Strike the Right Balance with Cross-Channel Behavioral Messaging

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Apply best practices to common scenarios of behavioral messaging.
Explain the potential risks of behavioral marketing.
Apply ethical recommendations to your behavioral marketing solutions.

Trailcast

If you'd like to listen to an audio recording of this module, please use the player below. When you’re finished listening to this recording, remember to come back to each unit, check out the resources, and complete the associated assessments.

Consumers Expect Connected and Personalized Experiences

More than ever before, consumers expect connected and personalized experiences. Consumers interact with your brand through many channels, including web, mobile, email, call center, and smart devices. To treat the consumer as an individual and truly meet their needs, you build an understanding of them as they interact through these various touch points. Then, you proactively engage with them, in the right moment and on the right channel, to delight them and strengthen their brand loyalty.

But, if done incorrectly, the tools you use to personalize experiences can cross the line into an invasion of privacy, resulting in brand aversion that negatively impacts your business. Salesforce is committed to doing good with technology. In this unit, you learn about the capabilities of cross-channel behavioral (or trigger-based) messaging, its ethical use, and customer-first best practices.

Let’s start by defining behavioral messaging. In its simplest terms, behavioral messaging is guided by consumer-expressed interests–for example, you set up communications that are triggered when a consumer takes a specific action in-store or on a website (clicks on a specific product, views certain categories, and so on).

As you learned in the previous unit, an ethical approach to personalization means that the customer must opt in to your collection of their data and clearly see a benefit in return. Your actions need to demonstrate that you care about them as an individual and want to help fulfill their unique needs. Let’s take a deeper look at what this means in behavioral messaging.

Risks of Behavioral Messaging

More than ever, customers want to be recognized, treated uniquely, and have their carefully-shared personal information come back to them in ways that are helpful. According to the State of the Connected Customer report, customers expect personalized engagement that is relevant, accurate, and timely.

Make sure that shared information benefits consumers. However, behavioral- and trigger-based personalization can turn from helpful to creepy, which erodes consumer confidence and undermines trust in a brand. How can you ethically use behavioral message triggers to engage customers without succumbing to the pitfalls that may offend them?

Recommendations for Ethical Behavioral Marketing

Consumers value personalization that addresses their needs, has a clear benefit, and demonstrates genuine care. Here are a few recommendations for deploying a personalization solution that constrains the negatives while driving shared positive outcomes.

Collect and Respect Preferences

Honor customer preferences and use only the data they’ve consented to sharing. Be explicit with consumers about the impact–the benefits and consequences–of their consent or lack of consent. Provide clear controls to opt-in or out.

Audience Targeting

Messaging should be targeted based on consumer-expressed interests, not demographics. View consumers as they truly are: multi-dimensional individuals with many varied idiosyncratic affinities. Highly individualized messaging is more effective than targeting based only on demographic data. It’s essential to reduce biases that can distort your messaging with associations that simply don’t hold up or were never accurate in the first place.

Include short, explanatory statements in your marketing copy. Keep it simple, like “Based on your interest in X, we are showing you Y.” That way, your customers immediately understand why you’re targeting them with a particular message or product.

Frequency Capping

Overwhelming a customer with too many communications can subvert your brand. Frequent but unwanted messages can annoy your customers and drive them to tune you out. So, how frequently should you send messages? Once a day? Ten times a month? Is there a magic number? It’s a delicate balance to reach. Of course you want to get your customers to engage. But overexposing them to your message can have the opposite effect.

An effective contact strategy must be cross-channel and consider all potential marketing touchpoints. Prioritize communication that’s most relevant to consumers and most likely to build trust. Configure messaging constraints to govern overall message rates. Customize behavioral and topic-based triggers to reduce total message noise and increase relevance to the consumer.

Behavioral Messaging Scenarios

Let’s explore common scenarios involving behavioral messaging to understand how to apply ethical approaches that enhance the consumer experience of your brand.

Abandon Cart

Abandon Cart is the canonical retailer use case for behavioral messaging. Let’s be real. As consumers, we are a distracted audience with short attention spans. For example, suppose you need to book a flight. You find the right time, select your seats, purchase two checked bags, and add your credit card to the order. Then the phone rings and you don't click the Book Now button. 30 minutes later you get an email from the airline saying it’s held your seats and reminding you to complete your purchase. Without this timely reminder, you might not have realized your mistake until it was too late. Instead of losing your booking, this experience helped remedy the situation. That kind of value through personalization builds loyalty and captures revenue.

