Ready or not, marketers will soon face the end of third-party cookies. This means that the visibility of determining and aligning customers’ profiles will become much harder; and marketers will need to find new ways to deliver personalized, targeted experiences.
The battle for customer attention and loyalty is becoming increasingly competitive. Marketers need to ensure they have engaging and reliable digital services to attract and win buyers. In digital marketing, the single biggest lever that you can pull is getting the right content in front of the right people at the right time to drive conversion.
With the quality of digital customer experiences having a profound impact on business and customers expecting a seamless experience each time they engage with a brand, how can marketers continuously provide delightful, differentiating experiences in a cookie-less world?
The value of observability
The removal of third-party data is long overdue, as consumers rightly demand that their personal information be protected and used only with explicit consent. In a world without this data, new tools and technologies must be called upon to create an ecosystem that is private, secure and customer-centric.
Companies should consider adopting the practice of observability as part of their tech stack since it can help them to oversee customer data, generate crucial insights and analyse their information in a cookieless world. Observability can help them analyze where users or customers are in the sales process and understand the experience from their side, in real-time – having a sense of personalization and immediacy of the customer journey.
Observability can enable marketers to navigate and access all their data in a unified platform. It provides a lens across all customer touchpoints more efficiently and generates better insights on key digital health and success metrics such as abandoned carts, click-through rates, and page load times. It enables marketers to eliminate data silos and visualize what’s happening easily to make rapid and smart decisions.
A well-run observability practice empowers businesses to create excellent customer experiences. Errors can be caught and fixed quickly before they have an impact; constantly testing and simulating real user flows to ensure an error-free experience and deliver consistency across all contact points. Traffic spikes or bottlenecks can quickly be identified and resolved, preventing customers from suffering slow page loads or payment timeouts. The entire chain can work flawlessly with visibility into every part of the operation.
Getting real-time insight
Observability allows your campaigns and tech stack to be agile, able to quickly evolve and keep up with the latest developments. This means that marketers will be able to see how a certain promotion or offer is performing in real-time and whether it needs fine-tuning.
For instance, Indonesian e-commerce giant, Tokopedia taps on observability to achieve end-to-end visibility, enabling them to make a direct correlation between the status of a transaction and the monetary value. Tokopedia can identify the number of shortfalls in relation to the number of transactions with the corresponding user. This empowers them to understand and meet their customers’ needs much easier and faster – and ultimately drive better conversion rates and sales.
With digital now being the primary touchpoint for most customers, any website, mobile app, and other online brand experience issues can have a real business impact from revenue, customer satisfaction, to brand reputation.
Observability will become a core competency for marketing in 2022 and beyond, filling – and improving upon – the gap left by third-party cookies. Marketers will effectively and efficiently know how to deliver the right ads and content to the right people, and at the right time – driving greater traffic, conversion, and sales, and ultimately contributing towards the success of the overall business.
By Stewart Garrett, New Relic Managing Director, ASEAN
This article was first published by MartechAsia