Truly impactful modern CRM is about so much more than a transaction. Today’s most effective brands focus on building strong, long-term customer relationships founded on human connection. In this blog, we break down our “Three M's” approach to building more powerful customer relationships.
Building strong relationships hinges on understanding the psychology of human connection, which involves tapping into the brain's reward centers. When people share personal stories or engage in meaningful conversations, it activates areas of the brain associated with delight and bonding, fostering deeper connections. By leveraging this natural inclination towards social interaction, brand marketing and advertising teams can create more engaging and memorable customer experiences, which can strengthen loyalty and trust with a brand.
What are memories, moments, and messages?
The demand for better brand relationships via personalized interactions is clear. Our latest personalization research revealed that brands that provided more robust personalized experiences to their customers saw revenue grow by 10%, compared to just 1.7% for peer brands with less mature personalization capabilities. To compete for the attention of today’s customers and build lasting relationships with them, brands need to adopt an approach that is end-to-end, outcomes-based, and scalable.
In a world where data and technology are constantly evolving, brands need a framework that can meet them where they are on the maturity scale. Brands that fail to innovate at the speed of customer preferences may risk falling behind. Embracing the right technology and data framework is essential to developing more human relationships with their customers. Our team has created an industry-leading, martech-enabled framework to solve these gaps for our clients. We call it the “Three M's”—memories, moments, and messages.
The Three M's are designed to work together to create a smooth and effective customer relationship management (CRM) model. However, many brands fail to integrate these components cohesively. This disjointed approach can result in fragmented customer experiences. Without a unified operation that connects all three of these elements, brands can find themselves unable to unlock the potential of their CRM strategies, hindering their ability to build lasting customer loyalty and trust.
1. MEMORIES: Know your customers better than anyone else
Memories are the data that you’ve gathered about your customers, organized in a location like a customer data platform (CDP). Memories include zero-party data, first-party data, and any supplemental data from second- and third-party sources. One common barrier in this area that we frequently see our clients face is a lack of customer segmentation. Having a clear understanding of who your customers are—and what motivates them—will help you build better relationships through a comprehensive understanding of the customer, enabling more personalized and effective communication strategies.
Along with traditional customer data (demographics, psychographics, location, transactional, etc.), the relationship activation programs that drive the most impact incorporate advanced behavioral metrics such as CRM data and social signals. Solutions such as ConvergeCONSUMER™, for example, can help generate feedback to give brands a fuller picture of their customers.
2. MOMENTS: The best way to reach your customers
Moments in a customer journey are strategically identified points at which targeted interactions can make a significant impact on the customer’s experience and grow their relationship with the brand. These moments are grounded in meeting the customer where they are in their purchase or communications cycle and giving attribution to important moments outside of simply a final action or conversion.
A frequent roadblock we see with our clients is the siloing of customer interactions. To better map out the end-to-end customer journey in a holistic way and identify critical touchpoints, it is important for marketing teams to analyze data across many different sources (CDP, web analytics, social media, customer feedback, etc.) and trends in customer behavior such as preferences and pain points to understand their needs and expectations. These key moments can be sub-categorized into groupings to optimize future messaging and channel strategies. Specific channel strategies can then be matched up to customer preferences or channel objectives. Additionally, for clients that are already utilizing platforms and/or models that are getting them results they want, we employ a “bring your own model” (BYOM) approach that can utilize those existing tools while enhancing their impact with our artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technology solutions.
3. MESSAGES: Deliver high-speed, AI-enabled, personalized content
Messages are the personalized communications that will be delivered to the customer at each touchpoint. These messages are tailored to the moment sub-category, the preferred channel, and engagement history details. Creating hyper-personalized interactions based on past engagements is a crucial element for today’s marketing and advertising teams to deliver effective customer messaging, and it is common for today’s brands to feel stuck when trying to develop a personalization strategy and scale it effectively.
It is important to first analyze a customer’s metrics to understand how to best tailor content to match the moment and the customer’s top preferences. Next, outlining the type of personalization most desired is crucial. Examples include using the customer’s name, delivering them bespoke product recommendations, and offering relevant, unique discounts that acknowledge their brand loyalty. Campaigns can be kickstarted once all of this information is organized and sent to creative teams that oversee content production solutions accelerated by GenAI, such as our proprietary AI-driven content tool, CreativEdge™.
In the long term, accelerators like this can help creative teams maintain a consistent message and brand voice across all channels, transitioning between pivotal customer journey moments smoothly to provide a cohesive, end-to-end experience. The test-and-learn process is important to instill as a continuous part of marketing and advertising processes to better understand evolving audiences. These results flow back to memories, and thus deepen our knowledge, improve conversions, and strengthen the overall effectiveness of the Three M's.
Looking ahead
Adopting the Three M's can have a truly transformative impact on building meaningful customer relationships for today’s brands. By leveraging the right customer insights, today’s marketing and advertising teams can enhance their customer experiences and continue to foster loyalty and trust. Brands can move beyond mere data collection, and transition to actively engaging with and responding to customer needs in a personalized way, in real time.
Potential benefits of the Three M's include:
If you would like to learn more about the tailored solutions that we bring clients who want to better personalize memories, moments, and messages for their customers—or find out where your brand falls on the CRM maturity continuum through an assessment—feel free to get in touch with our professionals to kickstart your relationship activation journey today.
About the authors
Kathleen Erickson is a managing director and martech strategy and operations lead at Deloitte Digital. Kate guides clients through the complexities of marketing strategy, customer lifecycle management, campaign management, marketing automation platforms, and digital marketing technology strategy.
Olivia Balicki is digital marketing and relationship activation lead at Deloitte Digital. Olivia brings together data, technology, and content to help clients develop better relationships with their customers that drive business value. She has extensive advertising and digital marketing experience across B2C, B2B, and distributed models spanning brand strategy, integrated campaigns, go-to-market planning, mobile/web development, social activation, CRM/relationship development, content at scale, and end-to-end email development.
Brooke Dunnigan is a digital marketing practitioner at Deloitte Digital with over 15 years of experience focusing on better marketing across the customer experience. Her data-driven approach to modern marketing is focused on personalization to build loyalty for many high-profile clients in the consumer and travel industries.
Tim Greulich leads Deloitte Digital’s Experience Management practice. He has over 20 years of experience in the customer transformation space and focuses on helping organizations better leverage customer data, feedback, technology, and advanced analytics tools to drive profitable growth.
Personalization: The value exchange between brands and customers
CreativEdge™: A GenAI digital marketing campaign engine
Personalization insights focused on loyalty, apps, relationship activation, and more
