For a very long time, it was said that customers are the kings. This has been proven right now more than ever, especially in the Covid-19 era where almost every major retailer and quick-service restaurant (QSR) came up with their own mobile app. Customers make decisions in a matter of seconds when it comes to your marketing message or objective. Provide something that is relevant to them and you have a happy customer, but miss the mark and they are gone.
Between 2019 and 2022 due to the pandemic, everything changed. Even the marketing ecosystem has evolved drastically. What consumers are now expecting from the businesses is significantly different from what they were looking for in the past. This led to the rise of personalization when it came to customer engagement.
Personalized marketing refers to customizing your marketing based on the data you have retrieved through contacts. This consists of interests, shopping preferences, purchase history, etc. When you use this data to customize the content your contacts receive via email, ads, and other platforms, you are using personalized marketing.
If done right, personalization can enhance customers’ engagement and loyalty by delivering messages that are tuned to, and even predict what customers really want. These benefits for the consumer is a benefit to the company as well. However, capturing value through personalization requires more than great analytics and a tech solution. Most organizations struggle to alter their methods and practices to receive benefits from the maximum possible potential of personalization.
How to practice successful personalization on the digital platform?
Step 1: Use behavioral data to identify where the value lies
The very concept of personalization depends on behavioral data. The first step to effective personalization is segregating customers with similar behaviors or needs. The next step is to identify the customer journey for each segment which can be done by marketers by collecting information through internal sources like purchasing at the store calling the contact center, visiting the company website, etc. Combine this with information gathered from external sources like the prospects’ visit to competitors’ websites and you will have hundreds if not thousands of micro-segments. All the micro-segments are understandably not created equal but their potential must be evaluated and prioritized carefully based on relative value. The outcome here will be the premise of 1:1 personalization.
Step 2: Plan ahead of time to act on customer signals
Personalised marketing only works when both parties are involved, details, if the customers provide signals or information about their needs and intentions through activities like online browsing, purchasing, and social media posts and in return, the company responds to it with a relevant and timely message called a trigger that is sent to the individual customer. Executing this plan will require meticulous planning in advance and the marketing team will need to create a large number of trigger messages catering to individual signals. These trigger messages can be images, titles, copy that can be combined together to match a situation.
Step 3: Delegate a small group of well-curated people
This group will consist of 8 to 15 carefully selected people including a campaign manager and staff from IT, operations, digital media, analytics, and creative. This team must not work like a task force where everyone comes together a few hours every week while focusing on their main employment position. They must be dedicated full time to this job. The responsibility that falls on this team is that of looking for signals with the highest potential value and developing launching ratings over personal messages to get results day in and day out. Early in the personalization initiative, every such team should launch 1 or 2 new triggers every week and as they gain experience, they must be able to launch 1 to 2 new triggers every day.
Step 4: Emphasise the technology and processes that improve your team’s efficiency
In the world of personalised marketing, if you take too much time to cater to a specific individual, you will lose business as well as time. You have to be proactive and ready to try new methods and alternatives. To work in the space extensively, agile processes have to replace the old ones. Teams need to be empowered to make their own decisions in order to quickly test and try out different ideas to pinpoint exactly what works. If speed is one of the factors that you make use of in order to achieve quick and efficient results, failure and mistakes are bound to happen but the leadership needs to be prepared for that, learn from their mistakes, and move on. Another thing that will help to execute this plan is the right automation technology. Its job should be to provide the teams with signals and deliver triggers more efficiently. Moving ahead this way, the organization will determine the correct parameters and requirements to help segregate all possible solutions to create real value.
Over the years every possible sector developed, as did the marketing sector. Initially, the same message would be seen by every person irrespective of their interest and ability to make the purchase, but that is not the case now. Nowadays products and services are only marketed towards people who have a greater chance of buying them. Personalised marketing, especially when dealing with a larger audience has truly turned out to be a sensible move as it narrows down the right audience for you and makes it easier for you to put all your efforts and attention.