How often do you scan your inbox and notice many of the emails aren’t relevant to you or interests? You’d think you weren’t being personalized to, and that the brands sending you these irrelevant messages aren’t accounting for who you are and what you want.
The truth is, some of those email sends were personalized—not to you, but to the segment you belong to. When you’re still receiving irrelevant messages from a brand, though, does that “personalization” even matter? (After all, there is a perception gap here: Brands say they personalize 61% of their customer experiences, while the actual customers recognize only 43% of their experiences as being personalized, according to a Deloitte study.)
Campaign management systems (CMS) are often used to send promotional emails to large groups of people. But those email blasts miss their mark when people don’t want or need the product or service, even if they “fit” into the targeted segment.
A CMS is an important tool in a marketer’s toolbox. But by itself, a CMS has limited potential to improve customer experience (CX). Your customer experience management stack needs something else to unlock it.
What Is a CMS?
A campaign management system is a software application that helps businesses plan, execute and track the effect of multichannel marketing campaigns. A CMS typically includes tools for creating and sending email campaigns, managing social media posts and tracking website traffic.
A CMS builds marketing experiences for segments of people based on shared traits like demographics, location or behavior. These systems are designed to automate content delivery across customer segments, delivering tailored versions of the same campaign at scale. For example, a bank might create a “young adult” campaign targeting recent high school graduates with a credit card offer, then push it through email, display ads and text reminders—all triggered by a shared age or life stage.
CMS Limitations
A CMS is useful for reaching a large, wide audience. However, when it’s used by itself, a CMS has limited impact on CX. Marketers often use campaign funnels to outline the most straightforward path customers take from awareness and consideration to purchasing the product or service. These funnels are frameworks designed to guide groups of customers through a marketing journey.
But a campaign funnel isn’t the same as a customer journey. Customer journeys are rarely straightforward and linear —and they don’t end at the point of purchase. Real journeys continue long after the sale, shaped by a person’s ongoing interactions with your brand.
Take telecom, for example. A customer might see a social ad, browse internet bundles, compare other providers, leave without buying, return a few days later to complete the purchase, call support for activation help, and later call again about a billing issue. That winding, multi-touch experience can’t be captured or acted on in a traditional campaign funnel.
And here’s the bigger challenge: campaign management systems are built to understand segments—not people. They don’t adapt to individual customer behavior or intent in real time. So even if the message is technically personalized to a group, it may still miss the mark for the person receiving it.
A campaign management system:
Focuses on the sale—not the full experience
A CMS doesn’t consider or accommodate the many journeys taken throughout the customer lifecycle. A CMS typically focuses on getting people to purchase a product or service by sending a series of messages with calls to action (“click here to learn about our internet bundles,” “take advantage of a special introductory rate”). A CMS doesn’t pay attention to customers’ post-purchase interactions with the brand, such as contacting their internet provider regarding a billing problem or service outage. But that’s where real customer experience happens—and where loyalty is either earned or lost.
Is driven by internal priorities—not customer needs
A CMS often reflects what the business wants to say, not what the customer needs to hear. Marketing wants to promote a new offer. The digital team wants to drive adoption of a new app. Sales wants to push a bundle.
Each team has a goal. Each one runs a campaign. But none of them look at the full customer journey—so the messages stack up without context.
Personalizes by segment—not by person
A CMS-generated message may address someone by name or offer a free dessert on their birthday, but that’s usually the extent of the personalization. A CMS sends emails to customer segments based on probabilities (e.g., a recent grad who moved into a new apartment) instead of predicting what each customer needs based on purchase or browsing history and previous interactions with other departments (e.g., billing or customer service). Most campaign management systems also don’t leverage a real-time customer data profile to send a message addressing an individual customer’s needs or preferences, at the right time. For example, it might not notice that someone’s cable TV contract is about to expire and send a message promoting relevant packages based on the customer’s viewing history (e.g., sports or movie channels).
Lacks orchestration
Sending a series of emails to thousands of consumers doesn’t guarantee that you’ll get people to act—or that you’ll improve CX and loyalty. That’s where orchestration comes in. Without it, you risk sending conflicting messages, missing key moments, or pushing offers at the wrong time.
Customer journey management systems fill that gap. They pull in real-time data, understand where a customer is within their experience, and guide communications across channels and teams—so the right message reaches the right person, in the right moment, with the right action.
Internal goals shouldn’t drive external experiences. When every department pushes its own priorities, the customer ends up lost in the noise. Orchestration connects the dots—so what you send aligns with what your customer actually needs.
—Frankie Toboyek, Product Marketing Manager
Better Together: Benefits of Connecting a CJM System to Your CMS
Businesses can use a CMS to send a series of marketing messages to promote a new product. The CMS tracks the open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates of the campaigns. As customers progress through their journeys, a customer journey management (CJM) platform uses real-time data from the campaign management system, combined with other contextual data, to make intelligent decisions on the next best action or message for each customer.
That’s why it’s a customer experience management best practice to pairing CJM with CMS. This combination leads to:
Improved targeting
A CJM system helps marketers understand the customer journey, allowing them to target their marketing campaigns more effectively. A CJM system acts like an air traffic controller, directing which communication(s) are sent to each customer at what time. Someone who is in the middle of a customer support journey (complaining about a billing error) probably isn’t currently interested in renewing their cable TV contract for two more years (at a higher rate after the introductory rate expires). A CJM prevents the CMS from sending a “renew your contract now!” message to that unhappy customer.
Increased personalization
A CJM platform uses real-time customer data to create personalized marketing campaigns that are tailored to each customer’s individual needs. This can help improve customer engagement, satisfaction and lifetime value. For example, if a customer frequently exceeds their data limit, CJM can automatically send a notification suggesting a data plan upgrade or a data usage optimization tip.
Better business insights that drive optimization
By tracking the results of marketing campaigns, businesses can see what‘s working and what‘s not. This information can then be used to improve future campaigns. CJM tracks customer interactions, campaign performance and conversion rates. The collected data is analyzed to measure the effectiveness of different marketing campaigns and to optimize future journeys. Insights gained are used to refine customer segments, improve messaging and enhance overall personalization efforts.
Go Beyond Segmentation in Your Customer Experience Management Strategy
Customers don’t see their interactions with your brand as campaigns—they see them as experiences. Without technology that does the same, your brand will be limited in delivering personalized CX.
CSG Xponent, our customer engagement platform, is built with journey orchestration, analytics, communications management and advanced profiles at the core of the technology. Xponent bridges the gap between customer experience and customer engagement by unifying experience design with proactive management. This combination of capabilities allows brands to drive action in critical customer moments. Xponent integrates with your existing systems—CMS, CRM, billing, personalization platforms and others—for quick CX improvement. You won’t need to purchase multiple systems to personalize your marketing campaigns and deliver exceptional CX.
Unlock your customer experience management strategy
Learn how Xponent takes your existing CXM stack to the next level.
