Speaker 0: Hello, everyone. Welcome to MarDreamin’. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, depending on where you’re joining us from. Please meet Rich Wright, chief experience officer at Carbonx Group. I think I’m pronouncing that right. Rich, you yell at me once you come on stage if I’m not. He is a true expert in your experience with a strong focus on data and martech. He’s He’s passionate about helping companies build sustainable stacks and is here to talk to us all about transforming life cycle marketing. We’ll explore today how Salesforce Marketing Cloud, personalization, and Data Cloud can drive customer journeys from first touch all the way to loyalty. Rich will also be sharing how automation can streamline onboarding, nurture relationships, and reengage customers creating meaningful interactions that build lasting success. So, Rich, the stage is all yours.

Speaker 1: Amazing. Just confirming you can hear me?

Speaker 0: Yes. We sure can.

Speaker 1: And you can see my screen?

Speaker 0: Sure can.

Speaker 1: The day? Yes. Beautiful. Thank you. Um, it’s CarbonX, but don’t worry. A lot of people have said the same thing, so we will we’ll look at the logo. Um, pleasure to be here. Appreciate everyone, um, joining the session. Uh, it is 5AM here in Auckland. I’m down here for a world tour, so it’s an early start, but very excited. Um, and, yeah, today we’ll be looking at building the world class life cycle, um, and automation strategy using the Salesforce stack. Obviously, mainly focused around marketing cloud, data cloud stack, but, um, I’ll touch on a few other pieces as well. Obviously, thanks to all the incredible sponsors, um, that make this happen. Uh, it’s a great great conference. Great to have a digital conference where we can join from all over the world and excited to, uh, chat through today.

Very quick intro from me. Um, so as mentioned, I’m the customer, um, or sorry, chief experience officer here at CarbonX. Um, I spent the last four and a half years at Salesforce running professional services from a marketing cloud and a data cloud perspective. Uh, before that, I also ran another partner, um, in DataRati, uh, doing very similar thing customer strategy. And before that, I’ve been a Salesforce customer for many, many years, um, and doing a lot of what I’ll be talking about today. So customer experience strategy, life cycle marketing, um, platform strategy, which I’ll talk through a little bit today, and implementing, getting ROI on on those platforms.

So a few quick goals for today, really looking at how do we turn that customer experience strategy into a platform strategy, which is, I guess, a a term that I’ve been talking about for quite a lot quite a while now and looking at a data strategy that goes along with that to make make your platforms work, make all of this really happen. We’ll look at what platforms help in each of those stages throughout the life cycle. We’ll look at why an overarching strategy is so important to help drive people through and and get them to where you want to be from a customer perspective, And we’ll look at where and and how to start because it can be very daunting. It can be very overwhelming, especially if you’re doing a new platform implementation or you’re just starting out with a customer strategy or a life cycle strategy can be very, very daunting. So we’ll look at that too.

So in terms of a sort of a more exact agenda, we’ll start simple. We’ll frame up a few of those pieces and those questions. We’ll run through the customer life cycle. It will be quite generic, um, from a life cycle perspective, but, hopefully, you can all pick up and and gather some info that relates more closely to you or your industry. Um, we’ll go through some some closing thoughts and some takeaways, and, obviously, should be some time at the end for some questions.

So let’s start simple. Customer experience, um, a, uh, sort of general understanding, let’s say, encompasses every aspect of a company’s offering, quality of customer care, but also advertising communication, product, and servicing features. So all things like brand voice even determine a customer experience, and it’s it’s every touch point. It’s every experience, obviously, that a a customer has along their journey, prepurchase, purchase, post purchase. Today, we’ll be focusing very much on that digital, um, let’s say, experience when you you’re trying to get a customer onboarded to purchase a product. And then from there, how do you get them to that that next action and into advocacy, loyalty, those types of things? A very generic customer life cycle, as I mentioned, starting from awareness, completely unknown from a company perspective. Who are these people? Why do they wanna buy our products? All the way through into that loyalty advocacy space. And we won’t talk about win back today, but hopefully, you never lose your customers and their advocates and loyalists forever. But, obviously, you should be considering a win back phase as well if they have a a trip over to a different, um, a competitor, and then how do you win them back?

