In this episode of the Consumer Insights Podcast, Thor is joined by Jennie Lewis, Senior Manager, Customer Insights at Airship.

Personalization is the key to business success in digital and physical realms across B2B and B2C. But not all types of personalization are useful.

Jennie Lewis, Senior Manager, Customer Insights at Airship specializes in mobile experience and personalization. She shares why insights need to be translatable to stakeholders, actionable, and in the marketing realm, personalized and segmented. Jennie also illustrates how to take the sea of data available and put it to work for your company and customers.

Join us as we discuss:

• Importance of personalization and tapping into direct customer insights to fuel success
• Building a customer engagement strategy tailored to your business’s digital and physical presence
• Realistic personalization strategies to deliver the ultimate customer experience
• The building blocks of effective mobile experience personalization

You can access all episodes of the Consumer Insights Podcast on Apple, Spotify, or Spreaker. Below, you'll find a lightly edited transcript of this episode.

Thor:
Hello everyone and welcome to the Consumer Insights Podcast. Today I'm excited to have a brilliant insights leader joining me for what I know will be a fantastic conversation. I'm thrilled to introduce today's guest, Jennie Lewis, Senior Manager of Customer Insights at Airship, where she leads the Customer Insights function. An expert in CX and mobile experience, she helps brands to understand economic impact and quantify the results of their mobile app strategies. Prior to joining Airship, she held several leadership roles at CrowdTwist Inc., now part of Oracle, as well as Epsilon. Thank you so much for joining me today, Jennie.

Jennie Lewis:
Thank you so much for having me and for the kind introduction. Big fan of the show, so I’m excited to be here.

Introducing Jennie

Thor:
Well, fantastic. And if you're a big fan of the show, you know that we love getting started by asking more about you and allowing the audience to get to know you. So, could you take a couple of minutes to tell us about yourself, your role, your company, and how you got to where you are today? How did it all begin?

Jennie Lewis:
Yeah, absolutely. As you mentioned, I'm at Airship now. We're a mobile experience company, so really focused on everything around the mobile device—from in-app to emails that drive folks to the app, SMS—really working with customers end to end on that experience, app store optimization, all that good stuff. I work in the insights function, doing research in a B2B2C environment, which is really fun because I get to do the research around B2C conversions that I provide to the brands we work with and help them understand how their customers are converting. I also do a bit of B2B research, like NPS and voice of customer, and it's a pretty interesting role. I've been in the B2B2C environment for all my tech career. Before I was in mobile, I was working in loyalty and, prior to that, email. I always joke and say I grew up in email—it was my first tech role. I actually started my first role as a campaign specialist coding Perl to personalize emails. This was back before the WYSIWYG days when you actually had to write code to personalize what color a vehicle showed up as in a message. That was where I got my start, and from there I got more into the custom solutions world, then into solution architecture, and eventually into a more strategy-type role.

Making insights understandable for stakeholders

Thor:
That's a fascinating journey. And as an insights leader, how do you define an insight?

Jennie Lewis:
I think there are a couple of key things for me. First off, it has to be understandable by your stakeholders, meaning it's something that will translate.

So instead of just being a sea of numbers, it's something that's understandable to the folks that you're presenting it to.

And second, it has to be actionable. It’s not just a number for being a number—it’s “Here’s the information, and here’s what I think we can do with it,” really providing both of those layers.

Demonstrating the value of personalized marketing to stakeholders

Thor:
If we build on that, from your perspective, what are marketing consumer insights, and why are they so important? Do you have any examples from your career that could highlight the importance and help illustrate this?

Jennie Lewis:
Yeah, I think one that comes to mind for me that’s very interesting is the research I’ve done around personalization and segmentation for mobile. So, when you look at conversion, both from an engagement metric and also, let’s say, like a purchase or if you're talking media, a view or listen to content—you see when content is personalized. And by personalization, that could be segmentation, it could be actual content, it could be timing. When that personalization is used, the conversion increases compared to looking at messages that are going to all users. So there's a lift that's substantial on both sides of the metric. And that, I think, is something we really need to take to heart. I mean, there's an unlimited amount of data out there surveying consumers and saying, “Oh hey, do you want things personalized?” And everybody's like, “Yeah sure, that'd be great.”

But what I've been focusing on lately is, well, what happens when a brand does that? How can you actually prove value?

