Editor’s Note: This is the latest in a series of articles spotlighting Women in Product & Engineering. Leen Penders, Senior Product Manager for Selligent, shares how organizations need to focus on being mindful: delivering relevance and value to consumers in an age when more and more people are tuning out.

Adults in the U.S. consume over 11 hours of media a day and are exposed to over 4000 advertisements daily. Using multiple screens and wearables, people are always connected via messaging and social apps, at the same time juggling the demands of career, family, and maintaining a healthy lifestyle. It’s no wonder we’re seeing a dramatic increase in the rate at which people disconnect and unsubscribe, in order to minimize the tsunami of messages that clutter our daily lives. Consumers have come to realize that it’s no longer simply a lifestyle choice, but a serious mental health issue. As we put up more barriers between ourselves and digital technologies, this presents a challenge to organizations, companies, and brands, which must learn how to offer value to users who increasingly crave quiet in a noisy world.

Mindful product development

In response to this, Apple and Google have introduced “well-being tools” that limit a user’s screen time. Microsoft has increased product features to minimize distraction. A new range of mindful apps have popped up, with Apple’s Calm being named “app of the year.”

The values that users seek from products, services, and organizations are shifting. Where once we celebrated and sought novelty, instant gratification, and excitement, we now reject organizations that digitally shout to get our attention.

Rather than being big, bold and, noisy, to avoid being ignored - or worse, abandoned - organizations need to focus on delivering relevance and value to their consumers, in order to survive. Consideration and respect for individuals’ context will become the pillars of the long-term, value-added, meaningful relationships that organizations will depend on in the future.

Minimize clutter, maximize every moment

As we develop Selligent Marketing Cloud, we are constantly exploring new means to enable brands to be mindful in their marketing and customer experience. We seek to limit the number of touchpoints, while maximizing every single interaction an organization has with its consumers. Here are some key ways for your company or organization to do that:

1. Be quieter

   Take a lack of responsiveness from your customers as a hint to be quieter, not noisier. Rethink your metrics and find new ways of measuring performance of your services that are not purely engagement-related.

   Cadence management enables marketers to limit the number of messages any individual contact will receive across different channels. In addition, journeys can be prioritized to ensure the messages a contact does receive will offer the most value. 
   (Note: this feature is planned for our next Selligent product release.)

2. Be selective

   Get the most out of the massive amount of first-party data you have collected. Use Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to optimize your audience and timing for each message. Be thoughtful who to address with single offers.

   Selligent Cortex makes use of data science and ML algorithms to help marketers identify the best time, content, and audience for each message. Our Smart Audiences feature will predict the best audience for specific offers. Rather than blasting any offer to your entire audience, work on specific value-adding offers – and only target those who are most likely to respond. Send Time Optimization will predict the best time to get in touch with individual recipients, so you can optimize send times for blast campaigns accordingly.

3. Invest in content design

   When the number of interactions you have with your consumers is minimal, every single one of them counts. Optimize your content for each individual recipient based on his or her stage in the customer journey, as well as for browsing history, current location, etc. Test different designs, change the language and test it frequently. It’s not just about what you say, but how you say it. Here are a few key capabilities and features of our Selligent platform that can help with your message optimization:

   • Message personalization can be done based on any data in the 360 consumer profile; even interests matching with product or content categories.
   • Live Content can make email hyper-relevant based on open time, location, or even real-time product availability.
   • Smart Content recommends the best content to show for each individual you interact with at any point in time, whether it’s in an email, mobile push, or on your website.
      
4. Retarget wisely
   Is there anything more annoying than being retargeted across different media with products you have just purchased? With Selligent Marketing Cloud, you can easily and instantly remove contacts from a Facebook retargeting campaign at the time they make a purchase, or when they take the next step in a customer journey. Smart Content allows you to hide products recently purchased, viewed, or put in a basket from the recommendations being shown across messages and channels.

   In this age of always-on, always-connected consumerism, it’s critical for companies to be sensitive to each and every one of their customers; especially as people increasingly seek ways to escape all the noise. Taking steps like these and combining consumer-friendly tech capabilities will enable marketers to significantly increase the relevance of each touchpoint and to truly maximize every moment... while limiting the risk of losing customers by being too intrusive in their busy daily lives.

As Senior Product Manager, Leen Penders is driving the product roadmap for Selligent Marketing Cloud. Leen has been in the marketing automation industry for over 12 years, having started her career as a Campaign Expert working closely with enterprise B2C clients across many industries. Her extensive experience in managing client projects and service teams across different geographies has shaped her profound market knowledge and formed a solid basis for understanding real user needs when developing product.