In today’s digital age, marketing technology (MarTech) plays a crucial role in how businesses engage with their customers.
However, the success of truly contextual customer engagement hinges on one fundamental principle: trust. Building and maintaining customer trust is essential for long-term business success, as it fosters loyalty and contributes to bottom-line growth.
Why customer trust is so important
Trust is the cornerstone of any successful marketing strategy. When customers trust a brand, they are more likely to engage with its marketing efforts, share their personal data and positive reviews, and make repeat purchases. They’re also more likely to become brand advocates. In the realm of MarTech, trust is built through transparency, data privacy, brand authenticity and personalized communications.
And it’s worth noting that a lack of consumer trust is at an all-time high. According to Accenture in its recent Life Trends report, “Hesitation is becoming a reflex as people can no longer automatically trust product images, reviews, marketing campaigns and content they’re served online.” The report notes that in the past year, 52% of people have consumed fake news, 33% have experienced deepfake scams for personal information or money, and 39% have viewed fraudulent product reviews online.
Privacy: A foundational component
Ensuring the privacy and security of customer data is paramount to trust building. Because of the newly minted regulations that are coming at brands from around the globe, companies must simultaneously comply with regulations such as GDPR, the EU AI Act, and the Digital Markets Act. This requires implementing robust security measures to protect customer information.
MarTech platforms that use this data must ensure that customer data is managed securely and that sensitive information is handled in compliance with each of these global regulations. Failure to do so can have both brand-damaging impacts and severe financial penalties.
Being responsible with marketing and customer data will build and continually cultivate positive customer relationships.
Personalization: A key to building trust
Personalization is another key aspect of building trust. By using data and analytics to understand customer behaviors and preferences, companies can create targeted interactions that resonate with audiences and enhance customer experience. The goal is to provide valuable and timely information that meets customer needs and improves customer satisfaction while avoiding irrelevant messages that could erode trust.
The power of personalization can’t be overstated: A recent Forbes State of Customer Service and CX study found that 81% of customers are more likely to do business with a company that offers personalized experiences.
The evolution of customer analytics has significantly enhanced the ability to personalize via MarTech solutions. In the 1980s and 1990s, businesses began capturing customer data through customer loyalty cards, allowing them to track individual purchases and apply analytics to understand customer behavior and preferences. The 2000s saw the first wave of marketing automation platforms, making it easier for marketing teams to segment and select customers for inclusion in marketing automation campaigns.
Today, customer analytics techniques involve understanding customer behaviors as they occur across digital and physical channels and matching those behaviors to predefined event triggers (moments of intent).
The output of this analytical insight is then embedded directly into the evolution of the marketing campaign, which is known as the “customer journey.” This customer journey is then activated with channel, content and interaction type – all personalized down to an individual customer level.
MarTech challenges along the way
Despite its potential, marketing technology comes with its own set of challenges. Some are relatively simple to solve, while others can be more complex. Nonetheless, these issues must be addressed when trying to strike the right balance between personalization and privacy and earn customer trust.
- Channel, device and ecosystem proliferation. Channels, devices and ecosystems are continually multiplying. New marketing and advertising channels seem to come online almost weekly. The challenge continues to be how to balance providing contextual personalization with the need to safeguard consumer privacy.
- Platform and ecosystem complexity. Platform and ecosystem complexity has become a major challenge over the past three to five years. MarTech utilization has declined for a variety of reasons – including a lack of solution composability (joining one or more solutions together seamlessly to solve a use case), limited integration capabilities, poor usability and organizations buying multiple products and solutions (often from the same or a single vendor) that provide overlapping functionality.
- No consistent customer view. Without a consistent customer view, the ability to generate true customer understanding is limited. The result is a haphazard, inconsistent experience for the customer – incorrectly personalized communications, poor customer service due to lack of insight, and continually lackluster interactions with your brand. Integrating and orchestrating customer data across various channels and platforms is critical to do, but often complex to execute.
- Lack of real-time insight. Orchestrating an ideal customer journey can be challenging without an understanding of your customers’ behaviors, preferences and motivations. Embedding analytics into journey sequences and workflows allows you to import real-time insight as a customer journey progresses.
- Limited scalability and performance. Scalability and performance are also significant concerns. As businesses grow, the volume of data and the number of customer interactions increase significantly. Ensuring that MarTech platforms can scale to handle this growth without performance issues can be a major challenge.
- Inability to measure success. If you can’t measure the performance of customer engagement programs, it’s difficult to understand if your brand is building and maintaining trust. Techniques such as optimization, attribution and performance management, along with personalization, can be implemented to solve this challenge.
Brands flourish when customer trust is high
SAS realizes that without customer trust, brands have nothing. Within our MarTech solutions, we focus on helping brands build and maintain trustworthy customer engagement through the responsible use of customer and marketing data, technology and organizational resources. Our heritage in data management, AI and analytics combined with our industry expertise allows organizations to take their contextual customer engagement practices to the next level.
Explore the results from Optimizing the Use of Marketing Technology to Build Customer Trust, a SAS-sponsored Harvard Business Review Analytic Services report
Learn more about SAS Customer Intelligence 360 – A modern multichannel marketing hub
Special thanks to Mike Blanchard and Jon Moran of SAS for contributing their subject-matter expertise to this blog post.
