Rajesh Jain

Micronbox

The customer endpoint of the hotline is an inbox – the email or SMS clients on the mobile or desktop, or WhatsApp. That’s where the brand messages come. The hotline is about making the messages interactive and incentivised to enable not just content consumption and conversation but commerce. The email and SMS inboxes are the repository for these messages. It has not changed much through the years when it comes to brand messages; the only innovation has been the creation of multiple folders to route messages algorithmically to reduce spam and clutter.

WhatsApp brought about a big change in our lives some years ago. Instead of texting or emailing each other and each new communication spawning a new message, it threaded conversations together based on individuals or groups. It made for a cleaner interface. Network effects took over and we all moved our person-to-person and communications to WhatsApp. The same has not happened with brands, even though some brands are now trying to shift engagement to WhatsApp. A big barrier is the cost of a WhatsApp session – 25-50 times that of an email and 4 times that of an SMS (in India). This doesn’t scale well. Besides, WhatsApp is the arbiter of what constitutes fair communications so there is always a ‘Big Brother’ fear of being blocked.

What is needed is a new kind of inbox for hotline-type engagement and interaction between brands and customers. This is the idea I call “Micronbox.” Here is what I wrote in a previous essay imagining a future where we are all using micronboxes. (Think of microns in the writing below as Email 2.0 messages – emails with support for AMP and Atomic Rewards.)

Each of us has a micronbox. It is built on email so it doesn’t necessarily need a new app or identity. This new inbox collates all the microns from our Gmail inbox and organises them better. No microns from a brand which we have not subscribed to make it through. Only a single email from a brand is present – older, unread mails get layered together into that single email. Thus, the micronbox only has as many emails as brands we subscribe to.

… Microns are interactive. So, instead of just a static one-way communication, microns become dynamic and engaging. One can buy a book right from the micron itself, expand a new story to read more, provide feedback or answer questions – right from the inbox, without having to click through to the website. (The magic which makes this possible with emails is AMP.)

… An element of gamification makes it fun. Customers/subscribers earn points for opening and engaging with microns. The more the continuing engagement, the better the rewards. (This is similar to what credit card companies offer – the more you spend, the more you earn. Basically, loyalty and discipline is being rewarded.) They also earn points by sharing information about themselves with brands so the communication they get is more personalised creating a mutual win-win. They can control what personal info they share with different brands. All this helps in increasing the signal-to-noise ratio in the inbox.

… The micronbox is clutter-free. Instead of a ‘delete’ mindset when dealing with emails, there is a ‘delight’ feeling as we scan it. Brands have become friends whose messages are never ignored, read promptly and always acted on. Brands provide us useful info which make daily life better. They offer us what we need rather than what they want. They learn from our actions to make the relationship better daily with every interaction.

Sounds familiar?! While I did not recognise it then, what I was really describing was the idea of a hotline between brands and customers.

The Micronbox completes the picture: a hotline is thus a 2-way connection between brands and customers, built using messages with AMP and Atomic Rewards, expanded to supporting omnichannel engagement. The micronbox becomes a repository of all these messages (microns) and conversations – just like WhatsApp today for our 1:1 and small group chats. Together, they can help drive brands to profitability by eliminating the AdWaste and enabling the 4 Rs of retention, repetition, referrals and reactivation.

Omnichannel

Gone are the days when there was a single channel that brands used to engage with customers. The digital customer of today is omnichannel. While each of us may have our preferred channels, interaction goes across channels. Brand properties now encompass not just websites and apps, but also the social media channels. From Facebook to WhatsApp to Twitter to Instagram to YouTube, all are creating ways to enable commerce. Communications are leading to conversations which in turn shows the way to commerce. The primary push channels are also becoming 2-way: email to Email 2.0 and SMS to RCS. WhatsApp is opening up rapidly for business enablement. Push notifications are being enriched with media. Across all these channels, brands need to create a unified view of each customer by feeding data into a CDP (customer data platform) and then building AI-powered journeys and next best actions for segments (of one).

Martech automation platforms have been seen as the key to making omnichannel engagement work. But they only start their work once customers open the app or land up at the website. What gets them there? It is the hotline. That is why hotlines must be seen as upstream of journeys. Because the customer is omnichannel, so must the hotlines.

We have discussed how AMP and Atomic Rewards can transform email into Email 2.0 hotlines. The same idea of Atomic Rewards can also help with the other push channels. Micro-incentives for actions can help continue the hotline across the other channels. The objective is to create habit loops – where messages sent by a brand are not ignored, and the feedback provided by customers helps make the messages more relevant.