And something that, uh, as I mentioned, I’ve been talking about for many, many years now is what I call platform strategy. I’m sure there’s lots of different terms for it, but for me, it’s that gap that lives between a customer experience strategy and the customer interactions that you your company provide through the platforms that you have. And the reason I say it’s a gap is because there’s a lot of companies out there with very pretty decks that are customer experience strategies. You know, we wanna be the number one customer company. We wanna provide the best customer experiences. We want our customers to be happy every time they engage with us. That’s great. In words, how do you translate that into the, um, actual interactions that you provide for your customers, whether that’s through digital platforms, through your website, or through a call center or a chatbot or or whatever it may be?

So the way I see it is if you look here, you’ve got on the left, you’ve got customer experience strategy, and on the right, you’ve got the customer interactions. This is what I’d say is the norm. It’s a a rope bridge between the two. Um, it’s barely connected, and there’s a lot of gaps and you know? Basically, you can draw a string line between them and say, yes. We are a customer first company. But in actual fact, when it comes to the execution, there’s there’s quite a large gap, let’s say. What you see quite a lot more of is obviously this considered strategy. There is some connectivity there, but more than likely, there’s no data strategy. Um, a company’s got four or five customer engagement tools, different SMS, different for email. They’re still sending some snail mail every so often. If you call up a call center, they don’t know who you are. So that it’s considered, but it’s still not entirely there. Right? And so what we’re looking to get to is this this full platform and data strategy. Hopefully, you can see a very, um, memorable bridge there. It’s where it all happens. Right? It’s what what we’re all here for and we’re we’re all considering. So a platform strategy is going to help you connect those dots between experience strategy and your customer interactions. And today, that’s that’s really what we’re gonna be focusing on and, um, I guess, where a lot of my skill set lies.

So let’s break down the customer life cycle a little bit piece by piece. So when it comes to awareness, this is the stage where you need to attract completely unknown people to your store, to your website, to your brand, essentially. They’ve never purchased before. You’ve got no idea who they are. How are you doing that? You know, if we’re thinking about a a sales or a marketing piece, this is that that top of funnel. How do you start to fill your funnel with these new potential customers, um, and grow the awareness of your brand for them, let’s say. So it comes with things like above the line advertising, keywords, and searches when they’re typing them in for, say, your products or your maybe your brand, um, and some of that look alike advertising. Now if you’re a new company or if you’ve never done this before, a new company won’t have any data for that look alike, um, type of advertising. So we’ll come back to that a little bit later on in the session when we actually have some of that data. Um, the main port point here is is around that capture. You want to start to understand who is coming to your website or who is coming into your stores and and engaging with you as a company rather than just all of these people that you you don’t even know who they are, you don’t understand. Because that understanding, that data is gonna help you drive them further down the funnel. So here is my very rudimentary funnel underneath here, and this is this awareness stage at the top. So at this stage, we could use a tool like Marketing Cloud Personalization or Einstein personalization, which is a new tool, um, to track the people that are visiting our digital assets. Now when I say people, at this stage, they won’t be people. You know, there’ll be cookies and IP addresses and all of those types of things, um, where you can see people landing on your digital assets. But that’s all you’ve got. You’ve just got people landing there. You don’t have any PII. You don’t have any understanding, but you can track that they’re clicking on a certain keyword to come to your website. You can track what they are doing on your website, and that data is gonna become extremely important as you wanna take them then onto the rest of your customer life cycle, but also provide the best experience that they can get as you try and get them down through interest, through desire, and into obviously that action stage to make a purchase.

