Brands are more confident than ever about customer engagement, and their confidence is paying off. According to data from the Braze 2022 Global Customer Engagement Review (CER), 43% of marketers said their company does an excellent job of customer engagement, up from only 32% the year prior. Overall, 94% of brands rated their practices as excellent or good, up from 88% last year.
But what’s driving this growing confidence, and what are the qualities that set some brands apart from the rest? In order to help answer this question and assess the maturity of brands’ customer engagement strategies, Braze has developed its Customer Engagement Index. The index is a proprietary framework based on 12 organisational and technological themes, including channels, experimentation objectives, channels, metrics, staffing, classification and more.
The index is built around research on 1,000+ brands ranging from high-growth small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) to global enterprises operating across a range of business units. It identifies where a brand ranks in customer engagement maturity, ranging from Activate (least mature), to Accelerate, and finally, Ace (most mature).
On the whole, the brands examined by Braze saw meaningful improvement when it came to customer engagement competencies, with the percentage of brands that qualified as either Accelerate or Ace growing year over year.
Braze identified two notable areas where a significant percentage of brands demonstrate Ace competencies: experimentation and culture. Experimentation was among the top competencies for surveyed companies, with top-performing brands displaying a culture of experimentation that allows teams to understand what factors actually impact their goals. Since many experiments carried out by Ace brands are complex, it’s important that companies break down silos and engage in cross-departmental collaboration with their data teams to ensure that experiments are set up and measured correctly.
Culture ranked as one of the most improved competencies across Ace brands, which speaks to how teams collaborate across roles and departments when it comes to customer engagement. This year, Braze saw significant growth in the Ace category, which reflects teams that are either meeting multiple times a week or continuously collaborating.
The bottom line is that reaching customer engagement maturity has a real-world impact. Ace brands drive more revenue with their customer engagement efforts compared to other companies, with 77% of Ace brands stating that they exceeded their revenue goals this year.
How do Ace financial services brands approach customer engagement?
In an industry historically dominated by long-standing institutions, the financial services sector has seen the rise of smaller competitors focused on catering to individuals’ needs over the last 10 years.
As services became more complex, costly, and time-consuming – like time to transfer money or fees associated with products – disruptors saw the opportunity to challenge long-time industry leaders. The CER found that 38% of brands polled have been in business for less than 10 years. While they have the advantage of reputation, long-standing financial institutions may also have data, tech, and organizational challenges that can lead to frustrating and dated consumer experiences.
For example, a retail bank can have different arms responsible for its credit card services, bank brands, and digital banking, with separate messaging solutions for each business unit. Large businesses must stream and share data across these units to support the orchestration of seamless consumer experiences.
In order to successfully combat these challenges, Ace financial services brands are more likely to assess the results from customer engagement activities, actively experiment with their campaigns and customer journeys across channels, and have employees trained on customer engagement tech and approaches.
On the technology side, Ace financial brands are more likely to individually personalise messages at send time, use automated systems to optimise campaign performance and make use of in-app messages in their customer messaging. This channel allows brands to speak directly to mobile users who are actively engaged with their app, supporting timely, relevant communications.
What’s Ace in retail and ecommerce?
In the face of a global pandemic that kept many people home for months on end, some industries had to scramble to handle the acceleration to digital. But the retail and ecommerce space was ready – in fact, 76% of these brands had already been using mobile as a channel for engagement for over six years. This advantage was undercut at times by huge supply chain issues, however, which continue to plague the industry.
Braze analysed the top-performing retail and ecommerce brands to uncover how they achieve success in the industry, finding that a whopping 97% were more likely to actively experiment with their campaigns and customer journeys than other retail and ecommerce brands, while 48% were more likely to individually personalise messages at send time.
One example of a retail brand demonstrating strong tech and teams Ace factors is The Coffee Club, which now operates across nine countries with upwards of 40 million annual customers. The Coffee Club realised growing their loyalty program via their app was essential to growing their customer base, especially with a younger demographic. The Coffee Club sent barcoded coupons that were fully integrated with their point-of-sale (POS) system to a targeted segment of customers, and personalised them based on custom attributes and purchase events. Over six months, the campaign drove a 35% lift in loyalty-driven sales and a 62% increase in conversions for their paid VIP program.
In order to uncover more actionable insights from Braze’s Global Customer Engagement Review, download the entire report for free here.