Put the 'Person' in Personalization in Five Steps
In an era when the average consumer is bombarded with thousands of marketing
messages per day, personalization has become a key way to break through the
noise.
And consumers are asking for it: 75% say they prefer personalized offers
(Aberdeen Group), and 61% say they're even willing to give up a degree of
privacy to enable personalization (Compass Intelligence) on a continuous basis.
Marketers who are not yet paying attention to the consumer preference for
personalization are carelessly leaving money on the table. Personalized emails
generate up to six times higher revenue per email than non-personalized emails,
according to Experian Marketing Services' 2013 Study. And that's just one
channel of communication.
Personalized multichannel marketing campaigns consistently and
overwhelmingly beat out static campaigns in generating high response rates, a
MindFire study of 650 campaigns concluded.
In today's on-demand, highly digital world, personalization can be defined
by several tactical components. However, the widely accepted most common and
executional definition is an organization's ability to immediately engage with
a consumer when that customer mentions the organization's brand or searches for
key terms from a campaign.
So how can companies, regardless of size,
effectively deliver personalized communications to a consumer base of thousands
or even millions of customers and prospects? These five steps can help.
Step 1: Combine email and CRM data with social
media
An easy method of personalization (and eventually a higher ROI on CRM)
begins by matching a current CRM system or email data with data collected from
all social media channels. Several tools on the market, and even some within
platforms, allow plug-and-play options to sync such data, and any of those
options are well worth the investment.
Of course, the more data a business has, the harder it becomes to interpret
that data with the precision required for highly personalized communications.
Thus, for any personalized messaging campaign to be successful, data gathering
and interpretation must be the first step.
By combining traditional datasets with more authentic pieces of data, such
as data discovered from social media profiles, email addresses can be
transformed into records of real people with lives and jobs, families and
friends, interests, and passions. Harnessing that magnitude of customer insight
allows marketers to trigger communications when customers' interests most
intersect with specific marketing campaigns.
Step 2: Learn customers' personal preferences
via social behaviors
Social data provides marketers with unprecedented insight into their
customers' lives, subsequently creating an abundance of opportunities for
personalization that reach far beyond surveys, focus groups, and feedback
forms.
What's great about social data for businesses is that it presents the
ability to analyze, in real time, what a customer thinks, feels, and cares
about, by simply "listening" to their online conversations—and then
reacting with predetermined triggers.
The frustrations companies face with customer analytics initiatives aren't
with the collection of data but, rather, about how that data is interpreted and
ultimately used.
Much as how we learned to interpret email metrics and click worthiness over
the past few decades, now is the time to achieve the similar outcomes with
social networks. As a medium now foundational to the lives of the majority of
consumers' worldwide, social media uniquely provides the tone of authentic
insight through mentions, comments—negative and positive—brand and product
engagement, and real-time conversations.
Use that authenticity! If a customer or prospect is clearly unhappy and has
taken to social networking to vent frustrations, your business has an
opportunity that it never would have had five years ago: to resolve a problem
through a highly personalized and direct response. In addition, if prospects
are on the hunt for a product in your industry, target them!
Social data takes us one step closer to delivering real-time communications
without missing real-time opportunities.
Step 3: Create custom audiences for ad
targeting
Once you're able to effectively collect social data, you're likely to
discover trends, categories, and opportunities that may not have been available
solely from email and CRM data. Use that information for new
"categories" and to segment your list into custom audiences. By doing
so, you'll be able to create ads highly specific to those unique audiences and
ultimately address new prospects that fall within those audience segments.
For example, insight into social data may uncover a market opportunity for a
niche segment such as "unhappy Apple users." For stores that sell
competitive products, such as Best Buy or a local mom-and-pop electronics
store, this type of knowledge is actually a form of lead generation. With
proper keywords and brand name identification, this example category can easily
translate into an automated ad with a promotion for a new computer.
Would you have identified an "unhappy Apple user" via your last
email marketing click rate? Probably not.
Step 4: Deliver personalization with newfound
customer knowledge
Ever since marketing emerged as a profession, its challenge has been to
influence purchase by delivering the right message, through the right channel,
at the right time.
With the latest breed of marketing automation tools, companies are beginning
to learn how to routinely address marketing opportunities uncovered by data.
Social automation, triggered emails, and even social advertising all allow
marketers to have the ideal, perfectly tailored message ready to go as soon as
customers mention a brand or keyword, open an email, or display interest of any
kind.
Once a custom audience is created and you have a better understanding of the
"categories" your audience falls into, you'll need to create the
messages you want delivered to those customers and prospects (with the understanding
that categories and messages may evolve over time).
Tailored messages can include anything from a response to unhappy customers
to offer them a discount, to an encouraging promotion for particular products
or product categories based on interest, and to a cross-sell or upsell on a
particular good or service.
Once those messages are pre-created, you've almost reached real-time
response capabilities. So what comes next?
Step 5: Ready, set, automate!
To summarize: if you've completed Steps 1-4, and your pre-created ads are
ready and waiting, then Step 5 involves the (automated) send button. Using your
newfound knowledge about your customers, prospects, and influential audiences
on social media, your next task is to set up the processes or
"rules," depending on your marketing automation solution.
Queue up the Facebook ads so that they're ready to be sent to audiences that
have been categorized per their Facebook posts. Save the promotional emails and
other custom messages so that once an opportunity is identified, all you need
is a click—and out goes your message.
The task can seem daunting, but available solutions can plug into existing
systems and deliver the valuable insights that previously took thousands of
hours and more dollars to uncover.
Through data, analysis, and automation, the process of sending personalized
marketing messages has become easier. No longer does your entire audience have
to see the same message. You can gain insight from the data, and use it to
strategize for all marketing efforts. The key is finding a way to integrate the
real, authentic insight from social media data and combine it with what we
already know about customers via our CRMs.
Finally,
automation will allow you to deliver those personalized communications on time
so that opportunities are never missed—and the likelihood of a sale or
conversion dramatically increases. Now you are communicating directly to that
person, formerly known as "Customer X."
Wednesday, April 29, 2015
Put the 'Person' in Personalization in Five Steps
Posted by John Hornyak, X2 Media at 10:03 PM
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