Customer engagement is critical for brands. If you’re in the game of trying to build better relationships with your customers, you’re on point. Learning what your customers want and then giving it to them; building brand loyalty and advocacy to foster customers for life. What’s not critical about that?

At Thunderhead, we define customer engagement as an ongoing, value-driven relationship between a customer and a business, which is consciously motivated according to the customer’s...

You can’t go very far within the world of marketing and brands without hearing the latest buzzword – personalisation. Everything is about personalisation, and with advances in technology and the use of data, marketing is becoming increasingly personalised and social. Many brands are already making the most of this shift by creating innovative and engaging campaigns which allow consumers to interact with the content.

However, as last week’s National Lottery campaign for the World Athletics...

We all know that video has become a key part of the marketing ecosystem – recent IAB statistics reveal mobile video is the fastest growing ad format, up 103% year-on-year.

In addition, data from YouGov shows that in the last six months, 54% of British smartphone users watched video clips on their...

Smartphones, autonomous vehicles, voice-controlled assistants – the wonders of the digital age are plentiful and growing. Too bad we’re constantly distracted by them.

Not only does research suggest that the average person checks their phone 150 times a day, but conditions like nomophobia – the fear of going without your device – are well documented.

People are now constantly connected, yet technology is increasingly seen as a distraction. Being relaxed and being connected are, for...

Consumers have come to expect personalisation as standard.

From offers to recommendations of products, the average consumer’s social media feed and email inbox is crammed full of communications from a wide range of businesses, all vying for their custom. But they want brands to make them feel like an individual, rather than just another customer.

By giving customers something that they want to receive brands can improve conversion rates and encourage brand loyalty. So far, so simple. But working out the...

For all the ongoing discussion about AI stealing our jobs – it’s already very much here.

In particular, AI is prevalent on the computers in our pockets, our phones. 72% of US smartphone users now use 6 apps daily - and AI has well and truly infiltrated them – with voice assistant and chatbot technology being seamlessly overlaid onto our most used apps.

It’s now paying our car tax and booking our plane tickets. A child born today is essentially AI-native, interacting with Amazon Alexa...

From handwritten notes to bespoke offers from stores, we pay more attention when people take time to personalise our communications.

A colleague of mine used to record every detail of conversations he had with clients, and would include them in personalised follow-up letters – even to the extent of inquiring how one particular client’s lumbago was.

This particular client found this warmth and attention to detail gratifying and respectful, and his spend with the business reflected this.

Whether you...

“The painful reality is that establishing a personal bond with individual customers is hard for omnichannel retailers,” an article for Fourth Source recently opined. “While it’s true that digital retail generates a lot of data relating to individual customers, which can be extracted and utilised both online and in the store, few businesses have successfully struck the balance between helpful and...

As customers’ paths to purchase become increasingly complex, marketers are under mounting pressure to evidence their contribution to ROI within the multichannel mix.

But with more tech platforms to integrate than ever before, is there room for call intelligence within the growing martech stack?

Despite the significant evolution of the call tracking and intelligence market, the technology, to date, is utilised by less than 5% of businesses that could benefit from it. In part...

Brands that craft excellent loyalty programmes know that they are all about the customer – not the business.

The benefits of long-term customer loyalty are self-evident. But, without providing the rewards and relationships that people want, that loyalty just isn’t going to happen.

Effective loyalty programmes focus on the wants and needs of individual programme members, and then align them to the sales goals of the business (rather than the other way around).

Businesses that want to provide a...