To align with ethical personalization best practices, consider setting up Abandon Cart emails and notifications that are both timely and contextual. Provide immediate or timely communication with a clear next step. This reminds consumers of their initial intent and offers a simple way to follow through and achieve their goal.

Abandon Browse

Although similar to Abandon Cart, with Abandon Browse, the consumer’s level of interest is less clear. But by combining counts of product views with viewing time, you can hone in on an appropriate connotation of interest. For example, consumers who spend a total of 2 hours looking repeatedly at a product over the course of a week might be delighted to receive a coupon that nudges them over the consideration-to-conversion line.

To align with ethical personalization best practices, consider adding a line in the coupon email that says something like, “Because you viewed this product in the past 7 days, we thought you’d enjoy this coupon.” Explain why the customer received the email. Explicit transparency helps inform the consumer and build trust.

Price Drop

According to Forbes, 67% of customers shop by digitally jumping from store-to-store looking for discounts. During consideration phases, a consumer may decide not to make the purchase because the price is outside their budget. If you let a consumer know when the product goes on sale, your brand message is meaningful, relevant, and in the consumers’ interest. Also consider adding a feedback mechanism that allows the consumer to tell you, “I have already purchased this item” or “I’m no longer interested in this item.” That way, the marketer can close the loop and avoid over-messaging the customer.

New Item in Favorite Category or New Promotional Campaign

A personalization solution can infer the affinity of consumers through the groupings of products they view and purchase. By deriving affinities, a brand can ensure that consumers don’t miss out on new products from the categories or brands they have their eye on. For example, you have a consumer who’s a regular peruser of fashion leggings, and you’ve just released a new color. This is the perfect moment to reach out to them. Use the opportunity to create brand evangelists, generate early hype, and drive continued engagement with your customers.

Word choice is important. It can determine whether an email comes off as a friendly suggestion or unwanted surveillance. For example, if you notice a customer showing an affinity toward swimwear, consider adding them to a segment that receives an email titled “Introducing: Our New Surf in the City Collection.” Another great way to gather data is to prompt the user for consent or provide a survey that asks them to explicitly share what they’re interested in. This lets you gather more zero- and first-party data, confirm what you’ve inferred, and let them know you’ve got them covered.

An emerging practice is to express more thoughtfulness around campaigns like Mother’s/Father’s Day holidays that may seem innocuous but are, for some folks, emotionally difficult. Provide an easy opt-out feature that allows consumers to stay engaged with the brand but limits or eliminates potentially sensitive emails associated with Mother’s/Father’s Day. Taking this extra step ensures that customers feel seen, heard, and acknowledged. What a great way to build immediate brand affinity while continuing to build trust over time.

Post Purchase

After a customer presses Submit Order, the next step of the journey commences. Whether this is the first time they do business with you or the hundredth, there is an opportunity to enhance and build on that relationship. You might consider communications like:

“Get ready for your <product>. You can review the instruction manual here.” Or “You can download our app to track your order.”

Give customers a reason to come back to you. A strong foundation of trust enhances brand loyalty and incentivizes referrals to help grow your network of consumers and potential customers.

Real-Time Criteria

The Salesforce mission is “to empower companies to connect with their customers in a whole new way.” Customers are busy. When they shop, they want efficiency and convenience. And they want to feel seen and understood. Time is money, and information is power. The longer a customer waits to receive their welcome discount, the more likely they’ll take their business elsewhere.

Rather than waiting on batched data that may be stale upon arrival, rely on real-time data on customer actions to help you quickly see what’s working and remedy what’s not working. In today’s practice of cross-channel engagement with customers, you need to capture and respond to real-time data across touchpoints. Immediate responses to consumer actions have enabled hybrid services, like curbside pickup or buy online pick up in store (BOPIS), which have skyrocketed in popularity.

Serve Your Customers Responsibly

Personalized and timely reminders can often aid the consumer in their journey to make a decision they forgot about, or to learn about an opportunity that might benefit them. They can also quickly erode brand trust if used inappropriately or misaligned with consumer expectations.

To sum it up: Honor customer preferences. Lead with interest-based affinities. Prioritize communication that is most relevant and beneficial. These are all ways to help ensure a more ethical use of behavioral messaging while strengthening trust and brand loyalty.

Let’s Wrap It Up

As our societies become more diverse and interconnected, it’s more important than ever for companies to be thoughtful about the messages, images, voices, and values that represent their brand. To build loyalty and trust, consumer engagement, and overall customer retention, base your personalization strategy on a foundation of ethics.

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