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The verdict is out, and according to a survey performed by Salesforce Research, over 76% of consumers are now more likely to take their business elsewhere just to find an experience that matches their expectations.
This is the same research company that discovered that 67% of consumers and 74% of business buyers are willing to pay more in order to attain that positive experience.
Because of these findings, companies everywhere have begun competing purely on the grounds of customer experience. Going so far as to improve their reputation online in order to make consumers more likely to try out their products or services over other competitors.
Of course, the same goes for many B2C companies and online retailers.
There’s a mad dash to the top as they make improvements on customer service, platform infrastructure, brand marketing, and so on.
And, one of the main points of competition, is their chosen marketing automation platform.
Platform vendors for such services now offer varying support to increase revenue and maximize the efficiency of various marketing operations. They’ve also evolved quite a bit from their previously too-heavy-focus on email marketing.
Now, you can integrate such platforms quite easily in order to perform advanced lead management, onboard new customers, manage the customer journey, reduce customer churn, and, even, use account-based marketing (ABM) tools that can provide predictive analytics on consumer behavior and trends.
The evolution of such platforms is not likely to stop any time soon either. As their main goal is to offer increasing support for their clients in order to provide a big ROI.
Learn more about the different marketing automation platforms available below:
Leading Names in Marketing Automation
One of the most talked-about marketing automation platforms in recent history is Maropost, a Canadian-based company that works with various international B2C companies and retailers.
This platform vendor markets itself as the only unified customer engagement platform designed to connect companies with their customers at every step of the journey. They’ve also been awarded as a G2 leader in both marketing automation and personalization software.
According to Econotimes, Maropost has made quite a few investments in improving its platform infrastructure over the past couple of years. Primarily, to support the rapid growth of its current customers after they had moved their platform to the GCP a year ago.
They’ve also made a couple of big changes to their UI to improve their own clients’ experience, and already have plans for further product and service developments in the upcoming years.
Quite unfortunately, there was a lot of talk recently about how the company had suffered from a data breach. And, even more, unfortunately, it turned out to be just over-inflated news on a misconfiguration that occurred while they were testing a new product for their platform. There was no leak of any actual data, according to the Patch.
So, our main takeaway from the incident is that the company is continuing to make improvements to its platform. In this, they are a great example of what many other marketing automation platforms are striving for.
According to Web Engage, the marketing automation software market is expected to grow another 8.55% this year.
With signs pointing to a market capitalization of around $6.4 billion by 2024.
More importantly, research has shown that 51% of companies are already using marketing automation platforms and software to get ahead of their competitors. And, that over 58% of those that aren’t, are planning to adopt the change in the future.
This comes as no surprise.
The customer is king, after all. And, these days, customers are more than capable of looking for the best possible experience, even if it means having to switch from brand to brand until they find it.
Consumers Are Looking for Personalized Customer Experience
Customer expectations are much higher now than ever before, and it’s only going to get higher and higher from here on out.
To leave you some food for thought, let’s take a closer look at some of the other Salesforce findings from the survey mentioned above. Starting with one of the most important statistics — that is, customers are tired of being treated as just a number, over 84% are willing to drop a brand if they are not treated like a person.
Even more worrying, as of right now, consumers say that over half of companies (at least 51%) have missed the mark on what they believe is the proper customer experience.
And so, as a company competing for their business, it is your responsibility to make sure that you are on the other side of that spectrum. Or else, pay the price of being left out altogether.
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This content is brought to you by Ashleigh Coran.
Photo: Shutterstock
