By Raviteja Dodda
Chess is arguably one of the most strategic games. The mental grit required to win this game isn’t too different from what a successful engagement strategy requires. Much like how chess coaches guide players through training and winning strategies, a powerful MarTech stack makes an effective campaign.
Let’s break down the parallels that are hard to miss between chess and customer engagement and how the right engagement platforms can propel you toward victory:
Know Your Friction Pieces
Whether you’re playing a seasoned player or not, certain chess pieces will delay your way to a successful checkmate. In customer engagement, these friction factors are, more often than not, customers that have gone cold. Dormant customers are the bane of brands’ existence as they’re always at churn risk. Therefore, identifying them effectively and on time is crucial.
Your MarTech platform should be able to monitor your customers’ activity levels to spot and eliminate any possibility of churn. Uncovering the story behind every churned customer by deep-diving into their previous actions (that led to uninstall or churn) will be a game changer.
Revive the Out-Of-Action Troopers
In chess, pawn promotion is a clever trick for replacing a pawn with a much stronger new piece—be it a queen, bishop, knight, or rook—when the pawn is moved to its last rank. Likewise, in customer engagement, brands must focus on resurrecting their out-of-action customers, such as those who haven’t made a purchase in the last six months or those who have unsubscribed from your newsletter, and getting them back into the funnel stronger than before.
An AI-powered MarTech platform will help brands leverage automation to create ‘micro-segments ‘, which are small groups of customers with similar characteristics or behaviours of churn-risk customers to drive win-back campaigns. The reactivation campaigns should be run across channels (web, mobile, and offline) to engage customers on the right channel, at the right time, with the right message using AI.
Know What Pieces to Move and When
Chess and customer engagement both require strategic planning ahead of the next move. Planning ahead means being completely in tune with your customers’ pulse—whether it’s knowing their likes, dislikes, or channel preferences.
Customer habits and daily routines significantly impact their engagement with brands, varying from early morning to late evening interactions. Additionally, preferences for communication channels differ, with some customers favouring email while others prefer SMS or push notifications.
For enhanced customer engagement, it’s crucial to identify the optimal timing and preferred channels. Your MarTech stack should be able to analyse the past behaviour of millions of customers, determining the preferred engagement time. Additionally, it is vital to reach customers through their preferred channels rather than bombarding them across all channels.
Predict Their Next Move
Like in chess, the primary strategy is to think at least 2-3 moves ahead– the same rules apply to customer engagement, too! Predicting your customers’ next steps is crucial to knowing what to expect so you can engage with them better.
To go beyond past actions, your MarTech stack needs to factor in your customers’ current interests and understand their future actions. This is where leveraging ML and AI capabilities comes into the picture—allowing brands to transform past data into future insights. Accurately forecasting customer actions is key to creating highly relevant campaigns that nudge customers toward desired actions.
Checkmate in 3 Moves!
Time to value is a crucial aspect of both chess and customer engagement. You’ll always be playing catch-up if you take ages to make the next move (or weeks to take that campaign live). You can rig the game to win seamlessly (both in chess and customer engagement). But it all comes down to the MarTech platform.
A recent survey of 1,000 marketers globally found that over 92.6% of the respondents find speed/agility important for understanding and adapting to changing consumer expectations. However, 55.8% state they lack the support to be agile and adaptable.
Over half of these respondents use a legacy marketing platform, signifying that a more agile and new-gen engagement platform is the need of the hour!
Bagging the Grandmaster Title
Ensuring your brand stays in your customers’ minds long after the first purchase requires brands to invest in technology that can handle changing consumer expectations. With new brands popping up daily, the difference between an average one and a Grandmaster will be how advanced their MarTech stack is. What you need the most is an AI-powered engagement platform that puts you multiple moves ahead of the competition!
The author is CEO & co-founder, MoEngage
(Views expressed are the author’s own and not necessarily those of financialexpress.com)