Because let's face it, for a brand to take that action, it’s work, right? Like, they have to invest data resources, they have to invest content resources, and from an ops perspective, it takes longer to build the messages. So, really, I'm trying to help brands with that information so they can go to their stakeholders and say, “Hey, if we invest, here's what can happen.”

Understanding life stages for effective personalization

Thor:
And if you would double-click on that for a second and maybe share an example of what really highlights the right way to think about personalization, what example would come to mind?

Jennie Lewis:
Explicit preferences are the top standard of personalization. So, you can gather, especially on mobile because it’s such a personal way of interacting with the brand, you can gather an unlimited amount of data. An example that comes to mind for me is I have an 18-month-old. So, when I was pregnant and doing baby registry, I used Target in the US. And I went in, and I did all these—they had my registry, they had the due date, they had everything. And I bought tons of stuff from them, I got gifts from them, but then I started getting ads from them about, like, juniors' clothing, meaning like 10–11-year-old kids. And I was really surprised by it because I thought, well, you know so much about me, right? Like you know pretty detailed information about my life at this point and where I am as far as life stage. And by that—you know, it’s just a little bit of a missed mark, right? So, they could have been targeting me with like baby swimwear at that point, and I would have been all over it, but I didn’t need the juniors' information. So, I think that’s an example of where using just learned information can fall flat on the customer side, right? So, if you're not taking the entire context together, right—kids is not just kids, there are stages.

And so what I recommend to brands is that they come in and start to ask customers, “What is it that you actually want to hear about?” There’s nothing we can do from an AI or a predictive perspective that replaces going to the customer and saying, “What would you like to hear about? Tell me more information.”

I always love to use sports examples because the level of preference is so rich for sports teams or sports in general, right? Like, they may say, “Well, what do you wanna hear about?” And I'll say, “Well, tennis, right? I wanna hear about tennis and basketball.” Like, I care zero about American football, but tennis and basketball I could consume all day long.

Understanding the customer journey in mobile engagement

Thor:
That’s such a good example. And I mean, if we double-click on it, measuring mobile app customer engagement is really one of your areas of expertise. But if we think about insights professionals who are maybe a bit less experienced in this area, if you could give them three pieces of advice, what would they be?

Jennie Lewis:

That's a great question. So, the first thing I think is thinking about the way the customer journey interacts with the app. So, are you primarily a digital brand, and, you know, most of the customer interaction is going to be within the mobile device? Or are you a brand that has physical locations and there's going to be some sort of blending interaction? Maybe you're a restaurant chain, right? We have a lot of fast food chains here in the US, and many of those recently are doing kind of incredible work by saying, "Well, we acquired all these customers during the pandemic closures when they were wanting to get delivery," right? So, the huge spikes—and I'm sure folks have all seen the news about this—like much more usage of the mobile device and people using mobile that had never used it before, right? So, most brands, I would say, as a generalization, had this huge acquisition of customers. But what's interesting now is the restaurants are saying, "Well, how do we retain them? How do we continue to get them to use the app? Because we know app customers are more valuable than non-app customers." And so what they're doing is saying, "Well, you can—maybe I'm a Starbucks—and you say, well, when you get to the drive-through, you can pay with geolocation from the app." So, you get to the window, and the app just geolocates, and you pay from your app where you already have all your settings done. So, it's none of the weird passing stuff through the window to go pay. And then there are also a couple of other brands that are doing quick lanes. So, if you do a mobile order ahead, you can actually jump the line and go into a fast lane. So, it's easier for the store associates because they have information on what needs to be prepped; they've got the food ready when you're supposed to be there. But then from a customer perspective, you're also getting the benefit of faster service. So, I think all that to say:

Where is the customer interacting with your brand, and how does the mobile device interact in that? And then secondly, what type of messaging are you wanting to send to them? What are the high-value actions that you want to drive within the mobile experience?

So, that could be anything from a purchase, which is, you know, that's the obvious answer, right? Like, you're a retailer, and you wanna get a purchase. But that could also be something like, for a shopping brand, you might want somebody to register their account. And for retailers, that's a huge milestone. For subscription-type apps, that might be getting somebody to convert from freemium to monthly. So, really going through and defining the micro or the mini moments that are points of conversion, because if you start to daisy-chain those together, it becomes more of a way to create a behaviorally motivated experience on mobile.

