Evaluate Best Practices with a Framework for Customer Engagement Maturity

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Partner Content

Enterprise customer engagement strategies are hard to execute on, and involve a significant amount of people, process, and technology to get right. Marketers and brands alike are looking for guidance and actionable steps to help them progress their strategies from crawl, to walk, to run, and optimize their programs over time.

According to Gartner, nearly 77% of respondents in their recent Marketing Organization Survey reported that their organization had an intermediate maturity level or below.

While marketing maturity is relatively low across many organizations, 80% of marketing leaders surveyed in Gartner’s 2020 CMO Spend Survey now own or share profit and loss responsibility. With CMOs increasingly being held accountable for business results, the importance of aligning resources to programs that maximize growth has magnified.

To address these challenges, we recently launched the Cheetah Customer Engagement Assessment. The assessment is an online survey and digital platform designed to initiate meaningful conversations with marketers and strategists to learn about the challenges you face. Since launching the assessment at the end of last year, hundreds of our clients and prospects have taken the assessment. It includes an evaluation of your scores across 30 questions and a personalized email with specific recommendations based on your answers.

The assessment is hosted as a Cheetah Experience, and includes six key sections with five best practice questions per section. The sections include: Data, Acquisition, Engagement, Personalization, Retention, and Strategy. For each question, you can rate your org. on a three-point scale, including Struggling, Progressing, Strong, or can say Don’t Know. Once completed, you can provide contact info and we instantly identify strengths, opportunities, and areas where you can improve. We automatically score you into one of four personas: Beginner, Tactician, Strategist, and All-Star. We then trigger an email with dynamic recommendations based on each category, which can be any combination of 24 best practices. We also recommend Cheetah collateral and thought leadership content for each of the six specific maturity areas.

Overall insights

We are just starting to aggregate all of the data, but thus far we see these insights:

  • 65% of respondents are from North America, 30% from EMEA, and 5% from APAC
  • 12% are Beginners, 64% are Tacticians
  • 20% are Strategists, and 4% are All-Stars

Strengths 

  • 74% are strong at sending email at high volume 
  • 53% are strong in audience segmentation
  • 65% are still planning their customer engagement strategies
  • 38% of the brands are able to integrate with multiple systems

Weaknesses 

  • 32% struggle with applying machine learning to their targeting strategies
  • 32% struggle with dynamic offer recommendations
  • 50% are only “Ok” at personalizing content in channels
  • 77% cannot orchestrate multi-step journeys
  • 27% struggle with loyalty program growth
  • 36% struggle to provide loyalty programs that go beyond points and discounts

Want to learn more? We can help! Once we collect more data, we will create a Benchmark study, publish a report, and allow you to compare your brand to your peers across industries. Until then, you can take your own version of the quiz here