Previously released in Internet Retailing on October 16, 2017 by Paul Skeldon.

Understanding the intent of your customer leads to more relevancy, an increase in engagement – with brands such as Danone and Dr. Oetker seeing an uplift of 25% in e-commerce conversion and brand engagement.

So finds OnModus, a customer experience strategy firm operating in the UK, Germany and Benelux, which works with Top100 FMCG brands to not only help with engagement but to understand the context of what shoppers are doing.

A shifting model

“Our clients are top 100 FMCG’s, popular brands which traditionally put a lot of effort in creating big marketing moments in which their brands can shine,” explains Lars Wisselink, Design Strategist at OnModus. “Clearly, this model is shifting. Due to the change of behaviour of customers, we move to a more customer centric approach in marketing activities”

Wisselink continues: “What is important to be effective in your communication as a brand is to tap into the intent of your customers, being in the moment. The use of implicit and explicit customer data is crucial to understand this context, we help discover these insights for marketers to become more effective. Software such as Sitecore helps delivering this experience”.

Test and learn

Brands such as Danone and Dr. Oetker increasingly want to establish a data-first strategy to enable context marketing. By helping them iterating on small successes, they get results in early and can test and learn.

“We work in multidisciplinary teams to come up with creative hypotheses which we test in an agile fashion,” says Wisselink. “Our context marketing teams work in sprints of two weeks, in which they create and test hypotheses. At the end of each sprint, learnings and ROI improvements are presented to business stakeholders.”

According to Wisselink, a typical example is retargeting people who, for example, have just been looking at a new pair of shoes. “For us, this does not mean you should retarget that customer over and over with the same pair of shoes,” he says.

Instead, understand the moment, the intent of the customer. What blog posts have they been reading, which referral url they came from, how does their purchase history look like. By using this context, you will get a clear picture of where this customer is in their journey. This data can be used to adjust the (retargeting) message and change strategy.

How do you start?

But how to start? “Probably your current data structure contains already many clues about typical behavioural patterns, for different persona segments within your customer base,” explains Wisselink. “These segments can tell you something about the intent, the job your customer is trying to get done. Use these insights to target a specific segment. Iterate and learn from small successes. At OnModus we provide a practical implementation strategy towards context marketing, and lead by example. We know the advantages and also how to overcome the common pitfalls and hurdles. We don’t provide you with documentation and implementation plans, instead we are in it for the results.”