Engaged Commerce: Remarketing that Drives Revenue

People interact with brands and with their own networks in a number of ways. Because of this interaction, we've found that mobile communication and social media have grown to be incredibly influential. Suffice it to say that if you are a retailer or another business that drives revenue directly through online marketing and you are not connecting with your audience in more than one way, you are only having a partial conversation.

Having conversations across multiple touchpoints means a couple of things to marketers:

• Be Highly Relevant: If someone did not engage with you because you were irrelevant to them via one channel, it’s only going to be worse if you’re irrelevant through multiple channels.
• Make it easy for subscribers to connect to all your channels. Build bridges between the various ways that people can connect with your brand.

Highly relevant dialogue via multiple channels with the ultimate purpose of driving purchases is what we call Engaged Commerce.

Engaged Commerce is a way of thinking about marketing strategy that addresses a business problem we all face, acquisition. Acquisition is expensive and now with so many touchpoints by which people engage with brands, acquisition is even more expensive because it’s likely that initial acquisition will not result in a purchase. Customers bounce around between touchpoints, looking up reviews, finding out what their Facebook friends think or wait for deals. Engaged Commerce is about re-marketing after acquisition and keeping people connected so that shoppers become buyers and one-time buyers become repeat customers.

You can reduce friction by meeting customers where they already are and interacting in ways that already make sense to them. For example, if I'm following a business on Twitter, it's a shorter path for me to buy something if I’m given a Twitter coupon compared to a direct mail piece in my mailbox or even an email. Reducing friction leads to more transactions.

The idea of relevance now extends to which communication channel is used. Any marketing mix should now consider mobile and social, in addition to email. But, effective cross-channel marketing means using the best channel for the particular message. This is part of what it means to be relevant.

In addition, by paying attention to signals and preferences, you can better understand where someone sits in the buying lifecycle and craft appropriate messages based on this information. Use data on behaviors and preferences to get the message, timing and channel right.

Engaged Commerce is a frame for much of what we discuss here at Bronto. Stayed tuned for more on this topic, such as:

• Bridging between channels of communication
• Staying relevant
• Reducing friction

In the mean time, we’d love to hear from you. Let us know what Engaged Commerce means to you by sharing your comments below.

Kevin Skurski
Director of Marketing Communication at Bronto
@kskurski