If we then think about that interest stage, we should now know that there are unknown users. There are people coming to visit our digital assets. And if we’re using a product like marketing cloud personalization or Einstein, we can then start to personalize the website on that browsing history, let’s say. So if you think about a use case, that home page where someone’s come to the website before, they’ve spent twenty minutes researching our product or our service, of which we’ve got many, the next time they come to their home page or your home page, that product or that service is the first thing they see. It is now your new home page for them to help get them back to the point they’ve already gotten to help drive them further and keep them moving down that that funnel, let’s say. So homepage personalization, product personalization, subscription, or or retargeting to bring them back all become possible once you’re using a tool like marketing cloud personalization. Um, and the end game here is really around the data capture. You know, you wanna take someone from unknown into the known when it comes to this interest stage to help drive that interest further. So if we look at a a few very simple examples, um, this is obviously our website. And if you were to scroll up towards the x button, uh, your the website sorry. Marketing Cloud personalization will track your mouse, see that you potentially are looking to exit, and a pop up will come up and say, hey. Before you leave, maybe you sign up or maybe you give us your PII, your email address so that we can talk to you about this product or remind you in a few weeks that, you know, you’re interested in this, whatever it may be. And that’s continuation of this strategy. Um, or you can see in the middle box down there a personalized message or a personalization of something that you’ve previously come to the website to help drive them that next step. But if for whatever reason the customer does decide to leave, because you have that PI, uh, sorry, because you have that that cookie or that, um, IP address, you can then start to do a little bit of retargeting even before they’ve given their personal details. So you might be able to send them an advert, um, whether it’s through Google or Meta or, um, any of those things to help drive them back. So that’s a a very simple advert there, um, on Instagram, let’s say, that would pop up because you’ve got some information based on that. But, essentially, as I said, bottom right, you’re trying to drive to either data capture or if you’re in maybe the retail space, you could be looking to just drive them straight to a purchase. You know, if someone’s put something in the cart before they’ve ever purchased with you before, and you just want them to click that button and check that that card out.

So from capturing that information, the unknown, let’s say, have now become the known. If I’ve been to a website, you now know that this is my email as Rich Wright. You know that I’m Rich Wright. And with marketing cloud personalization, you can append that history of what I’ve previously done on your website. You can look at all of the pages that I’ve spent time on and start to build up an affiliation of me and what’s probably going to be the purchase that I want to make based on the browsing history that I have or the engagement history that I have with you, and that’s all possible in MCP or or personalization. So when we use PII, my personal information, and that that digital affiliation, um, combined, we can really start to personalize my engagement to close out that sale or to get them to the bottom of that funnel, let’s say. So the use cases here would be around continuation of that web personalization. But now we have PII. We can start to personalize emails, personalize next best actions through email, through potentially through SMS to really get to that point of of purchase, let’s say, and, obviously, personalized personalized advertising. Now we know exactly who I am, what my data is, so we can target me much more specifically across all of the potential areas, Google, Meta, LinkedIn, whatever it may be, wherever your strategy is, about potentially the exact product that you think or know that I should be purchasing next. So the end game here is obviously to drive this out to get someone to make that purchase.

So, again, if we look here, bottom of the funnel is that action piece. You still got that, um, personalized next best action on the, uh, on the website. But rather than now clicking through to a capture form, that may drive straight through to a sale. Um, you know, input your details, click a button, purchase. Um, you can see then in the in the top right, very personalized email with a link to buy. Here’s your potentially abandoned cart. Click here. One click. Someone’s checked out. Away you go. Um, you’ve started to gain that more information. And then, obviously, a very nice thank you on your website wherever it may be after the purchase once that action is completed. That’s been the the desire, let’s say, for this whole time. At the end of the day, life cycle marketing is all about a sale, whether that’s the initial sale or the next sale or whatever it may be, it is all about that that purchase intent and and moving people down that funnel.

So amazing. You know, you’ve got action. You’ve got someone to make a purchase or to to complete the task that you want them to complete. But now what? And so many companies at this stage start to fall down. You know? They they start to forget about their existing customers in the hope of finding more new customers. Um, now there’s many, many stats out there in regards to the cost of acquiring a new customer versus the cost of keeping your current ones happy. I won’t try and remember them. Um, but we all know it is much cheaper to continue to keep your current customers happy and coming back for more than it is to continually advertise and find new customers. And, eventually, you’ll probably saturate the market, and there won’t be any new customers left. Right? So what are you doing from this stage to drive, as it says here, the next person purchase, the next best action, whether that’s a larger basket size next time, a cross selling to a new product, uh, repeat purchase of the same product, or delivery on that product or that service that the customer bought. But at this stage, your life cycle will very much start to fragment depending on what industry you’re in or what what your business does or or those types of things. Um, you know, the life cycle of a service based customer is very different to FMCG where someone is buying a bag of chips every week or or whatever else that may be. So really now starting to become cognizant of the different strategies based on buying patterns, buying life cycles, time to purchase, and all those things that that affect a life cycle, let’s say.

