Applying agile to deliver better customer journeys

Settling into habits can be the beginning of a dangerous routine that will eventually set teams behind. The rapid evolution of more sophisticated marketing technology demands attention, but organizations lacking the agility (or the willingness) to adapt and adopt certain practices will fall behind their competition.

It’s easy to develop professional habits  — it’s human nature — especially in day-to-day tasks and responsibilities. Being an agile marketer requires us to venture outside of our comfort zones to be successful, and an agile approach to managing customer data could transform your martech programs.

An agile state of mind

Agile marketing can give your team opportunities to find unique ways to work with customer data across your martech stack to orchestrate better customer journeys.

“Agile marketing requires you to quickly switch gears, working a way that’s totally new and different and may require you doing work you’ve never done before in your life,” wrote MarTech Today contributor and agile marketing coach, Stacey Ackerman. And while solutions enter the marketplace and generate more and more data customer data, marketers should be thinking about different ways to leverage that data — even on the most granular levels — to create customer journey processes that are even more tailored to the recipients’ preferences.

Consider the context

“Context is key when developing individualized customer journeys,” said Jeff Samuels, COO of Iterable. “The more you can understand your customers, the better you can engage them to strengthen brand loyalty. Every digital touchpoint (browsing history, app activity, social media interactions, purchases, survey feedback and so much more) is an insight that you can use to iterate and improve your next campaign.”

Advanced technology is good for agile, too

With an agile approach to creating customer journeys, teams can explore new methods of translating data and creating context to feed the personalization engine. Advances in areas like machine learning are creating new efficiencies for marketers — and consumers also realize the benefits as they advance through the marketing funnel. Machine learning algorithms can also help process huge amounts of granular data to develop contextual relationships with customers create and improve upon the algorithms.

“Not only can modern martech platforms personalize messages based on hundreds of user profile fields and custom event data points, they also use AI and machine learning to analyze each customer’s digital body language to optimize the best send time, channel and frequency of those messages,” said Samuels. “Like a ‘choose your own adventure’ approach to automation, all these possible permutations enable highly sophisticated workflows that deliver a 1:1 customer experience.”

Samuels’ idea of a “choose your own adventure” approach for customers requires an agile mindset from marketers to successfully execute. The flexibility of agile marketing will enable marketers to maximize their martech capabilities — and investments — to engage their customers and drive conversions.

About The Author

Jennifer Cannon

Jennifer Videtta Cannon serves as Third Door Media’s Senior Editor, covering topics from email marketing and analytics to CRM and project management. With over a decade of organizational digital marketing experience, she has overseen digital marketing operations for NHL franchises and held roles at tech companies including Salesforce, advising enterprise marketers on maximizing their martech capabilities. Jennifer formerly organized the Inbound Marketing Summit and holds a certificate in Digital Marketing Analytics from MIT Sloan School of Management.