Want to Drive Customer Engagement? Create Meaningful Experiences

Q: What is the central philosophy behind emBlue's approach and how does it drive the success of your clients?

A: emBlue helps brands build meaningful, lasting relationships with their customers and enables them to connect with them with more relevant and personalized conversations. This leads to greater user loyalty with the brand, making them their first choice again and again, and ultimately driving return on advertising spend (ROAS).

emBlue aims to go beyond the transactional conversations involved in a sale; it aims to generate meaningful experiences throughout the customer lifecycle. It aims to get to know customers as people, really connect with their needs and create long-term connections with customers.

By engaging in personal conversations, customers are happier, which leads to greater engagement with the brand. Customer engagement can be measured based on these interactions. The measurement consists of comparing the number of times the client responded with the number of attempts made to communicate with him.

Another way to measure engagement is through the “Happiness Module,” which uses Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) surveys.

Q: What strategies does emBlue employ to ensure that its solutions are personalized to effectively meet the unique demands of different industries?

A: There are three key pillars in our strategy: customer management systems (CRM), marketing automation and omnichannel. These pillars are essential for hyper-personalization and must take into account three elements: data, the communication channel and the timing of communication. The CRM stores all customer data from various systems, such as interactions at point of sale, website behavior and online or offline purchases. This information is integrated through the marketing automation tool to design a path that customers will follow in their relationship with us, so conversations are generated automatically. These paths focus on the acquisition processes, repurchase, recovery or simply nurturing the customer relationship.

Finally, it is crucial to communicate through any necessary channel, including WhatsApp, email, text messages or personalized notifications. This is where AI comes into play, as machine learning tools can predict or design messages based on customer behavior, timing and communication channel. 

Q: What notable changes have you observed in consumer behavior that marketing professionals should be aware of?

A: User behaviors change constantly and this is especially noticeable in markets like Mexico. This year, we detected a significant difference in the maturity of the market regarding online shopping and banking. Consumers have become increasingly demanding when it comes to delivery times, the quality of communication and the degree of personalization. Thus, if we try to communicate in the same way with everyone, the results are disappointing. 

On the other hand, simple text messages without many images or flashy links have a much stronger impact than messages loaded with colors and graphics. This is where our AI plays a fundamental role: we use it to personalize communication and adapt it to the individual preferences of customers, allowing us to stay aligned with changing user expectations and their impatience. 

Previously, when someone ordered a product, they had to wait and hope that it would arrive someday. Now, consumers want to track their products in real time. A website that does not offer the ability to track a product is providing a low-quality customer experience and can lead consumers to seek alternatives. It is essential for consumers to feel they are part of the brand experience and identify with it. This is where creativity and communication play a crucial role. 

Q: How has privacy legislation, such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) laws, affected marketing practices implemented in Mexico?

A: All companies must now re-obtain their customers’ approval to receive communications, which led to a reduction in the size of databases. The changes implemented by Google and Apple in tracking behavior and the upcoming elimination of cookies are forcing advertisers to work with the information they have in their own domains, both digital and physical. The ability to track user behavior through iPhones is no longer available. However, this drives us to explore other paths and apply smarter approaches. For example, we are testing Real Profile Integration (RPI) technology, which allows us to unify people's experiences in the digital and physical worlds. To bridge the gap between both worlds, we implemented Wi-Fi and location tracking technologies. If a user subscribes to our notifications and approaches a location where there is a store of our brand, we can send them a notification. This creates a continuous and unified experience for the user in physical and digital environments.

Q: How does emBlue BI integrate and analyze data from various applications, such as the Automation Module and Happiness Module? What advantages does this offer? 

A: Our ideal customer is a B2C organization that sells directly to consumers and has a large volume of contacts to manage, from 500,000 to several million contacts. These organizations face challenges in creating personalized and unique experiences for each of these contacts. Our customers come from various industries, such as banks, insurance, supermarkets, media, electricity companies, telecommunications companies and municipal and provincial governments. All of these organizations need to communicate in a specific and personalized way with their customers. All share a common characteristic: they need to manage large volumes of contacts and need to provide personalized attention at the right time with relevant messages. 

Marketing strategy changes depending on the customer being interacted with. Our solutions are not limited to marketing. We also collaborate to efficiently manage delinquent customer portfolios, which accelerates the recovery of outstanding payments. 

An essential aspect of our relationship with companies is helping them measure customer satisfaction. emBlue implements satisfaction surveys at key points in the customer experience, such as product searches, payment processes and deliveries. We collect valuable data about customer happiness to identify promoters and detractors and identify areas that need improvement. 

Q: How do Mexican consumers respond to sustainability and ethical marketing initiatives and are there best practices for companies in this regard?

A:  Ethical marketing is a philosophy that must reach the entire company, especially communication. This philosophy must be in line with the new demands of consumers, especially millennials. It must apply ethical marketing techniques, which grants prestige to the company, improves its reputation, adds value to the products and, above all, facilitates the connection between consumers and the brand.  Mexican society is waiting for companies to experiment with these new ethical and sustainability trends.  Unfortunately, companies that do not meet these expectations may lose ground to those that do.

Q: How does emBlue envision its role in shaping the future of marketing technology and what new frontiers do you plan to explore?

A: When we talk about marketing, we often talk about how brands communicate with people. In Customer Engagement, we manage the relationship between the brand and the customer. However, our focus goes beyond sales or brand promotion. At emBlue, our goal is to build and maintain strong, long-lasting relationships by staying relevant, solving problems and maintaining constant communication with customers. We are proud to be leaders in Latin America on a sustained basis over the last two years.

We are experiencing significant growth and competing with well-known brands. However, the challenge is to stay up to date with the latest technological trends and focus on meeting changing consumer needs. It is crucial for companies that manage large audiences to understand that each person is unique and communication should adapt to the individual.

Q: How can clients of all sizes use emBlue’s platform?

A: We offer options for both small businesses and large enterprises. For small businesses, we have a premium plan that includes essential features, granting them unlimited access to the platform to manage their entire contact database. The standard version includes some additional features and provides access to a customer support team available via phone, email or chat. 

For large enterprises, we offer a complete set of application features, along with an innovation team and specialists who help identify opportunities to improve the relationship between the brand and consumers. We have offices in practically every country in the region, including the US, Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Argentina and Uruguay. This year, we launched the emBlue Academy platform on our website, which offers a variety of courses, ranging from using our platform to courses on sales, business and implementing an NPS strategy.