Um, but some very poor important next steps could be things like getting some NPS. You know? How how did that person get to purchase? How difficult was it to get to that purchase? Gaining feedback on that means you’re gonna improve that funnel, that journey. You know? Oh, experience was amazing, but you when I went to check out, it was very difficult to put in my credit card details or to check out or whatever else. That is invaluable information in being able to improve that for your next customers because if things are too difficult, people will stop to do them or find somewhere where the customer experience is easier. So those things are super, super important. Um, and that could become the nice start of, let’s say, an onboarding journey. Amazing. You’ve purchased. Thank you. Give us some feedback. Now here’s how we take you on to those next steps, whether it’s cross sell, larger basket, whatever it may be. Um, and it’s at this stage really you need to consider how are you going to engage with your new customers to drive loyalty, and and what does that engagement look like? I said at the start, you know, there’s a lot of companies without a cohesive strategy where a text message comes out of one system and an email out of another, and there’s no personalization. Sometimes companies don’t even have an area where people can subscribe or unsubscribe or know what they’re subscribing to. All of these factors come into a a very strong customer experience and data and platform strategy.

Now I said back at the start, if you’re a new company, you wouldn’t have the data to think about lookalike audiences. So now you have actionable data. You have people that have come through the journey, and they’ve made a purchase with you, and you have their PII. So now you can start to use that information to find more people that look like those people through lookalike audiences and and start to suppress against them as well. So let’s look at a few of those examples. Um, hopefully, top left there. Everyone’s seen the back end of marketing cloud. Um, so this is obviously where you start to think about that uh, onboarding journey. You know? Obviously, you can see down the bottom there a nice little CSAT. Thank you. NPS. Whatever it may be. How did we do? What’s your feedback? Um, and you can see in the journey there, that could be very fragmented in terms of different emails for different groups or different users. But we’ll again, we’ll talk about that a little bit more in a moment. But you have that rich customer data. You have that rich PII. So there’s two main things you can do here. One is to stop advertising to these customers. You know, hopefully, you’ve got some type of media strategy that is focusing those personalized app personalized adverts on people to help drive them down the funnel. As soon as they make a purchase, you immediately wanna stop that media spend because, one, it’s very costly, but, two, it’s very annoying. You know, there is nothing more frustrating as a consumer than making a purchase on a product, and ten hours later, that product’s still being advertised to me on, um, um, Instagram or on Google Adverts or or clicks or whatever else. Right? I’ve already made the purchase. Stop advertising it to me. So suppression audience is there. Very simple to do through marketing cloud or through data cloud. Um, just pushing that information very securely through to, um, the the media platforms, let’s say. The other is that lookalike strategy. Rich has just made a purchase. There are 50 other riches that have also just made purchases. How do we combine that data and go and find thousands more people that look like those people by using that PII? Again, very simple to do in marketing cloud or in data cloud using, um, audiences and very strategically safe, um, which is probably the biggest thing. That security, um, I’ve seen many companies downloading this data and uploading it into the back end of Facebook or into Meta or whatever else. Downloading that data and having it set somewhere in a spreadsheet is a huge security risk. Um, so how do we ensure we can pass that data through into these platforms without the, uh, the risk, let’s say, of downloading it and having it set around in spreadsheets. The frequency is also gonna make a huge difference. Um, as I said, ten hours later, still being advertised things is is very frustrating. So how do you make that immediate? And, again, data cloud, marketing cloud, that’s every 15 minutes. Uh, it’s gonna change what is happening in the, uh, in the media spend space. So having an automated setup that is eliminating any of the risk and updating every 15 minutes is is where your strategy should should sit, not just from a spend perspective, but, again, considering the customer experience, considering what they wanna see and do and and get from you as a as a business.