I wrote in an essay introducing the Atomic Rewards idea a few months ago: “Purchase moments need to be preceded by persuasion moments. An atomic rewards program is the perfect driver for branding, delighting, positioning and decision-making. This space is a blue ocean as of now – with no competition. In a non-digital world, brands had little direct control on the customer relationship. But now, right from early interest, brands can track and identify individual customers, each of whom has a set of unique attributes (email address, mobile number) that can identify them across sessions and conversations. This enables action earlier in the funnel, which in turn creates the opportunity for atomic rewards. Atomic rewards can be offered to existing customers for their attention and engagement in push messages (emails, SMSes, push notifications), and on a brand’s owned properties (website, app). There is also an opportunity to offer rewards much earlier in the purchase cycle for future customers – in ads that are run, or via the physical product itself … Atomic Rewards…is the answer to the problem of attention recession that confronts every marketer. Attention and engagement need as much focus as marketers are doing with customer journeys, onsite and in-app experiences, and transactions.”

Omnichannel, powered by Atomic Rewards, thus becomes the third pillar for building the hotline. The final pillar is the Micronbox.

Performance Email

So far, as part of the process of building the hotline, we have discussed how to use email as the channel – enhanced with AMP and Atomic Rewards. For a marketing department juggling multiple activities, how can the hotline buildout not add to the list of activities with its own set of complexities? In fact, the hotline as envisioned here needs not just creative skills but also software and analytical talent. As part of the Email 2.0 construct, I have suggested the need for a Progency (product-led agency). This is what I wrote in Part 10 of my Email 2.0 essay: “Progency is a new type of agency built on top of a product (in this case, a martech platform). It is thus a product-led agency. It combines product, people (professionals), process, and pay-for-performance. It brings to the world of martech and customer retention, growth and cross-sell the ease of outcome-driven marketing that adtech agencies have done for new customer acquisition. Progency extends the brand’s internal marketing team to deliver on specific KPIs. This lets the brand team focus on business as usual. Progency – like IT consulting teams focused on specific tech platforms – brings in the necessary expertise to solve specific problems like reactivation, increasing Hooked Score, driving referrals and collecting zero-party data. Each of these initiatives can be measured, improved and rewarded.”

The Progency can be the brand’s partner for building the hotline, and in doing so, the compensation can be based on outcomes. This is where the idea of Performance Email comes in. It is drawn from the world of adtech – how Performance Marketing accelerated spending by compensating the customer acquisition supply chain on outcomes.

As Spiralytics explains: “Performance marketing is a type of digital marketing where brands only pay marketing service providers once their business goals are met or when specific actions are completed, such as a click, sale, or lead. As the name suggests, it’s marketing based on performance. So, what makes performance marketing special? It gives power to the advertiser, since they only pay after the desired goal is achieved. Because of this, they can be confident that their marketing budget is spent only on successful campaigns. More importantly, the success rate of performance marketing campaigns is generally higher since all campaigns are highly targeted, and marketers make data-backed decisions and optimize their campaigns based on the results. This serves as a win-win for both merchants and affiliates.” BigCommerce adds: “[The] win-win marketing opportunity for a retailer (or “merchant”) and affiliate (or “publisher”) allows both parties to target campaigns in a strategic, high ROI way, all based on performance. By paying the affiliate when a specific action is completed, a merchant can feel confident that their money is being well spent.”

Something similar can be done with the hotline value chain. A progency can be paid based on the actions that are done over the hotline instead of just paying for emails based on the number sent. Performance Email can reward in-mail actions – because there are now many more actions that can be done than just an open or a click. ESPs can become partners in this process where they are compensated not for emails sent but for the outcomes. (As we discussed earlier, in the perfect endgame, a brand will only need to send a handful of emails ever to any single customer.)

Performance Email which powers the hotline is an idea whose time has come. It is the breakthrough that can drive increased spending on existing customers because the outcomes (in terms of revenues and profits) can be measured – and therefore rewarded.

Once the Email 2.0 hotline has been established, brands can then take the same principles and extend them to other engagement channels – because the customer is omnichannel.

Atomic Rewards and Loyalty 2.0

Brand loyalty programs have so far been linked to money and transactions. I have proposed a new idea – Loyalty 2.0 which can be linked to time, attention and sharing personal data. Time can be thought of as a non-monetary resource. It is valuable, and is as I have argued previously, upstream of transactions. If brands can get us to spend more time with their content (solving for attention recession) and collect more data volunteered by us (solving for data poverty), they can build a better relationship with us – right messages, right time, right channel.

