Meet Your Users Where They Are

Here’s an old marketing problem: Company X believes their #1 priority is to sell product Y.
Here’s a new marketing problem: Company X believes their #1 priority is to sell product Y.

Even with all of the modern marketing tools now at our disposal, some brands today are still missing the point. Without customers, there are no products. And without understanding customers’ wants and needs, companies have no viable marketing strategy. Brands today should have all the information at their disposal to understand customer wants and needs—combined with sophisticated solutions to meet these wants and needs with personalized experiences and outreach—all in real-time.

Before “customer-centric” became the buzzword it is today, the earliest definition of marketing always boiled down to finding customers and meeting them where they are, with the basic steps involved including:

Within the modern marketing framework, these core principles remain the same. Thanks to the wealth of real-time behavioral data now available to us, however, brands can take a more nuanced, individualized 1:1 approach, including:

Unlike marketers of the past, today we have two powerful tools at our disposal that make these steps possible: Real-time behavioral analytics and customer lifecycle marketing.

The Two Tools You Need to Meet Customers Where They Are: Behavioral Analytics + Customer Lifecycle Marketing

Here’s an old marketing analytics problem: In the beginning, marketing analytics tools were designed to show brands how their marketing efforts were performing in the aggregate, leaving marketers in the dark about how to better market to individual customers.

Here’s a new marketing solution: Today, detailed behavioral analytics, such as those offered by Amplitude, reveal how individual customers are interacting with the brand at any moment in time.

In the past, Customer A and B might have received the same types of campaigns. But by pairing real-time analytics with customer lifecycle engagement platforms, brands can now deploy personalized 1:1 campaigns in the moment, individually tailored to customers A and B. That’s because customer engagement platforms like Braze enable companies to map out user journeys by lifecycle status, channel activity, real-time behavior, and more to create and deploy corresponding campaigns—the very essence of meeting individuals where they are, both in their journeys and also via the channels where they’re most likely to engage.

Back to the example above. In the old method of creating campaigns, if both customers A and B had opened the Black Friday campaign, they might have received the same Cyber Monday preview campaign. With behavioral analytics, however, seeing that customer A recently added items to a wish list, customer A can now receive a personalized email (customer A’s preferred channel) like this:

…while customer B, who has recently rated a recent purchase, can receive a personalized push notification (customer B’s preferred channel) like this:

When pairing behavioral analytics and customer engagement platforms, the way brands approach testing and iterating looks different today as well:

Meeting customers where they are is a fundamental way to build brand humanity, something most (65%) consumers say drives brand loyalty. And there’s a financial benefit to that kind of loyalty: According to research conducted by Braze, consumers are 1.7x more likely to make a purchase or use the services of brands that act—and treat customers—like real humans.

Success Stories: Meet the Brands That Are Already Meeting Customers Where They Are

IBM, on-demand delivery app Rappi, and online coupon platform Flipp all power their marketing campaigns with real-time behavior analytics from Amplitude combined with the Braze platform’s personalization-driven messaging campaigns, resulting in an impressive ROI across the board—including up to a 10% increase in purchases and 30% decrease in customer acquisition costs for Rappi. Learn more with Braze, Segment, and Amplitude: A Powerful Customer Engagement Trinity.