Composable Engagement: Powering Individual Experiences at Scale

In a world moving toward everything being custom, where each person wants to choose their own path and have their own unique life experiences, there is an implicit demand for brands to meet this expectation. Brands need to understand and relate to customers authentically and deliver experiences that are relevant and useful to meet each person’s unique needs. 

Today’s digital landscape encompasses an increasing array of channels, devices and touchpoints that shape the context of each person’s experience. On a global scale, orchestrating experiences that connect with your target audience and hold their interest requires a composable approach to business and technology that blends intelligence, personalization and multichannel communications.  

What is a Composable Engagement?

Engagement is all about creating connections and having meaningful interactions with your audience. Engaging customers requires creating interesting conversations that are shaped by offering the right content at the right time and on the right channel.

Being able to engage every customer everywhere at any moment requires flexible, composable technology that doesn’t depend on any specific technology or interface. A composable approach to customer experience won’t be limited to specific silos or systems, but will support a completely immersive customer journey. For global brands that have multiple siloed teams, designing experiences for specific markets or functions, it can be challenging to execute all of these experiences simultaneously. Today, there are over 5000 different tools across the marketing technology landscape, and more are appearing every day. Many of these solutions are monolithic and inflexible, boxing marketers into only using a single vendor. 

While the market is moving toward a connected approach, even tools that claim to be open to connecting with other technology and data still make these integrations very difficult. A platform with composability at its core makes a truly “open” approach to marketing and technology achievable. Composability empowers teams to unify all of their content and data into unique digital experiences that can be quickly molded and adapted to suit each customer’s current and future needs. 

1. Composable Data

In the age of big data, organizations are investing more in building out robust data pipelines to gather as much information as possible about their audience. However, with more data being collected across multiple systems and tools, businesses struggle with effectively sharing and activating that data across the entire enterprise. To execute a successful composable data strategy, organizations need a unified data platform that offers a centralized, complete view of the customer. Implementing a composable data strategy allows marketers to fully leverage the different types of data from across all of their various tools. 

A single source of truth for data, such as a customer data platform (CDP), eliminates bottlenecks by making data easily accessible to those who need it through intuitive dashboards and comprehensive analytics and reporting features. When marketers use a CDP to take control of the data they need, they can improve their segmentation and personalization efforts while still maintaining data privacy and protecting customer trust. When you allow data to be democratized across departments and embrace a focused first-party data strategy, it helps proactively inform the next best action in the customer journey. The ability to instantly access and understand data in real time from both online and offline sources translates into faster decision making and a more agile approach to building customer experiences.

2. Composable Journeys

There is no one path to conversion; today’s customer journey is a long and winding road. Marketers need to be adaptable, flexible and nuanced in their ability to understand customers across these journeys, and deliver the right engagement every step of the way. Instead of a channel-specific strategy, think about the total experience the customer will have and craft a journey that allows them to move easily between different points. For a brand to remain agile they need open marketing technology that gives marketers real-time access to their data so they can customize campaigns and activate them across every channel from voice to mobile to digital customer portals. By integrating marketing technology across all of your different systems, you can gain on-demand visibility into how customers are engaging with their brand.

Personalization also allows teams to avoid sending messages that annoy or frustrate customers by not being targeted to their interests. The flexibility to adapt a message instantly helps organizations speak to their customers in one voice. When each brand interaction flows logically into the next, customers are less likely to become frustrated or feel misunderstood and more likely to want to keep engaging. 

3. Composable Machine Learning Models

To overcome the silos of content and data within an organization and build an agile process to deliver individualized experiences, marketers must embrace the scalable intelligence of machine learning models. When applied to a unified customer database, machine learning algorithms can recognize trends and patterns within enormous quantities of customer data and pull out  valuable insights. Traditionally, most machine learning uses an inflexible,  black-box model. Teams can only leverage pre-set models with no visibility into the model itself. With a composable approach, machine learning is transparent and understandable. A customer data platform with a configurable intelligence layer means marketers can adapt their machine learning models to any use case. Configurable machine learning allows marketers to incorporate any data attribute, so they can adjust their strategy to suit the unique goals of the business.  

Using predictive machine learning techniques, teams can gain insight into both who their audience is and what they expect from brands in the future. Configurable machine learning models can be customized to detect and segment certain types of customers such as “high lifetime value” or “propensity to purchase online vs. in-store.” More so, machine learning helps businesses stay on the cusp of innovation by proactively identifying what channels and content types customers prefer to engage with. This foresight means marketers can confidently deliver the best possible experience and communicate a relevant message on the appropriate touchpoint. 

4. Composable Blueprints

Organizations with multiple business units, products or brands need to quickly scale in line with their growth. By leveraging centralized platforms that grant teams access to compose campaigns once and reuse content across multiple end-points, teams can stop duplicating efforts and focus on maximizing impact. 

Companies who prioritize their customer experience should spend less time setting up their marketing presence and more time engaging their audience. Marketing automation solutions help standardize business operations by offering templates of different customer journeys that can be tweaked to suit different circumstances. The combination of flexibility and overarching governance ensures that digital experiences feel intuitive without becoming generic or unmemorable.  

Digital experience is managed internally, but it’s felt externally. Crafting positive customer experiences requires more than just connecting each individual piece in the journey. A composable engagement strategy is constantly evolving to reflect new circumstances both at the individual and wider levels. Companies need to be ready to embrace every new innovation and expectation that comes their way. For more on how you can compose exceptional digital experiences, see our recent blog on the elements of a composable architecture.