Seven elements of personalization in mobile experiences

Thor:
That's amazing and really strong advice. And I know that personalization in the context of the mobile experience—obviously something you've already talked about—is something you're also very passionate about. And, um, in fact, I understand that you recently put together a framework in this area. Can you share a bit more about that and how you approach personalization?

Jennie Lewis:
Yeah, absolutely. So, we can—I can send you the link to put in the show notes so folks can go directly to it. But yeah, really, there are seven elements of personalization on mobile, and it's something that's unique to mobile as a destination. It's things that we might not be able to do on the web and, you know, you certainly can't do in a physical store by itself. So really, it's giving brands some guidance on what those different elements are. Explicit preferences, like I said, are the top standard, but we also have things like behaviors—what are you doing now, what have you done in the past, where are you from a location perspective, like the drive-through examples that I shared. Being able to weave all those together and pick, based on the use case, what's the right element of personalization to use. There has been a lot of conversation around personalization as far as an individualization perspective—an actual one-to-one. I love the concept of it. I think that, yes, there are times when we can create these truly one-to-one experiences. But I also spent a lot of my career in ops, working with brands whose marketing ops teams were really pretty jammed up from a time management perspective. And I know that creating that type of experience and the curation it takes to do something that individual is really not logistically possible on every message.

So my position on it is, yes, there are moments where 100% we want to create that individual experience. Yes, for some of the messaging, we want to do that. But it's not all the time. It's not in every place.

And so, if you look at the different building blocks, you can kind of, by the use case, help weave together an experience. And by use case, I mean what your actual message is and where the customer is in their lifecycle with you. So maybe somebody is very early on with the brand, and you don't have a lot of information. You can use some of the learned information to drive the next best action.

Prioritizing the operational investment for personalization success

Thor:
Fantastic. And how do you think that thinking about this in the right way—obviously, I realize this is really complex, and I advise our listeners to go out and take a look at the link that we'll post in the show notes—how do you think brands need to think about this to make it an advantage?

Jennie Lewis:
So, really, it's about prioritizing the plumbing to make it happen and the operational time, right? Because it is an investment, no question that it's an investment to do this. But the results of making these changes are significant. You know, you have a lift in engagement, you have a lift in conversion, especially if you're talking about retail brands and purchase conversion—it's a pretty significant jump. And I think that knowing that, and then being able to say, "Well, how do we get the data from our CDP into our email system or into our mobile system?" Figuring out all those pipelines—where to do personalization, to do it right, you really have to look at the data from a whole customer perspective rather than a channel perspective. So you're using more of a 360-degree view of the customer than just saying, "Well, Jennie has my mobile app, and we know she read this article," right? It's a much deeper engagement than that. I think one brand that does this super well is Ulta. It's a beauty retailer in the US. They have a loyalty program, and I forgot how many millions of members they have. I mean, it's in the tens of millions of loyalty members. It's a huge, hugely popular program. They have physical stores, they have e-commerce, and they have the app. No matter where I interact with them in any of those three locations, they know who I am. They know my past purchases, they know the preferences that I've shared with them, and my actions in each of those three destinations are all taken into account for whatever I get next. And it's this amazing way of—and this is, I mean, it's not something that, I know that it's not easy, right?

Like, I know that they must have all invested a lot of time talking to each other and working together across departments to make something like that happen. But the result, from a customer experience perspective, is huge, right?

Like, I’m so loyal to them because I know that my experience with them is always gonna be this really rich experience. You know, Target is another one that does it super well. They have an app that is just out of this world. I can go in and say, "Well, I'm looking for this item," and then it gives me information on exactly how I can get that item on the individual product level, down to an inventory perspective. So I can say, "Well, I need to get, you know, baby food pouches for preschool," and I can figure out, "Is that something that I could go pick up, or can I get same-day delivery?" And it lets you toggle between it, and if it's not available at the store that you currently have selected, it'll offer you the option to change to a store that has stock. And let's say, you know, I go to do my pickup, and I realize there's something else that I left off my list. I can pull up that product in the app, and it tells me exactly what aisle to go to—which, if you've ever been to Target with a toddler, you know is very helpful information.

Using "Disagio" to approach problems with an investigative mindset

Thor:
Those are some really incredible customer experiences you've just described. And, being a curious person, I also know that in your LinkedIn bio, you say or encourage me to ask you about "Disagio." So I will—what can you tell us about that?

