As the new year dawns, marketers need an updated playbook to connect with consumers is the new and changing landscape. In this CES panel, three marketing chiefs share their advice and predictions on making sense of the new normal.

Double-digit increases in ROI for every dollar spent on email, higher frequency spending customers and hefty database signups are the kinds of marketing and digital tech investment returns that speak for themselves. But it’s also the ability to lift that human connection with customers that’s top of mind for Winedirect.com.au's chief digital officer, Adam Hollinshead.

It seems even technology companies can run into customer management data issues. According to MYOB head of product and platform Jay Nawaz, product diversity had led to customer information residing in different places, which was causing problems for the company’s product development and marketing ambitions.

Visit Sunshine Coast says it’s continuing to gain insights around audiences interests to personalise content and digital experiences after deploying a marketing automation platform and strategy this year.

Building your organisation’s customer experience (CX) engine is increasingly becoming the prerogative for chief marketing officers. But how you tackle it is a tough ask.

​With 50,000 students studying more than 200 courses across five physical sites and one virtual campus, South East Queensland’s Griffith University is a large and complex organisation to manage.

Online beauty retailer, Adore Beauty, has a catalogue of over 15,000 products across over 200 cosmetics brands, serving more than a million transactions a year. Its unique market proposition is providing beauty consultation services through its digital channels, aimed at allowing customer to skip the intimidating traditional cosmetics floor. This ethos has been built into its communications, but Adore Beauty wanted to extend this into its lifecycle marketing by analysing real-time customer behaviour.

A 600 per cent surge in leads, the ability to connect the dots on customer journeys and a substantial lift in the quality of prospects are just a few of the initial wins for Australian builder, Wisdom, after overhauling its digital strategy and website.

It has been 15 years since Australian workers were given the ability to choose which superannuation fund would manage their retirement nest egg. While many funds have used that time to create sophisticated marketing functions to attract and retain members, the ability for them to differentiate in the eyes of customers has at times proved challenging.

A handful of years ago, Nestlé relied largely on TV advertising, a medium offering strong brand messaging to a broad audience. But as people have migrated to digital and social platforms, the brand has followed suit.

Box Hill Institute, in downtown Melbourne, relaunched its website, but after an initial surge in interest soon found conversion wasn’t what it had expected. And with the global pandemic seeing people rely on websites more than ever for researching and choosing between educational providers, a call was made to deploy some additional tools.

Dynamic Yield and Evergage, which was recently acquired by Salesforce, have again topped the latest annual list of personalisation engines from Gartner.

Brand building is now a priority over analytics, personalisation and martech, according to the 2020 Gartner CMO spending survey.

Online design platform, Canva, favoured by Pinterest fans, designers and creatives of all stripes, has made its mark in a short space of time, counting over 20 million monthly active users in 190 countries with a market valuation of A$4.7 billion.

Realising customer lifetime value and personalising digital engagement to accelerate growth is one step closer to reality for Australian wellness brand, ECO. Modern Essentials, as it deploys a new marketing platform.

“I think in the last five years, we've gone from being able to use some information about an individual to being able to effectively monetise and deliver the exact right message to the exact right person at the exact right time through the martech stack.”

Ikea's decision to give customers more control about how it handles their data signals the role privacy around customer data now plays in the brand marketer's toolkit, several industry experts say.

TerryWhite Chemmart has taken a customer-first approach and has improved its customer satisfaction ratings as a result.

Harnessing marketing and digital technology more successfully to improve customer experience is not surprisingly topping the list of 2020 priorities for a number of Australia’s marketing leaders.

In mid-2019, one of the most significant changes to how Australians interact with their financial services providers kicked off with barely a whimper.

If there’s one lesson Luxury Escape’s chief customer officer, Jason Shugg, has learnt through the process of overhauling marketing, sales and service technology, it’s the importance of communication.