In the world today, the way people conduct and respond to marketing has kept on evolving.
The developments of cloud solutions, data analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) have forced the constant development of both marketing strategies and approaches in a short period of time.
Marketers have to constantly move forward with the changes but now have a whole horizon of opportunities for being creative.
One of the best marketing strategies that can be relied on is marketing personalisation, which has changed marketing from the bottom up by improving the customer experience and ultimately improving the business bottom line.
What is Marketing Personalisation?
Personalised marketing or one-to-one marketing can be defined simply as follows:
The implementation of a strategy by which companies deliver individualised content to recipients through data collection, analysis, the use of automation technology in a way that feels personal and human, and taking into consideration the recipient’s likes, preferences and interests.
Every day, people are being bombarded by information of all kinds, via billboard ads, TV commercials, emails, social media, and more.
For the average consumer, most of that information overload gets tuned out, especially when none of that info is personally relevant.
So when a business reaches out to their audience with generic, impersonal content, they potentially lose a huge opportunity for engagement and long-term loyalty.
Why It Matters?
Personalisation is not just a competitive advantage but has become something that customers expect in their interaction with a business. An Epsilon survey of 1,000 consumers aged 18-64 found that 90% of consumers claim to find personalisation appealing.
Yet with an estimated 320 billion emails being sent each day, customers have been forced to be selective in their interactions with businesses. In fact, an overwhelming 72% of customers choose to only engage with businesses that personalise their marketing messages.
Studies show that 91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands that provide relevant offers and recommendations while more than half of consumers are willing to hand over personal information, as long as it benefits them.
Even better, 44% of consumers are likely to become repeat buyers after a personalised shopping experience with a particular company.
The many studies that have been conducted show that personalised marketing works and is here to stay.
The Real Benefits
There are a multitude of benefits from utilising personalised marketing, for both businesses and consumers. When personalised marketing strategies are implemented successfully, the following benefits are realised:
- Improved Customer Experience
Customers are more comfortable providing personal information to their favourite brands if the return benefits them. Filling out forms, downloading whitepapers, participating in surveys for discounts or vouchers and indicating favourite purchases or preferences are all personal information being offered up by the consumer to the brand owner. They expect that any sensitive information will be kept confidential and that a more personalised experience will be available upon their return. - Drive Revenue
As the business identifies and responds to each customer via their preferred channel, higher ROI is achieved. With the right automation technology at hand, marketers can identify which channel customers engage with, then craft an omnichannel response for follow ups. In fact, personalisation drives up conversion rates by up to 70% and impacts the entire consumer lifecycle: from acquisition costs, engagement levels, average order values to repeat purchases. Not to mention, driving down the costs of acquiring new customers by as much as 50%. - Increase Brand Loyalty and Customer Retention
Consumers are unique individuals with specific preferences. Businesses that consider the information and data provided by their customers, and dedicate both time and resources to successfully implement their personalised marketing strategy will benefit from competitive advantages in both brand loyalty and customer satisfaction. - Creating Consistency
Consumers interact with brands across multiple channels, including email, social, mobile and more, sometimes all in a single day. Its imperative for brands to create consistency across various channels, even matching in-store experience to in-app experience as every piece of content forms part of an entire coherent message. As a result, customers can pick up their conversation from where they left off, irrespective of the channel they were on. - Shorter Sales Cycles
When customers feel confident and trust in a brand and its offerings, the sales cycle gets shorter and shorter. In other words, brands can focus more on enhancing the customer experience at every stage of the customer lifecycle instead of spending more time to convince their customers to get on board.
The Real Challenges
Yet, life is not always a bed of roses. Like any other marketing strategy, there are challenges that arise as well:
- The Right Technology
It’s no myth that the technological landscape is ever-changing. Without intelligent algorithms to make sense of data collection and automation, personalised marketing efforts might seem to be outdated or irrelevant. Marketers often struggle not just to find a smart personalisation engine that suits their needs but also the right cocktail of automation tools that would assist in data collection and intuitive automation. - Creating a Single Customer View
Historically, information on customers has been fragmented. Storing data in multiple fragmented systems have caused marketers to face difficulties in understanding the intricacies of the customer’s unique preferences, interests and purchasing history. In order to establish a common thread across channels, there needs to a single unified customer profile. And without the right team and tools in place, making sense of the data can become a Herculean task. - Time and Resources
Marketing is no longer a one-man show. Aside from the right software, businesses need to have a dedicated team to manage the entire personalised marketing strategy at scale. - Implementing Smart Segmentation
Many marketers are still struggling to get beyond basic segmentation strategies which are based on broad segments and simple clustering. The old one-dimensional approach no longer works. Smart segmentation across channels by hyper-relevant offerings and recommendations to customers will not only garner appreciation and retention but will also boost performance.
