The How
To summarise the narrative so far:
- While brands can buy growth with adtech spending, that comes at the cost of profitability
- Good growth and profits needs repeat business and referrals from existing customers
- The challenges marketers face in dealing with existing customers are attention recession and data poverty
- A shift in focus from adtech to martech means a shift from acquisition and discounts to solving for attention and data
The path to exponential forever profitable growth comes down to something as basic as solving the problems of attention and data. In a world of digital and direct relationships, these are the two things that matter most. If a brand’s customers are not listening and if a brand does not have adequate data, it becomes hard to build a hotline to customers. Without the hotline, it becomes difficult to bring customers back to the properties for transactions.
In the pre-digital world, what mattered was branding. Great copy and ads created the customer connect and brought them to physical world stores. While branding still matters, it takes time and is expensive to build. Only a few succeed. For all others, the opportunity for B2C/D2C businesses comes from the push messages to get their communication out to their customers. This has been forgotten by marketers eager to show growth at all costs.
The problems of attention and data can be solved. For this, the mindset of marketers needs to evolve. The world of customer engagement must begin with the push channels. Today, there is very little attention paid to these channels. The channel with the best RoI – email – sees a spend of $8 billion annually. This is just 2% of what is being spent on adtech platforms globally.
I believe that email can and must become a marketer’s new best friend. Email is not what it once was – 1-way broadcast and semi-spam. Email is now ready in its new avatar: Email 2.0. This email can be interactive, informative, gamified, fun and exciting. It is email like customers and marketers have not seen or imagined. Email 2.0 is a way to convert the delete mindset into delight. It can become a powerful channel for getting customers to volunteer data about themselves. For this, Email 2.0 needs to be combined with Loyalty 2.0. Tokens for attention and data with a new spam-free inbox which delivers surprises and rewards can bring brands and customers closer in a win-win relationship.
With attention and data, marketers can then deliver omnichannel personalisation on their properties and differentiated 360-degree experiences for their Best customers (Martech 2.0) and slash acquisition costs via referrals and targeted new customer acquisition (Adtech 2.0).
This is the new world of marketing, reinvented for a digital world. The basics do not change. Marketing is about bringing customers back for more and ensuring they get their friends. What is different is the ‘how’ to get started – a new-look email format (what I call “microns”) and atomic rewards in the form of tokens for attention and data to nudge behaviour. These are the ideas that hold the key to building the pipe (hotline) with existing customers, and therein lies the secret of profit-centric marketing.