Forrester Research Analyst Ellen Carney teamed up with KBM Group’s Lindsey Resnick last week for a webinar titled, “Marketing Life Insurance in a Customer-Driven Environment: Optimize Customer Engagement via Data & Technology.” Don’t let the long title fool you: it was one of the most important webinars we’ve seen this year in terms of providing great data that marketers need right now.
You can view the entire webinar online by clicking here, but here are a few of the highlights that we thought would be of special interest to marketers.
Consumer Experience Emerges as a Key Revenue Driver
Ellen Carney presented quite a lot of new Forrester Research data during the webinar, much of it in support of her basic premise that a consumer’s experience with your brand – online, in person, at the point of sale, during a customer service encounter, and through feedback from friends and family – is the deciding factor in additional purchases, churn reduction and word-of-mouth (positive or negative).
Carney showed one slide that how customer experience affected over $4 billion in revenue for key industries like insurance, hotels, banks, and others. Another visually striking slide showed how smartphones have become the “remote controls” for consumers lives.
She said that the role that technology plays in business has shifted from being just a way to reduce costs to being integrated into how business gets done, and the online experience you deliver is now key to customer loyalty, as well as recruiting and retaining top sales people and channel partners.
Odds of Hitting Your Target Go Up When You Aim At It
Lindsey Resnick presented an overview of the role that customer data plays in today’s marketing and sales environment, noting that new and maturing communications channels are fueling an explosion of data.
“By knowing digital attitudes and behaviors across a range of technologies and devices marketers can deliver customized messages to customers via their most preferred digital device and digital destination,” Resnick said, adding that the key to doing that is data segmentation.
Resnick presented a wide range of important data, but one slide she presented stood out: it showed the percentage of consumers in various demographic groups who are “hyperconnected cybersumers”. That is, buyers who research nearly every purchase online, and rely heavily on feedback from user-generated reviews and comments in making their purchase decisions.
The 54 slides presented during the one-hour session were filled with useful data that most marketers will find both new and somewhat surprising. Details and a recording of the webinar are available online by clicking here.