Financial Impacts of Reacting to Customer Intent in Real Time

According to McKinsey research, a high-impact product recommendation – such as from a trusted friend or brand – is up to 50 times more likely to trigger a purchase than a low-impact recommendation. An effective way to ensure a recommendation reaches the high-impact threshold is to align it with a consumer’s intent to purchase. Through their actions and behaviors across channels, customers and prospects leave purchase intent signals at every interaction.

With an understanding of consumer intent, brands are positioned to optimize customer engagement across every interaction touchpoint and increase customer lifetime value, keys to driving revenue. In a Harris Poll survey commissioned by Redpoint, 53 percent of consumers said that they expect a brand to know their buying habits and preferences and to anticipate their needs, and to demonstrate this understanding through personalized recommendations, unique offers, and recognition across channels. Brands that do this right are rewarded with loyalty; 37 percent of consumers said they will be more likely to purchase from the brand in the future.

Another 37 percent said that they will stop doing business with a company that fails to offer this type of experience. Recent IDC research produced similar findings, estimating that by 2021 businesses that invest in providing a frictionless user experience will see a 20 percent decrease in customer attrition.

Form a Consumer Intent Picture Using All Data Sources

A previous blog on customer intent in this space focused on omnichannel intent listening and detailed how brands use all sources of customer data to mine intent signals and form a real-time response. Here, we’ll shift the focus to tangible, real-world examples of how brands turn intent signals into revenue.

Consider an advanced intent marketing use case deployed by one Redpoint customer, a specialty retailer. The retailer, like many others, struggled to curtail shopping cart abandonment. One study estimates that 68 percent of online shopping carts are abandoned before a purchase is made.

By recognizing abandonment as a strong intent signal, the retailer integrated the behavior into an innovative buy online, pay in-store (BOPIS) model. If a customer buys paint online and chooses the pay in-store option, a single customer view lets the retailer see if the customer also abandoned accessories such as brushes and rollers. When the customer is approaching or at the store, the retailer leverages a real-time decisioning engine to make a next-best action that is perfectly timed in the context of the customer journey. If the partial abandonment as a purchase intent signal is strengthened by similar behaviors – such as a click-through on an ad for the product – the next-best action could be a discount offer on an accessories package.

With perfectly timed next-best recommendations, the retailer delivers highly relevant, high-impact messages and offers to customers through any engagement touchpoint, including mobile, and has significantly increased upsell revenue.

Predicting Intent Beyond a Customer’s Action

With a single customer view that includes all sources and types of customer data, a brand can listen for intent signals beyond even a direct action taken by the customer. Another Redpoint client, a consumer packaged goods (CPG) company, links external data such as weather forecasts to customer preferences and transactional history to anticipate intent signals.

This external data becomes part of the customer’s golden record. A single point of control provides marketers with a capability to mine the golden record for data insights, to gather meaning from a variety of intent signals and decide what action to take to turn intent into purchase. With in-line analytics and a real-time decisioning engine, a single point of control provides the CPG company with the ability to return a next-best action optimized for the intent shown by the customer at that precise time.

For example, weather metadata can be used as a data source to predict shifting intent, but that signal might only be activated during a short window. Brands with an advanced intent marketing strategy can strike during the precise window of opportunity wherever the customer appears in a journey.

With hyper-personalized messages and relevant offers based in part on the full range of consumer intent signals, the company enjoyed a 144 percent sales increase in just six weeks after implementing the Redpoint platform compared with the previous baseline.

Intent Marketing Outside Retail

Capturing consumer intent extends to other industries. One Redpoint customer in the healthcare space is using a single point of control to capitalize on the trend toward healthcare consumerism, which recognizes that the healthcare consumer now drives his or her own journey through the healthcare space to include relationships with payers and providers.

The consumer’s intent to stay healthy plays a significant role in healthcare consumerism and the shift toward value-based care in which providers are paid according to their role and success in the overall health and well-being of the end consumer rather than by services rendered. With a single point of control over data, analytics and interactions, Redpoint enabled this healthcare company to analyze each consumer’s behaviors and actions (eating right, exercise, keeping appointments, etc.) and proactively manage these intent signals as part of an overall healthcare journey.

The next-best actions could be communicating appointment reminders or tips for healthy eating, for example, whichever action best aligns with a patient’s intent and with a preventive treatment plan as prescribed by the provider. In part through capturing and responding to intent signals, the Redpoint customer is helping its customers – payers and providers – advance toward what’s known as the “triple aim” of value-based care – improved quality of care, lowered total cost of care, and an improved member/patient experience.

The above examples show that intent marketing reaps financial rewards for brands and businesses that have the platform in place to aggregate every piece of customer data from online and offline channels, apply in-line analytics, and activate intent signals with a real-time decisioning engine that intelligently orchestrates a next-best action or recommendation at the moment of interaction.

RELATED ARTICLES

Capturing Intent in an Omnichannel Customer Journey is Next-Level Marketing

The Art of Listening in Mastering Omnichannel Marketing

Data as a Revenue Engine: Monetize Your Data with a Single Point of Control

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