The problem has been there is no reason for us to spend more time with the brand other than when we are planning a purchase. In that period, we are searching and asking around. What if brands had hotlines with us so they were top-of-mind? What if brands got our 10-15 seconds daily which helped strengthen their relationship with us – a sort-of mental billboard? What if brands can nudge us to share our experiences with our network or voice our opinion publicly? Each of these actions ‘costs’ us time. If brands are ready to reward us for our money, can they consider doing the same for our time?

This is where the ideas of Atomic Rewards and Loyalty 2.0 come in. Emails can be excellent carriers for these incentives. This is what I wrote in my Email 2.0 essay (Part 9): “Atomic Rewards bring gamification to emails. They are micro-incentives to help marketers get attention, drive engagement, nudge behaviour and create habits. Think of Atomic Rewards as a loyalty program – linked with attention (time) rather than transactions (money). Atomic Rewards offer the perfect solution to Attention Recession; these rewards can be embedded in AMP-enabled emails or in Ems to reward streaks. Atomic Rewards will work best when they are offered across brands because no single brand can offer enough to make it exciting. Rewards filling the email inbox is when we will get a mindset change from “delete” to “delight”. Atomic Rewards make perfect economic sense for brands – for a small cost, they can ensure the hotline to the customers stays active because if the customer becomes inactive or churns, the cost for the same attention will be many times higher via the adtech platforms.”

I wrote about Loyalty 2.0:

The starting point needs to be at the top of the funnel in the brand-customer relationship: with a customer’s attention and data. Attention is critical for everything else that follows. In a world of too much information, individuals can be lost; messages find it hard to get through; connections cannot be easily established. To instil loyalty, brands must solve the attention problem. This means building a pipe, a hotline to their customers. This is where the loyalty app comes in – an app which, crucially, rewards them for their time and data. As I have written earlier: to get customers to pay for their attention, pay them for their attention – else the brand will end up paying Google and Facebook (Meta) 100 times more for the same customer’s attention. There is no loyalty program anywhere in the world for attention.

After attention comes data. Brands need to understand their customers better. While they can decode actions of individual customers on the website and app, the better approach is to simply ask customers and incentivise their actions (in this case, the data being provided voluntarily). How many brands ask us? How many brands offer us incentives for giving information about ourselves? In this case, the additional benefit is that we will also benefit from the personalisation in the offers that we receive. We want to be shown opportunities that interest us, that speak to us. Revealing ourselves is both an opportunity to earn points and to ensure future communications are targeted for our particular tastes.

What better mechanism to get attention and collect data than an AMP email? Gamify it with Atomic Rewards and there is the foundation for a hotline! Into this mix let’s bring in the idea of “Performance Email.”

Living Email

For too long, emails have been static and lifeless. Brands create the email, send it and it stays that way forever in the inbox. At best, there is some dynamic image that can be pulled in when the email is opened. As such, the email becomes a single-use message – never to be opened again. What if this could change? Let’s consider the possibilities of an idea I call “All in Email” – search, browse, chat, cart, rate, review – many of the verbs we associate with actions on websites or apps can now be done in emails. Instead of a customer going to the brand property (website or app), what if the property came to the customer?! That is the promise of AMP – combined with the power of our imagination.

A Living Email could have a search box embedded in it. I could then search in the email itself and see the results right there. Popular categories could be listed for me to browse inside the email itself. In both cases, even the addition to the cart could be done within the AMP email. Since an AMP email does not retain its “AMP nature” when forwarded, the checkout process too can be done right inside the email. No click throughs, no landing pages! A Living Email could lead to the initiation of a chat session from inside the email. I see a product I like in the email, and I could initiate a conversation with a chatbot or a human for resolving my queries. The context-specificity of the chat could lead to faster closures. Features like search, browse and chat could be standard components in every AMP email – so all I have to do is to go to my inbox and open any email from a brand and get started.

A Living Email can show news and stock quotes in real-time – every time I open the email, I would get the latest info. In fact, take this idea to its logical extreme, and all a media brand would need to do is to just have a single email ever in the inbox. Think WhatsApp – we have a single conversation thread with an individual or a brand. A Living Email would be the only email a media entity would need to send. When a breaking news or a daily update needs to be communicated, the email would just rise to the top of the inbox. (More on this when we discuss the Micronbox idea.)

A Living Email could have changing questions for collecting zero-party data. Depending on what the brand knows about me, it could throw up a different question each time I opened the same email. A Living Email therefore is just a placeholder in the inbox – with each side (brand or customer) having the ability to initiate a conversation.

AMP is what makes the Living Email possible. Atomic Rewards is what provides the micro-incentives needed to nudge the customer to the desired actions.