How To Get Started On Personalised Marketing Strategy
It’s not easy to determine the benefits customers are seeking at any moment since those benefits may vary depending on situation, business and interests. Some facets should be considered before launching a successful personalised marketing strategy, such as:
- Compare
To begin with, use a content personalisation engine. If the business already has a personalisation platform in place, it’s not a bad thing to compare the existing solution against newer ones that claim to offer more value. - Capture
Customer data is a powerful currency in the marketing world. Implementing a data capturing solution is typically done via a few lines of code for webpages which is then collected in variables such as clicks, time on site, abandoned shopping carts, purchase history, and more. In fact, the collection of first-party data (data extracted from the business website/app, CRM data, social data, subscription data), second-party data (social media, user surveys, website activity), and third-party data (data collected from outside sources) can bring greater accuracy to personalisation strategies.
Out of the mountains of structured and unstructured data, it can be broken down into:- Quantitative data: Website activity, users’ social network activity, transactional information, customer service-related data
- Qualitative data: User attitudes, motivations, and opinions via surveys and polls
- Descriptive data: Lifestyle information and customer habits.
- Analyse
Businesses can only benefit when the personalisation solution is fully in sync with data capturing, proper analytical capabilities, and an adaptable website. After some learning weeks, the personalisation solution should be able start to provide relevant content recommendations to customers. This is the time when marketers should perform A/B testing with segmented data to validate the performance of the personalisation solution against a control system. - Act
Allow the personalisation solution to make most of the heavy calculations. While data collection and analysis would inform further marketing decisions, let the solution speak for itself and don’t be too involved in making changes to the calculation methods for various promotions.
What Do Personalisation Campaigns Look Like?
The average consumer these days fully expects personalisation in every campaign that a brand runs. But what do personalised campaigns look like?
Here are some samples of personalised campaigns that can lead a brand to great success:
Targeted Emails
Marketers use personalisation heavily in email campaigns. To gain a better understanding of their audience and increase the relevancy of email content, marketers usually begin collecting customer information through sign-up forms.
By tweaking sign-up forms to get the customer to fill up details about themselves like their birth date, preferences and interests, marketers can craft an email campaigns that speaks to specific groups with unique needs.
For example, a book store might request customers to fill up a sign-up form with details such as age, interests, and even number of children in the family. The store would then use the data to send emails specially suited to the age ranges in the family or to present new offerings in line with the customer’s interest.
Custom Video Messages
Did you know that the average online visitor only has an attention span of 15 seconds or less? Unfortunate but true, being on the Internet is a battle for attention. To keep engagement more effectively, marketers leverage videos with custom messaging.
The most basic example of custom videos are video greeting cards which typically feature a few choice images of the greeter over or under the animation. That was in the early years. Today’s social media can instead, seamlessly produce a customised video of the customer’s profile and choice profile events for a trip down memory lane.
Many brands also implement varying levels of personalisation in video to bring the experience closer to the viewer.
One such example is DoubleDutch, an event networking platform that transformed their event invites and notices with video personalisation. Their event invite video features employees talking to each other about the event before one of them takes out a huge invitation pass with the viewer’s name and their company.
Incorporating personalisation in video marketing sounds easy but is not easy to accomplish. Anyone can create a simple template and put the viewers name on the video and call it personalisation.
But creating a personalised experience that leaves a memorable impression on the viewer requires a good concept, and a plan to execute it seamlessly. Not to mention, a marketer needs to have the right tools, resources and automation technology in place, so that video production can be as scalable as possible.
Product Recommendations
This is one of the most standard tactics that has remained relevant as it truly works for engaging existing customers and even revitalise older ones. Data collection is used to determine the type of products, services or offers a customer would most likely be interested in and recommendations are tailored accordingly.
Giving customers the ability to rate the campaigns or selections presented to them and provide further feedback or reviews will allow the customer to filter what they like or don’t like and further adjust their recommendations.
Online retailer, Amazon is a great example of using campaigns based on this tactic, by using artificial intelligence to understand which products customers are likely to buy next. The algorithm factors in the products the customer has viewed, purchased or added to their wish lists. Once customers land on the brand’s website, they’re greeted with a personalised homepage that presents recommendations based on the customer’s real-time behaviour on the platform.
Social Media Marketing
Social media has become the backbone of multichannel initiatives and has helped keep brands in the minds of potential customers. Interaction with consumers and potential customers across social media networks helps to increase customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.
By sending highly personalised and relevant social media messages through automation, marketers collect responses and customer data, which in turn drives communication and improves conversion rates.
Fear of Missing Out (FOMO)
Fear is a driving factor for purchases. Fear of missing out, to be exact. Marketers bank on that uneasy feeling when there’s a sense of missing out on something special. By highlighting that a product is limited in quantity, has many views or has been bought recently, e-commerce sites are employing FOMO tactics and personalised messages as a way to convince customers that they need to make a purchase before leaving. Very little effort is required from the marketer’s standpoint as the messaging just needs to be brief and to the point, after which, FOMO will do the rest.
Conclusions
When it comes to personalised marketing, there’s no one-size-fits-all strategy. While consumers demand more personalisation throughout the buying journey, every brand’s personalisation journey will still be different depending on their audience, product type, business objectives and other variables.
What is important to remember is that the brand’s personalised marketing strategy should be customer-obsessed and properly tailored to each and every individual across every channel the brand utilises in order to be successful.
