Loyalty is all about relationships. Make your customer feel loved, valued and heard, and you’re on your way to creating a repeat customer and lifelong ambassador for your brand.
It’s a personal thing. And these days, that level of attention is pretty much expected by most consumers of most brands. We’re talking personalisation: communication that shows an understanding of needs and a tailoring of messaging across all customer touchpoints, and that is welcomed by customers.
In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, there is a strong momentum for personalisation. As the region’s economies continue to expand, incomes are rising and consumers are becoming more discerning in their tastes and what they expect from the brands they interact with.
The benefits of effective personalisation are clear: stronger customer loyalty that leads to better business outcomes. Get personalisation wrong – or simply neglect it – and the downsides are just as evident. At best, a brand may simply not be noticed. At worst, it’s avoided.
Getting it right is getting harder
As third-party cookies are phased out, alternative technologies are being developed to make sure this impetus for more personalisation continues. Organisations in MENA need all the help they can get to deliver a more authentic and meaningful experience to their consumers. Creating a more personalised experience is one of the biggest challenges brands in the region face.
Yet, continual changes in privacy regulations, in technology, and in how platforms provide access to data are all constantly throwing up new challenges to marketers looking to create meaningful and sustained relationships with consumers. On top of that, people are changing their habits and purchasing patterns. Plus, their expectations of timely, useful, personalised interactions with brands are increasing by the day.
The challenge is also not just to gather actionable audience information but to ensure that marketing teams across the business interpret and leverage it to best effect. Collecting data from diverse sources like web, mobile, backend servers, data warehouses (DWHs) and partner technologies can very easily lead to data silos and prevent a marketing tech stack from giving a unified customer view. The result of that is a failure to create cohesive and valuable customer experiences and a higher risk of delivering incoherent messages to users, eroding customer trust.
Beyond data silos, brands often also grapple with organisational silos, where a lack of collaboration among teams also disrupts the customer experiences across touchpoints.
What’s required is a data management solution which unifies all that customer data, providing valuable insights into customer preferences and behaviours and enabling a brand to create an effective personalisation strategy at scale.
Embrace the tech
One such solution is Braze, a comprehensive customer-engagement platform which has recently introduced new and enhanced data features, and added partnerships and functionality to help brands streamline their data integration and reduce time-to-value.
The platform offers a solution to marketers’ challenges around personalisation, bringing together fragmented data sources to give a unified, real-time view of each customer and powering interactions between consumers and brands.
Braze has teamed up with Snowflake, the Data Cloud company, to leverage Snowflake’s Secure Data Sharing, which enables marketers to unlock the potential of their customer engagement and campaign data even faster than before.
Marketers and data teams can securely access their company’s Snowflake data (which may give even more insight into customer journeys or personalization) by directly pulling it into Braze without worrying about creating data pipelines, failure points, or unnecessary costs. By using Snowflake with a customer engagement platform like Braze, marketers can easily deliver personalised brand experiences that can drive stronger business results.
If you’re going to act on customer information effectively, then a centralised location is a must, and the Braze platform is a purpose-built solution. With a flexible interface and pre-built integrations, it allows for seamless data porting. Live-updating customer profiles empower marketers with the most relevant data, sidestepping the issue of data silos and enabling the delivery of timely, accurate messages.
In it for the long game
With so many consumers expecting personalised interactions, businesses urgently need a streamlined process to collect, integrate and activate customer and product data across diverse systems.
In today’s challenging, fast-moving and competitive landscape, marketers need to find ways to serve up responsive, personalised brand experiences that speak to each individual customer and reach them on the devices, digital platforms and messaging channels that they care about.
Navigating such complexity requires the right tech stack, capable of supporting this vision at scale. It is those brands that invest in a more cohesive solution that streamlines data integration, therefore, that will ultimately prove most flexible and able to deliver tailored customer experiences.
These are the brands whose personalised customer engagement strategies are in the best position to drive loyalty, retention and revenue. These are the brands that will win tomorrow.
Unlocking actionable consumer insights and seamless team collaboration: Check out your guide to leveraging Braze and Snowflake for exceptional brand experiences
