Consumers use electricity and gas every day, but for the most part they are not often in contact with their energy supplier. Energy is often seen as a pretty homogeneous product in a price-driven market, which makes it challenging for an energy supplier to win the customer’s loyalty.
That’s why it is so crucial to give customers the right message at those precious interactions with the customer or moments when the customer is looking for information about energy.
We make that happen by identifying the right triggers and translating these triggers into the right context and the individual 360° customer profile. Combining specific customer behaviour – such as a visit to an online information page about solar panels – with relevant customer attributes creates possibilities to be relevant in marketing terms to the customer’s individual needs, via the right channel at the right time.
Thinking from the customer’s perspective is an essential part of this, as customer behaviour such as visiting a website or calling customer services helps to identify customer needs, which leads to the right follow-up from marketing. It is important to do this by deducing customer behaviour from data as much as possible. We therefore don’t just help to provide the most relevant data for that in the right format, we also help to create new, relevant data.
Marketing Automation starts with defining the objectives that match the organisation’s vision and strategy. A gap analysis is mapped out on the basis of these objectives, which is necessary in order to move from the current situation to the desired situation for Marketing Automation.
A key component of Marketing Automation is the Customer Journey and having a good understanding of the journey that the customer goes through. The brand itself is a good starting point for designing Marketing Automation. We help with this by mapping the Customer Journey based on the data and identifying, together with the client and/or market research, which are the critical moments in the Customer Journey. This then allows the link to be made with the identified triggers and creates a blueprint for the marketing campaigns that will be developed and how they can be automated.
However, the Customer Journey doesn’t have to be identical for every customer. The customer base may be made up of various different target groups, each of which may have their own interpretation of the Customer Journey. We help to identify these target groups based on segmentation analyses. With these analyses, we can assign individual customers to the right segment, creating possibilities to match their individual customer needs better than before. These segments provide a framework for thinking about the right content, the right tone of voice, the right proposition and the right marketing channel to maximise the ROI on marketing activities.
In addition to segmentation analyses, we also help with analytics by developing models for churn, supply and channel preference. These can be more traditional models, or alternatively models based on machine learning, where the model is continuously being automatically updated based on the most recent response and data.
Depending on the objectives of Marketing Automation, new tooling may be required to ensure Marketing Automation is used to its full potential in the organisation.
A Data Management Platform (DMP) can help to identify customer behaviour from every customer interaction, and anticipate it. Connecting information from various different channels creates an integrated customer profile in the DMP which can be used to reach the various different customer segments (in real time). The DMP can be used in online advertising to show the right banner for each customer segment or in e-mail marketing to automatically send the right e-DM based on a specific visit to a website.
Whilst a DMP is primarily aimed at the correct follow-up to online anonymity, a Customer Data Platform (CDP) is more aimed at CRM and analytics. A CDP combines both offline and online data sources to generate a “single view of the customer” which offers many possibilities for analytics and for connecting customer interaction systems.
We help with our broad and in-depth knowledge of these tools in the form of advice to arrive at the desired situation for Marketing Automation.