SessionM, a pioneer in real-time personalization and loyalty technology, and Bottle Rocket, a leading mobile strategy, design, and development company (which is part of the Ogilvy & Mather and WPP network of global agencies), recently partnered together to enable brands to deliver richer, more immersive mobile apps powered by true mobile loyalty
This new joint offering will allow Bottle Rocket to build apps that fuel consumer engagement and retention with powerful new features from SessionM.
Loyalty360 caught up with Adam Morgan, VP of Global Partners & Alliances at SessionM, to find out more about the company and new partnership.
What are your goals for the partnership with Bottle Rocket from a customer engagement/customer loyalty perspective?
Bottle Rocket brings a unique set of skills to the table not only because of its extensive history of mobile and mobile application excellence, but also as a part of Ogilvy and the broad sets of skills it introduces as a fully integrated marketing firm. If you look at the diverse clients that Bottle Rocket has historically served, it is well represented across industries such as Travel and Hospitality, Retail and QSRs, Consumer Products and Media/Entertainment, all industries at the forefront of customer engagement and loyalty.
What is SessionM bringing to the partnership that makes it unique?
I think there are two things which we introduce that help Bottle Rocket stand out and differentiate in the market; one is our platform and the second is our approach.
For the platform, the historical approach to mobile solutions, particularly mobile app development, is highly fragmented, requiring a litany of point solutions and SDKs to make a robust customer experience work. That is part of what has led to the cost/complexity/timeline challenge around mobile app dev. Our platform introduces a highly innovative, yet consolidated approach to addressing so many of those challenges...at scale.
For approach, we have a highly customer-centric approach and invest heavily up front to reduce friction points and delivery challenges. That approach leads to highly specific customer deployments with verifiable outcomes and a demonstrable ROI.
What is your assessment of the mobile marketing world and what trends do you see or foresee?
Personalization, 1-to-1 marketing, micro segments, predictions, recommendations, and machine learning are changing how mobile marketing (and all marketing, for that matter) works and how brands are creating unique customer experiences at mass scale. These strategies are not necessarily new as concepts, but up until recently, marketing stacks couldn’t make them realities.
Data was distributed widely across an organization without being actionable at scale or speed and an operational customer profile was nonexistent. Now, technology has finally caught up with the buzzwords, giving marketers the ability to completely transform their customer experience.
Whereas marketers have had to manually derive segments and set up each variant for every campaign, obsessing over “the offer,” “the product” and “the segments,” in the new world of machine learning, micro segments and personalization, marketers will simply declare the goal of the campaign to the machine, and it will decide the offer or content, product, segment, time of day, delivery channel, and more that will help achieve it.
How do you see apps fitting in the customer loyalty world? Some critics say apps are too expensive and take too long to come to fruition?
Apps unlock doors to customer loyalty by enabling brands to collect first-party data on their users that can be leveraged to create personalized experiences, which is critical to forging lasting customer relationships. In the same way the neighborhood butcher might have greeted you by name and asked if you wanted “the usual,” brands leverage that first-party data to know you like one of their “regulars.” In a competitive marketplace, brands can’t afford to treat their best customers like anything less than VIPs. Doing this starts with intelligent data collection.
What are the biggest opportunities / challenges for brands and marketers today? If you could recommend one thing to a client (or prospective client), what would it be?
The ubiquity of smartphones has transformed so many aspects of our lives, including consumers’ expectations for how brands interact with them and what their experience should be like. Most companies are not equipped with the technology needed to meet the demand for sophisticated personalization at real-time speed. But they know that’s it’s no longer a nice to have; it’s a need to have. And now.
How sophisticated are the customer experience and customer loyalty initiatives of most brands today?
Most companies are not equipped with the technology needed to meet the demand for sophisticated personalization at real-time speed. Their legacy technology limits the flexibility and scalability of their customer experience and loyalty initiatives because they’re based on batch files and static marketing lists, which means a campaign is dependent on an upload of contacts. In contrast, our platform enables marketers to design campaigns around behaviors, so they can react in real-time at the moment of impact.