Jennie Lewis:
Oh, yeah, so it's two reasons that I have that. So first off, it's my favorite design thinking term. Really, it means approaching things with curiosity, approaching things with the lens of, "Oh, that doesn't seem quite right," right? And when you're doing design thinking, you're going in with curiosity and not with an end answer in mind.

So really, the purpose of it is to say, "Wow, that's a place that feels like it needs some more investigation.

And so I love it from a design thinking point of view. The second reason it's really close to my heart is that it was such a change in me personally in how I approach solutioning. When I learned about the concept of "Disagio" within my design thinking coursework, I had always been a problem solver, right? Going into things like, "All right, let's get it done. Let's take care of that and solve that problem." But as I learned about the design thinking concepts around Disagio, it helped me approach my conversations with brands. I've always been vendor-side, never customer-side. So, I work with dozens of different types of brands all the time. And really, approaching with more curiosity instead of going in, having an answer in the first meeting, right? That discovery process and getting really curious about how to solve bigger problems for these brands has unlocked a really different kind of solutioning for me, which is super interesting.

Thor:
And we need that all the time. So, I really thank you for highlighting that word. But if we shift slightly to think about skills, what skills do you think are essential for insights professionals today?

Jennie Lewis:
Oh, so I think that's a tough one. I am, I'm in a small organization, so I sit the line between part analyst—writing a lot of SQL, spending a lot of time in spreadsheets—and then you're taking that and doing the analysis and writing. So, I do a bit of a switcheroo on a day-to-day basis between those two things. I think curiosity is one. There are the hard skills of the database work, really being able to know how to manipulate the data and work with it to make it readable, so that you can do the analysis on it. And then, understanding customer lifecycle across different industries. Because the customer lifecycle really informs—I guess my knowledge of that really informs—how I look at the data that I find. So, as I find different, let's call them oddities or standouts in the data, often I'll look at something with, like, I'll normalize it as a percent change rather than using raw numbers. So, I'll take everything and normalize it to percent change, and then you look at where the spikes are, right? And then I take that information and say, "Well, I know that on, let's call it day two after downloading a mobile app, there's an opportunity to re-engage a customer," right? So I know that first 30-day lifecycle. And then I know that when I see a brand that has a spike or a change in their activation rate, something must be going on there, right? So, I can take my knowledge about the lifecycle and data analysis, piece it together, and then research what that brand is doing to affect the change I’m seeing.

Thor:
That's fantastic. And then, if we take a slightly broader perspective, what would you say the DNA of a successful insights team looks like?

Jennie Lewis:
I think that having, yeah, I always say from a team perspective, having a mix of superpowers is important. Really, you know, finding a way to utilize each person's real superpower. You know, for me, it’s the analysis. For others, I've had folks on my team before who were the most creative in the ways they could put data together. Sometimes, you're creating dashboards that are really interesting, so, you know, figuring out a way to link together folks' superpowers. And collaboration, I think, is something from a team perspective that is so important. If you want to create a product as a group, that collaboration has to be there, where you're working as a unit and not as a set of individuals.

Thor:
I think that's so true, but unfortunately, something a lot of people forget. And if we build on that, to take a look at the role of the insights teams within the organization, how would you suggest going about elevating the role of the insights?

Jennie Lewis:
So, I see insights as massively cross-functional, because you're getting information that can affect everything—from a SaaS environment and brands that we work with, to the marketing information that we're creating (which is a lot of the work I do—creating content for our marketing team to use). But I also, from the B2B side of my research, get information from our direct customers about what our product team might want to build. So, building those relationships—and I'm very lucky to have partners in a ton of different departments at Airship—and I love the way that we're able to work together. It's really interesting because it's like a spider web of connectivity. And it makes me really happy because I think that’s a great way for the insights information to be successful and to be utilized. As I mentioned at the top of our meeting, making sure that the information is actionable and really usable by folks is key. And I see all of the department heads and leadership as my stakeholders, right? And if the information that I give them is actionable for the SDRs on the sales team, and it's actionable for our marketing team, and it's actionable for the account managers, then that's a successful day.

Thor:
And if we think about the people who have inspired you during the course of your career, what are the best elements of career advice you've ever received?