So people have made the purchase. You started to take them on the journey, but how do you drive loyalty? You know, we spoke about the, um, the repurchase or the cross sell or those types of things. Again, there’s gonna be a lot of fragmentation here, um, that will occur based on which industry you’re in or what your offer is or what the buying cycle duration is. But loyalty is really about acute key few things, um, that are always driven by data, by automation, and by your platform strategy and those sorts of things. So how do you stay top of mind? Uh, you know, if I made a purchase from a company six months ago, how does that company make sure that when I need to purchase again, I’m that’s the only company I think of because I’ve had a great experience with the product or with the thing that I’ve purchased, but also that there’s been some communication back and forth every so often to keep that company’s top of mind without being annoying. You know, if if you purchase, like, at least six months, no one needs to receive an email every single day for the next six months. That’s overkill. So how do you find that sweet spot of communication versus over communication, let’s say? Um, and always providing that great customer experience. You know? Being able to easy to deal with, being attentive to the needs and concerns of your customers, rewarding loyalty. You know? You think about the airplane schemes, um, in terms of their loyalty rewards programs and their tiers and all those types of things. How how does all that work? And, again, you’re you’re looking into mass fragmentation now of of a a life cycle strategy, but these are all the things you need to start to consider. Um, and and a great customer experience, when I say easy to deal with, that’s when we start to get into other areas of Salesforce or other areas of your platform strategy. So if I’ve been a customer for years and years purchasing hundreds of products but never had an issue, guess what? When I call up your customer service center and I say, uh, I’m Rich Wright. I, uh, I made a purchase a month ago, and the customer call center says, oh, okay. Let me pass you through to this person. You wait for another five minutes. Sorry. I can’t find your information. I’ll pass you over here. Wait another five minutes. That’s not driving loyalty. Right? That that is a horrible experience. So how how do you have the right systems and the right platform strategy set up? So it’s a dial through. Oh, I I can see your number on the system. Can I confirm your information? Great. I can see you’ve got 10 purchases over ten years here. You’re a great customer. Thank you for that. Sorry you’ve had a problem. That is an amazing experience. And there’s still not a lot of companies that have that complete holistic view from, let’s say, a tool like data cloud to enable that level of experience. So being convenient, being easy to deal with is is that key thing, I think, there. Um, I think the stat a few years ago that was people were purchasing, willing to pay more for products based off the back of great customer experience, and that really does shine through a lot of the time.

So when we think about loyalty, um, a simple consideration, let’s say, if you have a repeatable purchase product, um, do customers go on the same onboarding journey again? Would you send the same emails all over again, or would that change? Thanks for another purchase. You know? You don’t need to know about our company this time or about x, y, and zed. You just get a thanks for your purchase and maybe feedback again or or whatever else that’d be. So, again, based on the the buying cycle and the the life cycle of that product or that that person through it, what do those communications look like as someone repeats the journey? Again, that’s gonna drive loyalty. One, in terms of the remembrance that they’re coming back, but two, not being annoying from a a repeat communications perspective. So, really, now it’s how you’re removing those data silos. Right? Um, ensuring all the customer communications have a complete view of that individual, especially if you’re a business that is still working with brick and mortar stores, people going in and out, or you have a large service center where people are calling up, um, to do x, y, or zed, the the gap between that complete customer view is is huge. Right? So, obviously, you’ve got the very, um, um, memorable three sixty view from Salesforce there, and I’ve just ported in those those obvious connections to things like transactional data or where whatever it may be from your Snowflake, your Databricks, your AWS, those types of things. So one of the key things here and one of the key spaces I would say is that transaction history from banks. Um, you know, we see mortgages, those types of things. How do we get that transactionist history in? Or down the bottom, I said, how do we consider that, um, that service center setup? Let’s say. I know I’m running a lot of time, so I’m gonna speed through this next thing. But, essentially, it’s about getting people back through the funnel. Right? It’s gonna back be back into interest and action and those types of elements. Um, and advocacy then is is how to continue to drive that. So, again, really fragmented now, but how are you using your data strategy, your platform strategy, data cloud, marketing cloud to to drive advocacy? Um, the main thing here is around value exchange. The more data you get from customers, the better the experience they expect. So how do you continue to drive up in the right element there from a a data and a customer experience perspective?

My thing is start simple. One strategy all the way across before you start to build out multiple different product lines or or multiple different personas that you have through your business. Have one end to end before you start to fragment through that.

So really quick takeaways, have a plan, Have an experience, um, strategy, a life cycle strategy, and connect that to your platform strategy. Know how this is going to be executed. Start broad, as I just mentioned, not deep. Always consider the value exchange when you’re capturing data and and how you’re gonna provide that experience, and analyze and improve. Always improve your strategies. Um, I know I’ve run out of time for questions, so please feel free to scan that. Submit questions to me. Email me. Um, you can catch me on LinkedIn here, um, or you can drop me an email. It’s been awesome to be here, so thank you. But, uh, yeah, apologies about no questions. Feel free to send them over.

Speaker 0: Awesome. Thank you so much, Rich. Thank you, everyone. Have a great rest of your Marjoriemund day.

Speaker 1: Thank you.