Turning individual interactions into recurring revenue

Before joining Agillic, the Danish Red Cross had a different point solution for each of their channels – one for email, SMS, telemarketing and print, respectively. 

The slow, manual process they endured to send out communications was inconvenient both for them and their donors. Some donors would receive calls to action in the middle of the night because sending SMS took so long. 

Without the speedy communications necessary for them to be efficient, the Danish Red Cross lost donors to other charities who were able to more quickly execute campaigns after crises. 

Since joining Agillic, they have been able to address these problems to efficiently execute timely, relevant communications. Says the Head of Individual Giving and Fundraising at the Danish Red Cross, Charlotte Christensen: “From when we get an idea, it takes us no more than a few hours until we have an SMS and email ready”. 

For example, according to Christensen, with their previous system, their recent coronavirus development project would’ve taken them roughly three months to accomplish. In reality, it took only a few days of configuration to accomplish this campaign in Agillic. 

The ability to act quickly has been transformative for their business. Since joining Agillic, they’ve increased email revenue by 120% and boosted text message revenue by 60%. These results did not come from complex configurations or by adopting more channels; they came only from nailing the basics with our platform. 

The Danish Red Cross has achieved these results simply by pushing compelling communications across its existing channels more quickly and efficiently than ever before. 

With Agillic, The Swedish Red Cross implemented personalised lifecycle communications, enabling them to meet customers where they’re at across channels ​

The Swedish branch of the Red Cross, another Agillic client, has worked with other omnichannel marketing automation platforms before joining Agillic. They attest that it is the ability to orchestrate coordinated and highly detailed cross-channel communications that set Agillic apart from competitors. With Agillic, you can coordinate campaign-based marketing and lifecycle communications with each other so that no customer receives overloaded or irrelevant communications. This way, you can make sure your personalised lifecycle communications take precedence over your campaign-based ones. Agillic also enables you to easily reuse content across channels, so you can maximise the utility of each communication created. For example, you can resend unopened emails with slight alterations to increase the likelihood of opening. Crucially, it is also easy to use and act on behavioural data from your website to maximise the effectiveness of your communications. 

With their customer journey, the Swedish Red Cross customer journey is focused on identifying donors’ maturity levels and pushing out the corresponding relevant communications.  It is key to make sure to communicate the right thing at the right point in the customer journey. For example, you wouldn’t send a thank you flow to a customer that hasn’t made a recent donation. As Houlind says: “Communication preferences vary for each individual, and companies must meet each donor where they want to be met with a message that corresponds to where they are at this point in the life cycle. Without a proper system in place to manage this, you’ll be left with lots of headaches to figure out how to best reach out to your customers.”

The company can’t control where customers choose to interact with the company; they can only ensure that they are ready to meet the customer with relevant messaging whenever that moment of truth occurs. With a system in place to help predict where each customer will be at what point in time, and which channel to reach them on, it becomes significantly easier to create targeted, personal marketing campaigns.

Reap the benefits of lifecycle communication in your business through relevant content, proper marketing structuration and resource investment.

As Houlind discussed in the webinar, nailing the basics of omnichannel marketing does not simply mean understanding how to use your customer marketing platform. To reap the benefits of the platform, you need fresh and engaging content to push out to your customers. 

You also need to make sure to implement the proper structuration within your marketing department to successfully implement a new marketing software. If your marketing department is already working full-throttle on campaign-based marketing, they will not have the bandwidth to properly adopt a new customer marketing platform. Therefore, be sure to delegate some people to work on existing campaign-based marketing and some to implement the new marketing approach. Finally, you must understand that implementing marketing automation software is not only about saving resources, but that it takes an investment of resources to achieve the desired savings.

Although Houlind used the example of charities and NGOs, it is not only charities that can benefit and grow in this way. Any business that is looking to turn one-off transactions into long-term customer loyalty can apply these learnings to their marketing. This is especially relevant for retail and subscription-based businesses, which can benefit from implementing the following flows no matter what customer marketing platform they are using.