It’s a tough being a Marketer with everything changing around us and its hard to predict the future with so much uncertainty.
A study by 1to1 Media asked 150 members of its Xchange panel the question, "What will one-to-one marketing look like in 2020?" The overwhelming response was a more connected and informed customer-company relationship.
Here’s what the study showed:
- 84% say there will be moderate to high levels of positive change occurring within one-to-one marketing by 2020. With significant improvement in company’s ability to collect and share information, understand customer needs, calculate customer lifetime value, improve the customer experience, and provide customers with relevant messaging in their preferred channel.
- 78% agree that the future of marketing will be based on building authentic relationships more so than the development of new products. And customers will continue to gain control of the relationship. Online chats, blogs, and Internet-based social communities increasingly put control of the brand image into the hands of customers. On the customer service side, one bad experience can have an exponential impact on a company’s reputation as customers share their stories electronically.
- Companies that will break through to customers are the ones that will focus on fairness, transparency, and building trust across the board.
- By 2020, marketers will focus less on gaining short-term advantage and more on working to win and maintain customer trust — 84% of respondents agree that building customer trust will become marketing’s primary objective. Historically, the goal of marketing was to promote sales. This shift in mindset suggests that marketers are more fully recognizing that a message can’t influence customer behavior if the messenger isn’t trusted.
- 82% agree that customer collaboration will prevail over marketing to customers. And, it will only increase as the tools to enable and track customer insight and participation improve.
Some of the chalenges we will face involve governmental regulations that impact privacy, the amount of solicitations and messaging across channels, and the fact that customers’ attention spans are in short supply and under increasing pressure.
Nobody asked me, but it seems as though the future is here!
So, to improve your 1 to 1 strategy you need to put one-to-one marketing into the day-to-day operation of the organization to improve the customer experience. Tactically speaking you can create more meaningful, relevant and timely communications.
Staying ahead of the curve will not be easy and will require a consistent planned effort and dedicated customer insight.