Jennie Lewis:
Oh my goodness. I've been lucky to work for a lot of really great folks over the years. I think that, you know, one is that it wasn't a direct piece of advice. I think it was more how this individual managed me that helped drive, you know, what I've done in my career. I had an interest in doing a different role than what I had, and really, you know, I just needed a change—I needed out of Ops. And anybody who's done campaign Ops can probably understand that want, right? And the boss that I had at the time, she said, "Well, put together a proposal. Show me what you want to do. Show me what you want to do with this new thing. Tell me why you would be good at it." And I was like, "All right." So, I put together this presentation. She said, "Okay, yeah, all right. Let’s try it out. Let’s make it happen." And so I think it gave me the understanding that you should ask for what you want, and that it's possible to really try to make that change in your own career. It wasn't a role that was posted, it wasn’t something that was being hired for. It was just an opportunity that I saw within the organization, and she let me make it happen. So, really, I think approaching and advocating for what it is that you want to do with growth within your career—and if you see an opportunity within the organization that you're in, go tell somebody about it and try to make it happen. Yeah.

Thor:
And looking ahead to the future, what opportunities do you think there are for insights professionals to make true business impact and to challenge the status quo? How do you think the insights function should evolve?

Jennie Lewis:
I would love to see it driving more of the underlying data integrations into marketing channels. So, if we could get more of that plumbing in place and have—let's say, in a mobile app perspective—you have the opportunity to say, "Well, Thor viewed this screen within the app." And we might know that you tried to search something several times and then didn’t, let’s say, ever listen to anything. Well, that's curious, right? Like, why? You didn't find what you need? You got pulled away to something else? But there’s something there, right? From a customer experience perspective, if we have that data all talking to each other, then a marketing professional, like a marketing communications professional, can come in and say, "Well, maybe he was trying to get to something that he couldn’t find," right? Is it something about our search functionality that's not clear? Is it like a phrasing in the search that needed a better recommendation, right? How do we help that customer get to what it is that they're looking for? And to do all of that, to create a customer experience where at the end of the day, we would then offer you some information, be it instructional or recommendation-based, all of that is data strategy-driven and data-plumbing-driven. And to get that level of data integration—I've seen brands do it, I know that it’s possible, but I also know that those brands are cross-departmental, talking to each other all the time. They're in communication.

Thor:
And it’s not a channel-based organizational strategy; it’s more of a customer-based organizational strategy. And that's a huge change for brands to make. I mean, I'm not suggesting that it's simple, but I think that really, to create the type of customer experiences that are possible, especially in a digital transient world, in the way that customers interact with brands today, I think that’s what we have to do to really affect change.

Thor:
That's such a good point, Jennie. Now, unfortunately, we've come to the end of this podcast, but there’s one more question that I want to ask you. It's a question I love to ask, which is, "Who in the world of insights would you love to have lunch with?"

Jennie Lewis:
So, there's an insights leader at Ulta, Elizabeth Oates, who is just really—I mentioned Ulta as a brand—they are doing this phenomenal work, and I would love to have lunch with her and learn more about how they're doing it. Because to the earlier point, I know that they must be doing something so interesting and cross-functional that it would be really cool to learn about.

Thor:
Well, we know Elizabeth, and we really like her. So, I really—and I would not hesitate a second—if that lunch was going on, and I was in the neighborhood, I would definitely eavesdrop.

Jennie Lewis:
Oh. You come over to New York, and we'll all kind of meet in the middle and get together.

Thor:
Fantastic. Well, this has been such an incredible conversation, Jennie. Your perspective on the industry is truly unique, and I think we can all learn from it. If I play back some of the moments of our conversation that really stuck with me, I’d start off with your definition of an insight. You said an insight needs to be understandable by the stakeholders, and it needs to be actionable for the company. We talked a great deal about personalization, and you reminded us that doing great personalization is really hard, and brands need to understand that doing it right is a big investment, and they need to prioritize the plumbing. This is particularly true for brands that are digital or brands that have a strong retail footprint. To do it right, you need to look at the data from a customer perspective and think about the organization from a customer perspective, not a channel perspective. Ulta and Target are great examples of brands that do this really well. Lastly, you encouraged us to embrace the concept of "Disagio." It’s an Italian concept; it’s about where the discomfort lies. The concept comes from the design thinking world, and it helps you to approach discovery with more curiosity. Now, I know that I’ve learned a lot from talking to you today, and I’m sure our audience has as well. So, thank you so much for joining me.

Jennie Lewis:
Thank you so much. It was a pleasure to speak with you. I really enjoyed our conversation. Thank you.