Agile marketing is all about putting the consumer at the heart of everything you do and giving them the best possible customer experience. Engage explains the theory behind agile marketing, and what you should be doing about it.
1. Tear down the walls
2012 will be the year e-commerce moves beyond multichannel. Consumers are interacting with your brand from their smartphones, on your Facebook page, via e-newsletters or through your website, fluently shifting from one to the other. The solution is cross-channel – or agile – commerce. As the influential report from Forrester Research which first thrust agile commerce into the spotlight put it: "Companies must tear down the walls they have built between their channels."
"You can't make assumptions about a visitor just coming in through one channel and staying there," says Bob Egner, EPiServer's VP Product Management and Global Marketing. "They jump around between channels, so you need to have a way to get your offer out to them at the right time in the right channel."
2. Smart thinking
Apple's iPhone set the standard that others have successfully followed, and the result has been completely new ways of consuming content. Add to that the boom in social media, the rise of tablets, internet TVs and the other online appliances that will follow, and you have a rapidly evolving set of "touch points" to which consumers are constantly connected, and through which they can be reached. Technology developments like near field communication (NFC), enabled smartphones and mobile point-of-sale technology will only increase the number of touch points.
Egner points out that there are different ways to engage with users depending on the technology they use to connect with your brand. "Analysts talk about lean-in and lean-back user experiences," he says. A lean-in experience is someone sitting at a desk using a PC. A lean-back experience is someone sitting on the sofa watching TV with a tablet on their lap. "They are consuming content in a different way and have different expectations about how they want to engage." Similarly, point-of-sale mobile technologies require a different approach depending on whose hands they are in. "If it's a kiosk in a store that a shopper is interacting with, they might want to find product information or their account information," says Egner. "But if it's being used by store personnel to handle a return, they have different expectations about the information available to them."
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