The Key to Profitable Growth? Become a Go-To Brand

Image Credit: Adobe Stock / elenabsl

Making a sale is great. Making two is even better. But profitable growth is a long-term goal, and that means becoming your customers’ go-to brand. Being a go-to brand takes more than a slick marketing campaign or perfectly timed push notification. It takes a real-time understanding of every customer’s needs at every moment, and the ability to personalise your offering to meet those needs as they evolve.

And they do evolve. Constantly. Adobe research reveals that 76% of consumers change their tastes every few months, and 40% see themselves as very different to how they were just six months ago. Most importantly, over three quarters say they are unimpressed with brands that can’t keep up.

These findings tell us two things. First, the age of segmenting audiences by age and gender, or into simplistic categories like “millennials” and “single parents” is over. Second, brands don’t just need to be more attuned to each customer’s needs, they need to respond with timely and personalised experiences at scale, and across every channel its customers use. In short, businesses across every industry need to be able to do more with less.

Which brings us to the inescapable role of technology in driving profitable growth for brands today. Even major corporations with hundreds of thousands of employees don’t have the resources to speak with billions of customers at once, much less connect with them at the individual level.

How do they maintain a steady dialogue with all these people and continue to grow at pace? By leaning on a centralised platform that combines data from every customer touchpoint in real-time. And, by having customer experience applications natively built on top of that platform, that are fully integrated by design, to seamlessly share customer data between them. This is what Adobe Experience Platform and its native applications, Adobe Real-Time Customr Data Platform, Adobe Customer Journey Analytics and Adobe Journey Optimizer do best.

This level of integration sets a new bar for customer experience, combining the power of real-time profiles with seamless omnichannel customer journey analysis and optimisation. Or as I like to call it, the Holy Grail for brands that truly want to transform the customer experience and engage every customer, with the right content, in the moments that matter.

That applies to every industry, whether those customers are shopping for a new suit, a mortgage or Formula 1 tickets.

Retail Banking Reimagined

Financial services firms today need to reconcile decades of legacy processes with the demands of a digital customer-base. More than half say offering digital experiences that improve their customers’ financial health ranks among their top priorities, but 43% struggle to perform more than the basics of personalisation. More telling is the fact that just 28% believe they are actually meeting their customers’ needs.

Digital-only firms like Monzo, Starling Bank, and Revolut have reset customers’ expectations of banks. What’s more, consumers now also compare their bank’s online and mobile services against every other digital application they use, from Netflix to TikTok. That sets a high bar for the quality of digital experience people expect from their banks, and the standard continues to rise each day.

High street banks may not have lean business models like digital only-players, but as pioneering firms like the UK’s TSB understand, their omnichannel presence is also a major differentiator. The key for TSB is ensuring data flows freely through its in-branch, in-app, email, SMS, and online banking properties so it can deliver services, financial guidance and offers that are aligned to its customers’ needs, no matter how a customer chooses to interact with the bank.

TSB previously took a batch marketing approach to personalisation. It would collect data, segment customers into simple categories, and target them with relatively generic content based on which bucket they fell into. Naturally, that approach was slow and led to a fragmented customer view, on top of which customers would get inconsistent experiences if they banked in-person or online.

Those issues are now relegated to the past. Data now powers every performance marketing activity at TSB, with customer journey design sitting at the heart of its strategy. Using the Real-Time Customer Data Platform, the bank draws first-party data to learn more about its customers with every interaction across every touchpoint. The solution also provides a central environment on which TSB can build its one-to-one customer communications strategies.

Meanwhile, with Customer Journey Analytics, TSB can analyse entire customer journeys across channels, rather than just single customer touchpoints, and identify where there may be friction points. By integrating Customer Journey Analytics and Adobe Analytics with Real-Time Customer Data Platform, TSB can ingest data from any channel and access actionable insights on how each customer behaves so the bank can create, personalise, and orchestrate compelling cross-channel campaigns. From there, Adobe Target ingests the data and allows TSB to test, refine, and improve those experiences, making them more personalised every time.

By personalising its loan experience and application process, TSB has seen sales jump 300% among its mobile customers. A channel that barely factored into its sales mix before working with Adobe, and has since become the primary growth driver for TSB’s loan services. In fact, the bank estimates that 6% of its total revenue is now earned through digital marketing channels.

Giving Retail Shoppers the Luxury of Choice

Digital sales have come to dominate the retail sector, the testing ground for many of the digital and omnichannel customer experiences that are commonplace today. According to the International Trade Administration, 83% of Western Europeans shopped online in 2020, led by the UK, Germany, and Spain. But the majority of retail purchases are still made in-store, which is why market leaders are just as focussed on using data to enhance their bricks and mortar experience, as they are their digital channels.

That goes double for luxury brands like Prada Group, whose loyal customers demand more from the in-store shopping experience, and expect to be treated like individuals. The Italian fashion house recently adopted Adobe’s Real-Time Customer Data Platform and Journey Optimizer to align its digital and in-store experiences and deliver richer personalised experiences.

Whilst Adobe Real-Time Customer Platform will enable Prada Group to combine vast amounts of data from every channel and unify customer profiles, Journey Optimizer will enable Prada Group to determine the next best interaction, and create and deliver marketing campaigns and tailored individual communications through push notifications and email.

