The importance of cloud based, third-party provided messaging and interactivity can’t be overstated. Not only is it of growing importance as to how telemedia services are sold and deployed, but moreover it is increasingly central to consumer-facing business’s as they navigate a world of demand customers that use multiple channels.
The imperative to offer the full gamut of messaging and interaction channels is crystallised in a survey out this week from MoEngage, which shows that consumers love of email as a comms channel from brands has waned, replaced by mobile.
In its Personalisation Pulse Check Report shows that pre-pandemic, a third (32%) of consumers ranked email as their preferred way to communicate with retailers and brands. As the pandemic has eased, 20% now cite email communications as their preferred engagement method, compared to 22% who said mobile was their top choice, rising +9 percentage points higher than compared to pre-covid levels.
Demand for brand engagement via social platforms from shoppers also increased by +5 percentage points compared to pre-pandemic levels, rising to 19% of consumers who said social media interaction was their preferred medium to communicate with brands.
This change in channel is playing out through a growing number of partnerships between messaging companies and ecommerce and marketing platform suppliers, the latter desperate to add the former to give retailer and brand clients the contact channels that consumers now demand.
This week we have seen Infobip offer its CPaaS portfolio of services to AI-driven marketing platform RedEye, which will see RedEye look to use Infobip’s wider SaaS solutions, including LiveChat, WhatsApp and Rich Communications Service (RCS) solutions, to enable clients to deliver fully branded, interactive messaging.
Similarly, Sinch has expanded and enhanced rich media MMS messaging within leading marketing cloud Oracle Responsys. The Sinch MMS Messaging App greatly expands Responsys creative palette adding video, audio, PDF, vCard, extended text payload, and geo-location maps to existing image media support. Now creative marketers can combine messaging channel’s 90%+ open rate and its 2-3x conversion rate increase generated by richer media formats.
The power of CPaaS in practice has also been clearly demonstrated, with UK-based, SIM-only mobile network SMARTY seeing a 100% increase in engagement following the implementation of CPaaS.
Using mimobile’s CPaaS solution, imiconnect, SMARTY can now better support seamless customer engagement across its customer onboarding programme as well as throughout its in-life and retention campaigns which required greater need for effective, cross-channel, personalised communications.
This has allowed SMARTY to replace disparate services and vendors, consolidating these channels and services to minimise costs, maximise operational efficiencies and improve campaign response rates.
Replacing the manual processes of previous solutions with imimobile’s multi-channel CPaaS technology has provided SMARTY with better automation through one central platform to manage all its customer interactions. Its teams now have real-time insight into the communications customers are receiving and how they are interacting and responding to these, which in turn offers the ability to add further levels of automation and intelligence throughout the customer journey to improve the overall experience.
And that, boys and girls, is why CPaaS is so important.
