is even greater. Disconnected customer data, data governance issues, lack of offer management capabilities, and decentralized decisioning across channels can lead to disjointed experiences for customers. For marketers to tackle these challenges, they need an end-to-end solution that can manage the process of creating and delivering the right offer, to the right person, on the right channel from beginning to end.

An end-to-end solution

Offer Decisioning, a new API-first application service built on Adobe Experience Platform, gives brands end-to-end offer management and decisioning that drives revenue, improves the customer experience, and offers value to customers, ultimately encouraging loyalty. Offer Decisioning provides businesses with the essential building blocks for managing offers at scale:

• Unified customer data: Brands often personalize customer offers based on limited data. Customer preferences can change quickly, but few customers take the time to update these preferences with stores. With a single view of the customer, unified within Adobe Experience Platform, brands can get a real-time view into customer preferences, behaviors, and even contextual data, allowing for an even more relevant offer.
• Centralized offer library: Lacking a centralized library of offers means that brands are wasting resources, creating one-off promotions for each channel and each campaign, leading to inconsistent experiences. With a centralized offer library, supported by the ability to rank and prioritize the offers as well as defining which customers are eligible to receive those offers, brands can accelerate time to market and remove both inefficiencies and inconsistencies in managing their offers.
• Decisioning engine: A decisioning engine ensures each customer receives the next-best offer regardless of interaction or channel. Brands can specify business rules to determine eligibility for offers based on ranking, constraints, frequency, deduplication, and even capping. For example, a clothing boutique wants to run a promotion for a 15 percent off flash sale on its site for its most loyal customers. The clothing boutique can use the decisioning engine to offer the promotion to only return customers who shopped at least five times in the last six months and cap the promotion at 1,000 redemptions.
• Cross-channel integration: This API-first service enables brands to deliver consistent and seamless cross-channel experiences by integrating Offer Decisioning with marketing and customer-facing channels across the organization.

Offers are more than discounts. Every offer is an opportunity for brands to build a connection with their customers. In today’s competitive landscape, brands can’t afford to get it wrong when it comes to offers. And with Offer Decisioning, they don’t have to.