Armed with a complete view of customers’ interactions with Prada Group’s brands across every channel, sales associates will be empowered to enrich the in-store experience on a whole new level. For instance, for customers who have opted in, sales assisants will be able to know if the shopper has checked out Prada’s infamous Cleo handbags on its website, and proactively invite them to see the bag in its latest summer colours. After leaving the store, the customer will receive recommendations based on their purchase, in-store experience, and online profile.

Thoughtful touches like these have always been the secret sauce for heritage brands. Prada Group is simply adjusting the recipe for a new era by drawing on the power of technology to create these personalised moments at scale.

It is not only in the luxury segment that the focus is on the individual needs of customers. Hyper-personalisation is also crucial in FMCG where many brands are trying to build relationships with consumers directly. Thus, Henkel, one of the largest companies in the consumer goods and adhesives industry, is also personalising customer experiences to further deepen its relationships with its customers and launch innovative products more quickly, to drive the company's growth.

To that end, the Düsseldorf-based group has developed a digital business platform called RAQN, which is powered by Experience Platform. RAQN sits at the centre of Henkel’s data-driven business and ecommerce model, integrating all of the brand’s customer touchpoints into a single environment. It bundles data management, 360-degree customer profiling, content distribution, and e-commerce for both Henkel's B2B and B2C businesses. A complete view of each customer’s needs now allows Henkel’s many consumer and industrial brands to deliver hyper-personalised marketing, relevant product recommendatons and provide seamless customer journeys.

In practice, that means that all of Henkel’s content and product recommendations speak directly to each customers’ individual needs in the moment. For example, if a customer posts a question in one of Henkel’s online forums asking the best way to remove red wine stains from their tablecloth, the personalisation engine behind RAQN will immediately recommend the right household product, and the customer can complete their purchase.

Similalry, RAQN also helps customers choose the right haircare. The user's most important hair characteristics, requirements and wishes are briefly queried, and based on the data provided, RAQN will recommend the most suitable Henkel products to meet their haircare needs. A seamless shopping experience that that feels natural and adds value to customers’ lives.

Revving up the Fan Experience

This development towards individual product recommendations and associated services are continuing to gain relevance, and not only in the consumer goods industry. Major sports brands like Real Madrid, FC Bayern Munich and Major League Baseball are also using Experience Platform and its native apps to deliver personalised content and offers that will resonate with their global fan communities, and bring fans closer to the action.

From exclusive video content on their team’s social feeds to discounts on merchandise based on in-depth customer profiles, Real Madrid and FC Bayern Munich are augmenting their fan experiences with new channels and formats and building new revenue streams in the process.

In the world of motorsports, Formula One’s fanbase has exploded in recent years as F1 increases its media reach with live leaderboards, multi-angle livestreams through F1 TV, and the hit Netflix docuseries Drive to Survive.

For legendary F1 team, Williams Racing, it saw the opportunity to transform its approach to fan engagement through personalised content and communications. Prior to working with Adobe, Williams Racing was delivering great content, from articles on the website to photos on social media, but didn’t have a strategy to elevate content, connect channels, and give its fan base the exclusive behind-the-scenes access that turns casual supporters into loyal Williams fans.

Working with Adobe, Williams successfully built out a new fan engagement program that aims to use one-to-one personalisation to build and nurture relationships with fans across channels, engaging them with gamified content, exclusive videos and shoppable content before, during, and after the biggest races on the Grand Prix circuit.

Adobe’s Real-Time Customer Data Platform provides the 360-degree view of every fan required for accurate targeting and personalisation. Meanwhile, Journey Optimizer, which uses AI and machine learning for personalisation and next best offer decisoning, enriches the Williams Racing fan experience even further by using audience and behavioural data, and orchestrated journeys to drive fans to the content they will find most engaging, using push-notifications, SMS, MMS and email.

The ability to segment audiences at a more granular level revealed that fans who played Williams Racing’s prediction games before each race where 12 times more likely to re-engage with the brand, prompting the company to drive more customers to these kinds of experiences. The move was inspired, helping Williams to increase its conversion rate by 22%.

What’s more, using geolocation triggers through Journey Optimizer, Williams push special messages through the mobile app to fans at key Grand Prix events, inviting them to visit nearby pop-up experiences. Fans can see show cars, take part in AR and esports experiences, receive discounts, buy special merch, and maybe even meet a Williams driver.

Williams has seen visits to its digital properties jump 340% thanks to its healthy pipeline of rich content. The company has earned more than 9 million video videos and increased page visits by an impressive 689% since joining forces with Adobe, a testament to the enhanced quality and relevance of its digital customer experiences.

Do More with Less

Across every industry, the dynamic between customers and brands has been reset by higher expectations about what it means to deliver true personalisation. In a world of infinite choice, with new engagement channels emerging each day, brands need the right technology to do more with less and drive profitable growth.

A centralised experience platform sits at the heart of this approach, helping brands to gain a complete understanding of their customers’ needs and behaviours. In parallel, the ability to build and act on customer profiles in real-time is the secret to delivering personalised experiences at scale that actually hit the mark.

Layer natively built customer journey analysis and optimisation applications on top, and you get a true personalisation engine that listens, learns, and evolves with every customer, on every channel, all at once. That’s not just doing more with less. It’s achieving more with less, which is what true innovation is all about.

In the coming articles in this series, we will show exactly how personalisation and real-time data help companies and brands in a wide range of industries to drive success and build lasting customer loyalty. To do so, we will take a deep look at the challenges of each industry and how companies can elevate their customer experiences with Adobe Experience Platform and its native apps, to build business resilience, excite customers and drive profitable growth.