WEM: Moving From Mass Blast to True Engagement

By Arjen van den Akker (@arjenvdakker) Jul 13, 2011

Web Engagement Management (WEM) is a heavily exploited topic by most Web Content Management (WCM) vendors. But can they truly deliver WEM solutions? Do they know what it takes, and do they truly deliver the technology to achieve it?

Look at Web Content Management (WCM) vendors’ websites, and you’ll probably come across the term multiple times: Web Engagement Management (WEM). Others use the phrase Web Experience Management (luckily also abbreviated as WEM) or similar terms, but the core of all these messages is the same. It’s about moving away from a one-way information push to interacting with your audiences and providing relevant information, ideally tailored to each specific individual.

In theory, this is a great thing happening. In an era of information overload, we all prefer relevant information we can use, rather than receiving dozens of emails taking us to irrelevant landing pages and other pieces of information that we have to sift through, trying to find what we need.

Web Engagement: What is It Really?

But what really is Web Engagement, where does it fit in the bigger picture, and above all, how do you progress on the road from “mass blast” to true engagement?

Two recent posts already contain a lot of valuable information on the subject of WEM: “What is Web Engagement Management (WEM)?” and “The 5 Pillars of Web Engagement Management.”

These posts talk about WEM spanning your website, including personalization, SEO, multivariate testing, social media and interacting with people across multiple devices.We can all most likely relate to these aspects in terms of WEM, but the underlying question is the most difficult to answer. How do we maintain a single view across channels so we really understand our target audiences?

Knowing that we need to have web analytics in place, monitor what people do with the emails they receive from us, even perform social media monitoring is all great, but how does that build a holistic customer view? Currently, it probably doesn’t, but companies who get this right can see as much as a 400 percent increase in revenue.

Customer Engagement — Tough

If you think about WEM, you must consider it as a subset of a larger subject: Customer Engagement Management. Customers engage with your brand, products and services not only through the web, but perhaps also through your call center, your brick and mortar stores, or in any number of other ways. All customer interactions potentially leave behind a very interesting trail of information. Retailers, for example, could collect customer information through loyalty cards, while a telecommunications provider can learn about their customers through their calling behavior. If you’re a utilities company, customers tell you about themselves by the patterns of their energy consumption, and if you’re in travel, customers’ past bookings and travel behavior is extremely valuable information. This means a lot of data from your CRM system, helpdesk tool, transaction system, etc., need to be considered alongside online data coming from email, social and web statistics to realize improved customer engagement.

You end up with the need to combine information from a variety of sources into a single customer view, and that can be a very tough job.