Every nudge marketerâs customer journey checklist

Great marketing isn’t a hoax. More than feeding consumers a series of subliminal messages, this is really a practical application of the behavioural economic ‘nudge theory’, or ‘nudge marketing’ as it’s previously been coined.

In short, rather than ‘pushing’ a predetermined message onto an unrefined audience basket, as a nudge marketer you are providing the information an individual consumer is looking for - and in an ideal world, doing this at scale, and in real-time.

When push comes to nudge

The term ‘nudge marketing’ grew in its buzzword bingo popularity a couple of years back; but what I’d like to propose now is to lift nudge marketing out of academic theory, and into practice. We now have the technology - or choice architecture - at our disposal to make nudge marketing into an omnichannel reality. Another word which is so often used, but is seldom applied properly.

To make nudge marketing thinkers, into doers - and to do it better than ever before, I propose using the following simple framework (or asking your team and business the following questions), combined with flexible data management technology which doesn’t keep you constrained to a fixed set of channels or systems.

Because the customer leads:

1. WHY: what do you want to achieve?

And why do you want to engage in this specific journey consisting of these nudges?

• Branding / awareness

• Engagement

• Conversion (lead generation)

• Nurturing

2. WHO: who do you want to interact with, and why do you want to get in touch?

Think about data points you might want to centralise your campaign on, like…

• Behaviour: have they indicated their interest behaviourally in a certain product, like clicked on a banner?

• Demographic: do they belong to a broader demographic which qualifies them for a specific product or service?

• Geographic: does location qualify this consumer’s buying intent?

3. WHERE? On which platform will we find the person we want to interact with?

Using a data management platform or datahub which can flexibly identify someone across channels and touchpoints, you should be able to determine their next-best-channel, and from this - test a channel mix which makes sense, for example

• Search > Display > Email

• Email > Display > App

• Social > Personalised Video > Email

TIP: why bother wasting resources and nudge power by re-targeting consumers on paid channels, when they’re not converting? For those with lower ‘intent’ or ‘value’, try email instead. It’s more personal.

4. WHEN and HOW MUCH are we going to reach out to this person?

This is when timing, frequency and orchestration come into play, using real-time targeting capabilities, combined with the ability to automate your activity so you can deliver consistently based on a consumer’s behaviour:

• Run a campaign for X weeks

• Show the same ad up to 30 times based on this qualification, followed by an email

5. WHAT relevant content do we serve or trigger?

This means taking into account any personal preferences of the consumer, based on previous interactions.

• Have they interacted more with campaigns using a creative component containing this demographic?

• Do they click on content promoting Barcelona over content promoting New York?

6. HOW MUCH do we want to spend?

Think about pooling your resources in a way which will effectively reach your consumers, and make the best use of your budget, using technology:

- Make real-time calculations of customer value which consider past and present behaviour

- Use value per individual customer to determine target group and margin

- Spend £500 in 1 month, across these channels

Then, all nudge marketers need is the ability to effectively determine when to stop prompting someone. Have they purchased your product? Indicated their loyalty to your brand? Fulfilled the original purpose of the campaign? Stopping at the right time means your customers will stick around for longer.

With each layer or step you add to your framework, you’re adding additional complexity - and from your customer’s perspective, the additional subtlety and nuance needed to make your marketing more effective.

But rather than this nuance serving as a scare tactic to steer you away from nudge marketing, this reminds us of a real industry need: technology to automate efficiently, flexibly and effectively - and marketers to navigate their customers’ journeys and desires.