The Face Of Martech 2.0 — The Retention Operating System

Gone are the days when obsessing over acquisition was the recipe to drive business growth. In today’s hyper-competitive era, pouring in hefty amounts of marketing funds in bringing new users onboard is not sustainable. Acquiring a new customer is five times as expensive as retaining an existing customer. Brands need to shift their focus to keeping existing customers engaged and providing more value to them. Today’s informed customers expect individualized, highly tailored brand experiences. We are no longer in the era when customers were just another name on the mass blast campaign database.

Marketing Technology, or Martech, has been deemed to hold the key to unlock superior customer engagement and retention. However, the Martech landscape is complex and riddled with unique challenges such as finding the perfect tool, ironing out integration woes, figuring out the ease of use, nailing pricing aspects, measuring ROI, achieving scalability, and so on.

It’s not a walk in the park to put together your brand’s ‘martech stack’ that can deliver desired results from the get-go.

Challenges Galore

In a B2C world, where more often than not the top of the funnel comprises anonymous website visitors and inactive app installs, it is challenging to devise a robust marketing strategy. It becomes imperative for brands to understand data, analytics, funnels better to drive effective campaigns. The most obvious choice for a brand would be to onboard a traditional martech cloud tool. However, these tools are clunky, lack versatility, and are challenging to integrate and scale. They are also heavy on the pocket with limited customization abilities.

Over the years, marketing technology has evolved, and brands have started deploying myriad software to build an all-in-one ‘stack’ that tackles customer experience, engagement, and retention. Marketers wind up spending a lot of time and effort trying to manage various platforms, make them communicate effectively, and ensure proper configuration, optimum usage, and high productivity.

With many tools on the market that cater to different use-cases, marketers have been facing a ‘problem of plenty that amplifies the existing challenges — What solution to choose from an incredibly crowded martech ecosystem that solves your marketing challenges?

To ensure their marketing function is well-oiled, what brands require is a solution that bridges the gap of performance, affordability, ease of use, and scalability across the board for various industries and business sizes.

The answer lies in a single platform that offers an integrated solution of martech tools, enabling brands to drive and deliver powerful campaigns & digital experiences. Well, say hello to the Retention Operating System!

One Stack That Ticks Many Boxes

As the name suggests, the Retention Operating System provides brands with the vital set of intuitive tools needed to execute a data-backed engagement strategy that supercharges user retention. It takes the complexity out of the “cloud” business in marketing technology.

Just like a typical operating system, the Retention Operating System functions as a singular universe that houses everything a digital business requires to power business growth with a suite of connected tools.

A robust Retention Operating System (ROS) constitutes three layers:

1. Enhanced data storage and management capabilities coupled with insights
2. Intelligent engagement via omnichannel campaigns
3. Deep Personalization across web & mobile

Rev Up The Marketing Function

The first layer of the ROS, an intelligent customer data platform, helps brands unify their customer data and get a complete, unobstructed view of their customers at any given point in time. Marketers can understand customer behavior better by simply getting behavioral insights on what customers do on the platform, how they respond to marketing campaigns, and access an additional layer of demographic data.

Now that brands have complete control of their customer data, they need to use it effectively. A campaign management system helps create dynamic lifecycle campaigns at scale using real-time user data, giving brands a natural edge.

Homelane, India’s leading tech-enabled home interiors brand, saw an uptick of 148% in its revenue by adopting the proper retention operating stack. The brand adopted a behavior-based multi-channel engagement approach reducing drop-offs in the user lifecycle and increasing conversion rate.

After devising the campaigns, brands must evaluate performance to gauge effectiveness. The ROS helps marketing teams improve campaign performance with behavioral analytics and revenue analytics.

“FirstCry, Asia’s largest online store for baby and kids products, boosted its repeat purchases by over 400% using funnel analysis and hyper-personalized recommendations. The company created different funnels to understand how parents interact with its app/website and where they drop off in their lifecycle. Using these insights, they made dynamic user journeys to send hyper-personalized communication to parents on their preferred channels like Mobile and Web Push.”

While communicating with customers, why should brands restrict personalization to just addressing customers by their first name in brand campaigns? It is time brands make every touchpoint, every interaction, every experience personalized and high on context. The Netflixes and Amazons of the world capture attention effectively because they personalize significant web and app domain elements based on behavioral data. The act of micro-customization makes every touchpoint rich and every experience valuable, which positively impacts conversions.

The Retention OS gives brands the ability to customize entire sections of their mobile app and website based on user data and real-time insights. User A might see content based on their last visited product, while user B might see content triggering a repurchase on visiting a brand’s website. One of the world’s largest eCommerce websites, Amazon, provides differentiated homepage experiences by personalizing users’ homepage with product recommendations based on their purchase history and browsing patterns.

In essence, the Retention Operating System hyper-personalizes customer experiences that deliver maximum delight at every digital interaction and unlocks customer loyalty.

In Conclusion

The Retention Operating System unifies critical growth enablers (read – tools) under a single umbrella, making it easy to use, integrate, and manage. A robust ROS has the potential to propel your brand in the orbit of growth. It enables brands to crack one of the most challenging aspects of business growth — engaging and retaining existing customers without breaking the bank or losing sleep and doing so consistently.

Apart from making the marketing function more efficient, ROS demonstrates the brand’s commitment to making every customer interaction value-driven and purposeful. A Retention Operating System is just what brands need to ace growth and win customer love in a nutshell.