Full Stack
Communications, Engagement and Product Experience have functioned as three distinct stacks. Companies are now using build-and-buy to expand their turf. The driving factor behind this is that all the solutions offered by the three stacks are targeted at the same end customer. This is giving rise to the Digital Experience Platform (DXP).
The DXP is expected to have the following features:
Omnichannel: it should be able to work across all the channels that customers are engaging on. Customers expect continuity in their interactions across channels, and also between the offline and online worlds.
Push Messages + Conversations: The earlier world of push messages sent via SMS and email is getting replaced with the rise of 2-way interactions. Texting in the US is on the rise because it is 2-way. (In India, TRAI has unfortunately restricted SMS to just being a 1-way broadcast channel, preventing recipients from replying and engaging with brands.) New channels like SMS over IP (SoIP), RCS and WhatsApp allow for rich media and interaction. In email, there is AMP. Chatbots and the linking of these channels to a martech automation system enables the interaction to go beyond the standard request-reply mode.
Email with Primary Inboxing: Email remains the channel with the best RoI. The focus in email is shifting from just sending to ensuring delivery into the primary inbox. This is necessitating multiple innovations: using standards like BIMI, DMARC and AMP, leveraging STO (send time optimisation) and SLO (subject line optimisation) to ensure greater relevance, and new ideas that I have written about in the past – Ems, which are short, identified, sequenced emails, and Microns, which are emails with rewards. The goal is to ensure an increase in opens and clicks.
Automation and Journeys: The DXP subsumes within it the key elements of martech automation, which enables customer segmentation and the creation of customer journeys which can cut across channels and time. This no-code solution ensures that once the rules are defined, customer engagement is simplified and continuous.
Next Best Action: What marketers need for each customer in the messages they send is the ideal next best action. This is best done by creating a “digital twin” – another customer who has a similar profile and is ahead in the customer journey. The right offers packaged together in the push messages help move the customer ahead in the buying journey.
CDP: one place to store all data: All the data collected from customers (demographic, behavioural, transactional) from online and offline needs to be stored into a single repository called the customer data platform. The CDP eliminates data silos that can otherwise get created across different departments. With the CDP, it now becomes possible to run models to calculate the CLV (customer lifetime value) and decode the Best Customer Genome (BCG).
Personalisation at scale (1:1): With all the data in a single store, it now becomes possible to do hyper personalisation, where each customer’s path is mapped based on past behaviour and similarities with other customers. The website or the app can take on a new look for each customer with unique recommendations.
Nudges & Walkthroughs: To complete the onsite or in-app customer experience, what is needed is guidance in the forms of nudges and contextual walkthroughs. This helps product managers ensure that the properties they control drive the right customer behaviour and eventual outcomes.
AI: Marketer + Machine: The soul behind tomorrow’s DXP will be AI-ML. With massive data becoming available, it is simply not possible for a marketer to imagine all possible scenarios. The marketer will be aided by the machine in the quest for the ultimate objective: maximising revenues and profits from an ever-increasing customer base.
Here is what Netcore’s full stack DXP looks like:
