We’re all hooked on technology, and it’s no wonder why.

The speed and convenience of digital experiences at our fingertips has us all glued to our phones. And it’s the open, real-time flow of direct messages that has us checking our email a few times a day. And let’s not forget the long-standing simplicity, reliability, and screen size of our laptops and desktops—that’s kept us browsing, clicking, and opening new tabs for over a decade. Pair all of this with the addictive universe that is social media, the growing support and demand for smart TVs and other OTT devices, and the technologies that continue to emerge at your favorite tech conferences (hello, 5G!), and you’ve got yourself a world of opportunity across channels.

What does that mean for future-forward brands? The ones that aren’t merely interested in keeping up, but also bucking the trend and finding an edge that sets your brand apart from others? Quite simply, this means forgetting old-school beliefs about a customer’s path to purchase, and modernizing your strategy with an honest look at how today’s customers experience apps, make purchases, and explore new content. Because remember, your customers are exposed to more options than ever before, so your approach is the difference between a one-time user and a loyal, high-value brand advocate.

I’d like to give you three pieces of advice to help jumpstart the modernization of your brand’s path to purchase:

Recognize that Relevance is the New Currency

The rapid explosion of digital channels and platforms has ushered us into an experience economy, where you’re only as good as your last interaction with your customers. Relevance is the new currency, making it imperative for brands to deliver better, not more, customer touches across journeys. And contrary to popular belief: mere personalization isn’t enough. Deliver too many irrelevant touchpoints (think random promotions, confusing service messages, unappealing offers, and minute-too-late interactions) throughout any journey, and inserting customer names won’t save you: you’ll quickly see your retention, engagement, and purchase rates decline.

Swrve helps brands across industries identify, interpret, and anticipate the needs of each individual customer in real time. That means customers will only see messages that are intended for them, whether that be during the activation/onboarding, retention, monetization, or advocacy phases of their journey with your brand. This approach ensures that every path to purchase is unique and relevant to the specific interests and expectations of every customer. It helps make every purchase worth it, every experience memorable, and opens the door to more opportunities for even greater purchases across channels for your brand.

 

Customers Respond to Dynamic Journeys That Work in Real Time

Your customers are constantly moving across devices, jumping across time zones, and exploring new content across channels—all at the speed of now. This means it’s important to create fluid journeys that can quickly adapt to every customer experience. 

You can optimize every path to purchase and back with dynamic campaigns. The ability to deliver messages that are based on the live, 360° view of every customer solves the perennial issue of timing in every campaign. Dynamic campaigns in Swrve include live, self-updating audiences that are continuously refreshed in real time from the importation of over 14 billion data-points daily, and powerful AI used to deeply refine the accuracy and precision of messaging.

 

This means that if a customer goes near one of your physical locations, he’ll get a notification alerting him of a special offer exclusive to that store. Or if another customer typically opens your brand’s app during her commute to work, she’ll get alerted of new content around that time, exactly when she’s most likely to engage. This alone has been proven to increase revenues per engagement by 243%.

 

Bring Unique Value to Every Journey with Surprise and Delight Marketing

No one likes irrelevant marketing communications, no matter how deeply-invested a customer is with your brand. This makes nurturing customers through to repeated purchases uniquely difficult—especially when opt-outs and app deletion is easy as the click of a button.

Refresh your approach with surprise and delight marketing, a technique used to sprinkle seemingly-spontaneous value into your brand’s customer journeys. This can take the form of sending a special token of appreciation to those who’ve completed onboarding, or exclusive content to those who haven’t been in the app in a few days, or an offer tailored to those who’ve searched certain items in your app over 3 times. 

These sorts of experiences make customers feel listened to and valued, driving loyalty across journeys. Brands who focus in on this have seen their engagement rates triple within just 3 months of deploying these campaigns. 

There are plenty of roads a modern customer journey can take in today’s era of real-time relevance. Stay tuned for more posts on this subject in our upcoming Swrve Customer Journey blog series, where we’ll explore key routes for:

  • Stellar onboarding and activation
  • Valuable engagement and retention
  • Smart monetization and cross-selling
  • Acquisition-driven customer advocacy

And if you want to skip ahead to see real-time relevance happening across journeys in action, sign up to demo Swrve today.