When we personalise a customer’s journey, they are given a unique experience. We want to give them the power to dictate the direction and speed of their interaction with your brand.
Without it, your audience can be faced with an overwhelming variety of choices that detract from a convenient and smooth experience. Frustration can also play a part if the content, offers, ads, and promotions have nothing to do with their interests.
Personalisation could be anything from interest-based (what they have bought before or where they have shown consistent interest in but never made a purchase) through to the staff at your local bar remembering your drink order. Most companies still focus on the basics such as gender, age group, location, and previous purchases, and if you can combine that information with other data sets, you can get real value.
Getting it right is a big step towards making the customer feel like part of a community, connecting them with your brand beyond a transactional relationship, becoming a loyal brand advocate. However, it’s easy to get it very wrong and lose customer faith.
There is no way of avoiding the fact that personalisation needs large amounts of data and investment in infrastructure and technical capabilities to collect, classify, analyse, transfer, and understand it. This might include Data Management (DMP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or location information from mobile devices.
Some channels require fewer resources and investments than others and, depending on your marketing mix, you can apply personalisation in lots of different ways. Most businesses already use the purest forms of customisation, such as the name of the recipient in email marketing, but you can take it much further including personalised digital experiences, television adverts or social content.
1. Identify: Get to know your customers, collect reliable data about their preferences and how their needs can best be satisfied
2. Differentiate: Understand their lifetime value, their priorities, their needs and segment them into more focused groups to make it easier for marketing
3. Interact: Get the right messaging at the right time, ideally by recording their communication preferences
4. Customise: Use the information that you have on purchase, clicks, and watches to help you create a unique experience
5. Adapt to technology: Be responsive to immerging social media, data-gathering platforms, and other technologies that your competitors may be used to steal an advantage
6. Get it legal: Data privacy is a topical subject so make sure you have the relevant legal basis for retaining and processing the data
Personalised marketing helps to bridge the gap between the vastness of what is available and the customer’s need for a streamlined experience. If you would like to get more personal with your audience, we would love to work with you, get in touch to set up a conversation.