Marketing is both challenged yet empowered in our digital world; the competition has spiked in all fields of business. In many ways, this is a good thing. Companies are not limited now to print-and-distribute models anymore; business communication can take place across a wide range of channels while measuring effectiveness every step of the way. But of course, more communication methods mean more factors and criteria to assess:
- Is the communication one-way or two-way?
- Are the messages across channels integrated?
- Are your decisions data-driven?
- Are consumers engaged?
- Are the most effective channels being used?
- Is automation being leveraged to increase efficiency?
This is where Communication-Platform-as-a-Service (CPaaS) comes in. Keep reading to learn about how CPaaS helps marketers answer these questions.
What is CPaaS?
CPaaS streamlines customer communication for businesses by offering a single platform for voice, SMS, email, social media, and more. This integrated solution simplifies engagement with prospects and customers, while built-in tracking provides valuable insights into interactions.
It incorporates sophisticated technology like artificial intelligence and machine learning to build efficiency into the communications landscape and enable organizations to move from multichannel to omnichannel.
While it might be tempting to think of CPaaS as a customer-service-driven platform, it has a powerful role in marketing communications as well. In fact, it is difficult to run effective campaigns without the help of CPaaS. It distinguishes a unified omnichannel messaging that is recognized and remembered by prospects from a poor, inefficient messaging experience that struggles to engage and inform even when the right audience is being reached.
CPaaS and Marketing in the digital commerce world
Nowadays, consumers switch brands at the slightest dissatisfaction. To provide a customer experience that drives loyalty, your marketing strategy shouldn’t compromise any of the following capabilities: personalization, scalability, automation, and real-time analytics. This is where CPaaS creates an edge for marketers to boost their marketing ROI and take businesses to the next level with an omnichannel approach that meets customers’ expectations and offers cost-efficiency and growth for businesses.
Five benefits of CPaaS for marketers
So how does CPaaS directly impact marketing campaigns? Here are five benefits of investing in this cloud service.
1) Turning campaigns into conversations
People want to be spoken “to,” not spoken “at.” Organizations can now accomplish this without a trade show floor or even a phone conversation. Innovative communication and engagement solutions offer multiple avenues to have a real-time conversation with a prospect – moving beyond just sending an email and analyzing opens and clicks to see if the offer hits the right notes. Embedded APIs in any application or service make it easy for prospects to engage on their preferred digital channel.
2) Diversifying communication channels
While email remains a legitimate and effective business communication channel, it should not be solely relied upon. Offering multiple communication channels is a game-changer for organizations, as it attracts more potential buyers by allowing them to choose their preferred channel. Complementing email with targeted voice, SMS, and social media communications amplifies messages and ensures your business can reach diverse demographics. Email works well for certain groups, but SMS is also powerful due to its high security and open rates that are up to 98%. However, some people prefer phone calls or social media communications. Therefore, an omni-channel marketing strategy is smart for any organization. CPaaS provides access to all these channels through a unified platform, letting prospects choose their preferred communication medium. With varied preferences, a campaign that uses multiple opted-in channels has the highest chance of success.
3) Delivering real-time metrics for analysis
Being able to track marketing campaign metrics in real-time is the holy grail for marketers in all industries. By leveraging data and analytics tools in a CPaaS platform, marketers can not only track impressions, conversations, and conversions from start to finish, they can also observe them in real-time, pull trend reports, and adjust according to customer and prospect feedback. In addition, they can integrate various communications channels into their website to better understand which pages are converting and track the origins of the customer inquiries across the web.
4) Enabling flexibility and experimentation
Like any software as a service platform, CPaaS offers a lot of flexibility to organizations that adopt it. This could mean using the software out-of-the-box, or it could mean customizing it to the specific needs of the business. And this customization can be adjusted at any point along the adoption cycle without extensive development work.
But the flexibility of CPaaS doesn’t end there; it can also flex in response to prospect feedback. If a campaign isn’t performing as expected, the real-time monitoring that CPaaS provides gives marketers the insights they need to make immediate changes to digital campaigns, chat scripts, and social media messaging. This also gives marketers the ability to experiment with their campaigns, taking a “fail fast” approach that swiftly tests various strategies to find the most clear and effective message.
5) Automation, Automation, Automation
Automation makes the world go round these days; this is no different for marketers. Most companies need to send confirmations, follow-ups, appointment reminders, and other notifications that customers and prospects rely on to keep them on track. CPaaS offers personalized marketing automation through push, SMS, social, and other channels that not only keeps campaigns running and prospects engaged but also makes sure that they fulfill their appointments and purchases through the end of the sales cycle and then return for follow-up purchases later.
Check out Premium Card’s experience with CEQUENS and how adopting CEQUNES’s SMS API and WhatsApp Business API helped them hit a record-breaking surge in opt-ins.
Final Thoughts
There are a lot of ways CPaaS delivers benefits to marketers; these five are just the beginning. An investment in such a continually innovating technology will come with increasing returns as further technological advances allow for creating more meaningful conversations across web platforms.
Book a free demo now to explore solutions tailor-made for growing businesses!
Business Partner | 
