“Customers expect brands to know what they’re interested in, what they need now, and even what they might need in the future.”
Why pursue personalization?
In his 1991 book, Relationship Marketing, Regis McKenna spoke of the age of customer-centered and knowledge-based marketing.
The One to One Future, by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, published two years later, foretold a future where marketing and technology would marry and give birth to a new age of personalization.
Do people want personalized marketing?
They do indeed. Customers want to be understood. Though enjoying a personalized experience calls for accepting that brands will gather and use personal information, few people object. In fact, recent research from Epsilon (The Power of Me) reports:
How
does your brand benefit from personalization?
When brands
understand their customers and respond accordingly they can:
The many benefits of personalized marketing—from the fifth edition of
Salesforce’s State of Marketing report.
Let’s examine the essential questions about personalized marketing and uncover the answers you’ll need to tap its power.
Where do you begin with personalized marketing?
As you know, nearly all marketing strategies
begin with goals. Questions to ponder as you pursue them include:
Marketing automation leaders, Marketo, encourage marketers to approach personalization planning by answering the following three questions:
How
do you apply personalization in B2C marketing?
Personalization
in consumer marketing could be applied based on:
How
do you apply personalization in B2B marketing?
Personalization
in business-to-business marketing is more complex but could be applied based
on:
How does personalization meet
customer expectations?
In an effort to simplify the complex topic of personalization, Accenture developed a tidy “4R Personalization Framework.”
I’ll summarize it all with one short phrase: right-timing. Examples might be:
Use your
imagination. Think of the 4Rs or right-timing in the context of your business
and your customers’ needs. No doubt, the list above could get long. And I think
it’s clear to see, whether the personalization revolves around content,
products, services, or options, delivering it in a helpful way is bound to
foster greater satisfaction and loyalty.
Where should you put
personalization in play?
Brands can
deliver personalization across the customer journey, across devices, and
offline. You can personalize your communications across channels such as:
You can personalize across content types too, with
In a 2017 State of Personalization Report, Segment
asked its customers which were the most important channels to get a
personalized experience, where brands are succeeding, and where they need improvement.
The results:
What does it take to do personalized
marketing?
Given the
obvious benefits of personalized marketing you would think every brand would be
in rapid pursuit of making it happen. But that’s simply not the case.
Most
assume personalization is the domain of the megabrands such as Amazon and
Netflix and consider it too resource-intensive and therefore out of reach.
What are the main things brands struggle with?
The answers include:
Technical
challenges loom largest and include:
How do you overcome the technical
hurdles?
As you would expect, software is the key. The challenge is to achieve new levels of insight from multiple customer touchpoints and respond. A tightly integrated martech stack must inform decisions and:
For many brands, offline systems must factor in as
well. Consider, for example, the important data generated at the point of
sale.
Essentially, every action at every touchpoint in
the connected customer journey is a source of data. Three questions become
crucial:
The continued maturation of AI and machine learning are helping addresses
the challenge with technology. Platforms including CRM and marketing automation
enter the equation as well. However, marketing
automation platforms usually automate engagement for a single channel.
A new breed of software, the customer data platform (CDP) is emerging as the connective tissue that delivers the ability for marketers to tap into a system that reveals needs-based data regarding the individual buyer.
What is a CDP?
A CDP is not a CRM or a marketing automation platform (MAP). It provides marketers a central location for customer data. A CDP opens the door for marketers to employ personalized marketing using omnichannel data in real-time to tailor digital experiences to the customer.
According to Gartner, CDPs are gaining widespread attention from marketers because they
provide “a holistic view of the customer to help execute and optimize
personalized journeys.”
Element Solutions simplifies the essential
role of the CDP
What is customer journey analytics?
The customer journey tends to be cross-functional in
nature. McKinsey found:
As we’ve established, personalized marketing demands an actionable
single customer view. The essential ideas:
Customer journey analytics overcomes the gaps between
analytics and action.
Forrester claims
customer journey analytics combines quantitative and qualitative data to
analyze customer behaviors and motivations across touchpoints and over time to
optimize customer interactions and predict future behavior.
How do you get customer
journey analytics?
The simple answer is you get customer journey analytics
from an AI-powered CDP.
One provider claims: AI-powered CDP gives organizations
access to thousands of metrics for each customer from the earliest prospect
stage of the journey through long-term, loyal customers. It also builds
individual customer profiles in real-time to take the guesswork out of customer
journey analytics.
What does
personalized marketing look like?
Here are snapshots of six brands putting personalized marketing to work.
STARBUCKS
Starbucks engages its customers with its mobile app My Starbucks Rewards Program, which makes use purchase history, location, and more. According to GlobalWebIndex, the introduction of the rewards system saw Starbucks’ revenue soaring to $2.56 billion, while the app has generated around 6 million sales per month (around 22% of all U.S. sales).
Spotify has mastered the fine art of content recommendations. I’m sent personalized playlists based on my listening history and concert notices about bands “Because I listen to them.”
Netflix combines behavioral attributes with predictive learning to present subscribers content recommendations. More than 75 percent of its website activity is driven by their personalization engine.
NAKED WINES
Naked
Wines has adopted personalized marketing strategies similar to Amazon.
The online
seller allows you to buy wines and rate them and delivers personalized
recommendations based on your tastes.
easyJet celebrated its 20th anniversary with emails that made personal travel recommendations. The company created a model that profiled all the destinations the customer had been to and suggested other, relevant ones.
Open rates were over 100% more than its average
newsletter—with 25% higher click-through rates. 7.5% of
easyJet customers who received the personalized email went on to make a
booking within the next 30 days.
Rather than generically promote content across its site,
Evergage uses one-to-one content recommendations to
show website visitors specific content assets based on who the visitor is, what
they’ve shown affinities for, and what they’ve already downloaded.
Are you ready to personalize your
marketing?
Dynamic Yield’s 2019 Personalization Maturity Assessment indicates 97% of marketers believe personalization is valuable yet the majority still can’t say they’re prioritizing it as a strategic initiative.
Additional data from the study claims only 5% have attained a single view of the customer to orchestrate personalization across channels.
Where are you now?
Like most things that promise
large rewards, achieving effective personalized marketing requires taking
methodical and persistent steps up a steep path. Try to gauge where you stand
today.
This diagram from WebEngage
depicts a maturity model that might help you determine where you are and
understand subsequent steps.
Will you need help?
Getting going with personalized
marketing isn’t strictly the domain of software.
“Building a personalization program starts with getting the relevant stakeholders in your organization on the same page about the value and benefits of the initiative, developing a comprehensive strategy, ensuring you have the right skills on the team, defining a process to execute a personalization program, and confirming you have the appropriate level of governance in place to keep your personalization efforts on track.”
You may want to tap a digital
marketing agency that knows the ropes and is capable of helping you accurately
assess your systems, processes, and capabilities to determine next steps.
I’ve done a lot of reading on the topic and found that common theme is to “start small.”
You may not be able to leap
from the basic (and boring) personalized email subject line to the immensely
personalized experience a brand like Spotify delivers, but in short
measure—with the guidance of professionals—you should take smart, strategic
steps leading you up and to the right in your pursuit of personalized
marketing.
Keep in mind, your customers expect a personalized experience. Will they get it from your brand or from a competitor?