Breaking down the ‘8 seconds’

Within the 8 seconds of a customer’s attention span, marketers must successfully deliver relevance, true value and an easy path for further engagement.

1. Context
2. Relevancy
3. Personalization
4. Experience
5. Motivation
6. Reputation
7. Channel
8. Control

Context

The very first thing a customer or prospect will notice when they interact with your brand is how well you understand them as an individual. If you’re not connected in a relevant way, the other 7 seconds won’t matter. Chances are they will abandon the journey.

Getting context right requires marketers to connect all of their data sources so that they can understand who the person is, where they are, the language they speak and the device they use. Data and analytics play a big role in providing context for engagement. By coordinating customer data sources, such as customer behavioral data with real time data you can serve relevant and contextual content.

Only of marketers are 30% connecting their advanced data sources

- Gartner

Relevancy

From a marketer’s perspective, the way to ensure your content is most relevant to a recipient is by analyzing your customer data and making sure critical data repositories are connected. With such little time to capture and engage a customer, all your content must be optimized for each individual’s preferences, profile and context. That comes from fast, accurate insights into individual behaviors.

72% of customers will use multiple devices when making purchases

Personalization

Once your data reveals that a particular message will be relevant to the interaction, marketers must take relevancy one step further and personalize the content to create an individual experience in the moment.

Personalization is not only based upon intelligence from Slow Data sources, such as traditional customer behavior models. You also need to take into account today’s Fast Data elements gained from real-time customer interactions. Brands can only deliver one-to-one marketing when Slow and Fast data sources are combined.

Want to know moments. Want-to-go moments. Wantto-moments. Want-to-buy moments. They are all micro-moments and they are the new battleground for Brands

- Google

Experience

Congratulations! By this stage, you’ve likely got the customer engaged with your brand. Your customer is now looking for a reason to extend their interaction with your brand beyond the first 4 seconds.

You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression, so how well you utilize your customer data is vital to the overall customer experience. It’s all about balance. Become too personal and your customers may feel your brand is watching them in a voyeuristic or ‘bigbrother’ way. Get it right and your customers will be treated to a ‘valet’ experience where they feel happy to interact with your brand as they continue on their purchasing journey

89% of consumers began doing business with a competitor following a poor experience

- Oracle

Motivation

Assuming that your brand’s offer is relevant and personal, ask yourself what will motivate your customer to stay tuned in. Customers are not only motivated by price-based incentives. They need other reasons, such as exclusivity or loyalty programs, to keep engaging with your brand.

Research has shown that customers prefer brands that offer incentives and will therefore be more motivated to exchange personal information in response to the right offer.

Reputation

Each interaction with a customer is an opportunity to improve your reputation. Unfortunately, many interactions are designed to maximize short-term profit often at the expense of the brand and as a result, long-term profitability is threatened.

Delivering a first-rate experience will turn your best customers into trusted advocates who will actively share and recommend your brand to others. In doing so, they will enhance your reputation as a customer-focused company.

Channel

Next, customers will choose the channel they want to use to engage with your brand. It’s important that you enable and optimize multi-device and multichannel interactions because many customer journeys are non-linear.

Your audience’s behavior is erratic and they’ll start and stop their journey across numerous channels, including mobile phones, tablets, and computers, for no apparent reason. The experience must be consistent and content must be optimized at the point and time your customers choose to connect with your brand.

Control

Your customers are in control. They can tune in or tune out at the click of a button.

Marketers need to understand and respect the fact that users appreciate their privacy. They expect value in return for their interactions and for sharing their information.

Poorly executed campaigns can feel intrusive and risk alienating customers for good. Continued engagement with your brand is not a given – your brand must earn the right to engage.

A new way to think about digital marketing

In this fast-paced digital era, how will you deliver compelling experiences at scale? The answer is by using data insights to drive content decisions and amplify that content using a context engine. Without sufficient insights into your customers’ context, you’ll quickly find that no matter how good your content or data may be, the overall experience will be poor.

There is a new mandate from consumers: experience is more important than price. Properly designing and optimizing customer journeys based on the 8-second rule will allow marketers to take advantage of this new market opportunity and positively impact the bottom line.