'To deliver great customer experience, marketers need to act on data in real time'

Second edition of the e4m Health Communication Conference took place on June, 28. The aim was to bring together the stalwarts and thought leaders of the health and wellness sector on one platform.

The e4m Health Communication Conference was filled with a highly informative session on the topic ‘Digital Trends for strengthening brand engagement in a remote world by Sabrina Prince, EVP & Group Management Director, FCB Health Global. 

Focusing on the importance of customer data platforms, Sabrina, as the keynote speaker, presented, “There was an interesting survey on the online behaviour of consumers in the US around March 2020, and the website Centres for Disease Control and Prevention i.e. cdc.gov was the most popular government web domain in the US in March 2020. With almost 432 million digital visits. The majority of the American population considers the CDC the most trustworthy source of information on COVID-19. cdc.gov recorded over 934 million page views in that month alone. In stark contrast, social media was considered the least trustworthy source of information on the coronavirus outbreak, according to the same March survey. So, what does this tell us? The unfortunate truth is that we live in a world of information overload and mistrust of politicians, sometimes scientists, and on occasion, each other, and this reality has forced internet users to cut out the middleman and really turn directly to the source. And this place is a big responsibility for healthcare marketers to be a resource for unbiased information. Providing that unbiased information in a way that is authentic to the consumer.  

“Delivering the best customer experience is a core goal for most companies. And in order to do so, we need to understand our customers and how they interact with our promotional materials. Marketers may be using a variety of digital platforms to capture these customer interactions like Google Analytics, for any sort of customer campaigns you may have. All of this makes complete sense. That's where the concept of connected data comes in. So in order to own the data, and to ensure that we can deliver data in the form of solution-driven user experiences, it's really important for marketers to be able to manage and activate or act on that data in real time. This is where a customer data platform or CDP helps to improve this engagement and those conversations,” added Sabrina.

“CDP brings together all of that information from the sources in a format that is easily digestible and actionable by the marketing team so that they can collect it, they can learn about what the customer is doing, why the customer is doing it, and determine the best way to act on that, push that information back out, or any regeneration or whatever the overall brand strategies are.” 

Explaining the importance of CDP, she added, “Today's customers are assuming that your company knows them, that they remember them, that you know who they are, you know what they've done, you know what they want, basically, they think that you can read their mind. They want to be loved. They expect the marketing company to serve relevant content based on their experiences and based on data. And marketing technologists know that gathering this data and acting on it in a unified way, isn't easy. And we also know that internally, only a few companies have done this successfully. The rest of them, probably your own clients are battling with technology, strategies, budgets, organizations, stats, skills, and a host of other obstacles to success. But customers don't really care about any of these issues. If you don't give them what they want, it's game over.”