Brands up-scaling tech for digitally evolved consumer

There has been a remarkable drift towards Internet penetration in India more prominent since the past couple of years. Today, the country has around 370 to 400 million mobile-users, and 325 million smartphone-users. Because of a higher digital consumption rate in India, messaging has become more important for B2C brands.

Populaces from tier II, tier III cities, and rural parts of the country have been spending a lot of time on mobile. Multiple applications such as email, Facebook, and WhatsApp are now being massively used in these markets. Therefore, while digital marketing is turning out to be important for consumer brands, up-scaling digital messaging is also critical nowadays. The communication that goes to the consumers must be relevant, crisp, substantial, and on time.

A lot of brands have started listening to their consumer information, and needs by means of digital footprints that they leave on multiple channels. For example, if a consumer is visiting an ecommerce brand, he or she will be leaving a digital footprint on the website, mobile or on social media.

Therefore the brands can create a consumer profile that includes their likes, dislikes and buying pattern through these channels and customise brand messaging to better engage with them. Advanced digital technology that is now available for consumer brands helps gauge this information about their consumers. For example, if a particular person is spending some amount of time on a particular page online, and scanning a product; this data gets captured by a digital marketing technology platform that in turn helps the brand design content according to their consumer needs. Another crucial aspect to successfully engage with consumers is to connect with them real-time through their preferred channel (social media, email, or SMS) of communication with relevant content basis their profile.

Contrary to what is being assumed by marketers today, email channels are not fatigued, while this has been a concern for many marketers. In fact, email consumption has increased in the recent past, as it is a more credible source of information if packaged with relevant and crisp content. Earlier, when the Internet was not available on phone, many people did not access their mail for more than two times a day. However, now with increased smartphone consumption, people tend to synchronise their email on their phones and access mails even more through the medium.

Therefore, the usage has increased threefold due to smartphone penetration. Brand marketers know that their consumers are spending a lot of time on mail which means that the brands have to innovate their messaging in order to better engage with them. The trick of the trade is personalisation.

Brands need to analyse the medium through which the content is accessed — desktop or mobile — based on which, they can structure the content. Segmentation plays a vital role in brand message delivery — i.e., mass one-to-one personalisation. Email is frequently used in the ecommerce sector, since digital is the only market universe for those brands and they get to track return on investment (ROI) digitally.

About 50-70% of the revenues is generated on a daily basis through email as a channel. That proves that dependency on email marketing is extremely high in the Indian market. Offline retail brands are focusing on mobile for marketing purposes. Brands now have realised to collect digital handles of consumers. Mobile marketing is more intrusive communication than email marketing. Even the banking sector uses mobile as a medium for transactional purposes.

A lot of companies are looking at a mix of both email and mobile marketing as an omni-channel platform to market their products/services. Through Marketing Technology (MarTech), consumer brands are channelising their messaging on different mediums. Innovations are moving towards email marketing that is, marketers are now bringing in real-time content through email. For example, if there is a flash sale taking place for a particular brand on a particular date, brands can send real-time emails to their consumers to lure them to the sale, which means that when a consumer opens their mailbox, information on the exact number of hours remaining to make most of the sale will show up as part of the email messaging. This technology helps in changing the content, basis the time of the consumer accessing the mail.

Another trend that is picking up in email marketing is video emails. People are now moving towards visual as a medium for consuming content. While email marketing is drifting towards marketing automation, it is not just being considered as an isolation channel for brands. There has been a decline in SMS marketing with the impending popularity of WhatsApp.

However, combination of both mediums is what is picking up for consumer brands. That is, SMS is used in the initial phase to gather information about consumer behaviour especially in tier II and tier III markets, and then switching to email communication, voice communication, or push notifications to send out messages. The push notification channel is becoming more and more prominent.

Chatbots technology

To get a better understanding, digital, email, SMS and push notifications come under push marketing by which consumer brands share details about their products/services, share information about ongoing sale, etc. There is another vertical called as pull marketing under which Chatbots technology is now available, which means that the consumer can now cull out data. Chatbots are not used for marketing, but more for resolving consumer queries. Both push and pull marketing must co-exist for successful consumer brand marketing.

Millennials have been estimated to be a brand’s coveted customers with higher annual purchasing power in coming years. Omni-channel connect is what will help create connect with these demographics. While email helps build personalised connect with consumers, SMS helps engage with on-the-go consumer. Through SmarTech, which is a part of Marketing Technology, the content that a brand shares is bifurcated and developed according to different age segments and the preferred medium.

Sending across the same data to the same set of customers should be avoided as it creates content fatigue. In this case, marketing technology plays a vital role as a brand is now able to access ready facts about their consumers that includes age, mobile number, personal details, likes, purchase, pattern, etc. Basis this data, MarTech automates messages that are not repetitive on any medium or channel.

(The author is the CEO of netCORE Solutions)