Think you’re using personalisation in your communications? Including recipient’s first names on email newsletters isn’t really cutting it when it comes to truly engaging with individual customers and creating highly relevant customer experiences.
Marketing personalisation is a far more advanced method of achieving this. Personalisation enables the marketing of intelligently targeted products or services to individual users based on data you have collected about their behaviours and contexts.
It enables your marketing communications to be much more refined and responsive by using data that is based on changeable factors that influence each customer’s browsing and purchasing behaviour – rather than simply relying on static demographic factors.
Ideal for both business and consumer audiences, it is highly efficient, saves you huge amounts of time, ensures a consistent customer journey and avoids the output ending up as basic communications.
Marketing personalisation is an intelligent way to increase customer experience and engagement, ultimately leading to increased business.
Benefits of personalising your marketing communications.
Personalisation can be applied across all your digital marketing channels.
For example, it can be used in email drip campaigns, text message marketing, your website, PPC ads and more. It can better-reflect audience segmentation and interests. It can even react to each customer or recipient’s real-time behaviour while also considering their previous customer history and other factors.
The aim of personalisation is to create a far-more intelligent and nuanced customer experience.
And a higher quality customer experience will boost your ultimate commercial success.
We know personalisation enhances conversion rates – it’s even been reported that over 93% of businesses see increased conversions with personalisation1, because it creates messages that are genuinely relevant to the customer’s specific context.
Cross-selling and upselling also increases, with average order values being 30% higher through personalisation2.
Other benefits of improved customer experience are increased customer lifetime values and higher returns on investment across all your marketing channels. ROIs could rise between 10 and 30% with effective use of personalisation.
Strategies for intelligent customer experience.
There are various key considerations for successful personalisation.
Consistent customer experiences across all marketing devices and channels, and across all digital and physical interactions, are essential.
For example, if you operate a gym, spa, hotel health club or leisure centre, can customers book sessions and get customer information online which is consistent with the positive experience they receive when physically visiting your organisation? Are your websites, signage and displays, business cards and brochures all on-brand and consistent?
The context of products or services to customers is also important. Product or service contexts includes price, motivation, purchasing frequency, use and the likelihood of repeat-purchases. Customer contexts include demographics, location, activity, time and day, season, customer journey position and customer satisfaction – or dissatisfaction. None of these should be overlooked.
Think about fluid customer behaviour rather than demographics. Age, gender and other demographic factors remain pretty static for most people and may not impact on their customer persona. In contrast, individual behaviour data tells you more about customer personas through factors such as their customer journey stage, customer lifetime value, buying frequency, satisfaction, engagement with marketing and sensitivity to price.
Real-time personalisation is also important. This enables immediate responses based on the customer’s real-time actions along with historic behaviour and broader customer group characteristics. Dynamic content can also be added, based on customer history, preferences, demographics, browsing, purchases and customer lifecycle.
Other personalisation principles to consider include using varied styles of content for different customers, such as different styles of photographs or written copy about the same products or services.
More advanced tactics include display and PPC remarketing campaigns. This could include Pixel-based activity, involving specific adverts displayed to each website visitor, or List-based, targeting existing contacts using customer information. There are strengths and weaknesses to both remarketing techniques. We can help you discover what might work for you.
Marketing personalisation tactics should feel invisible to the customer. Your customer should never feel they are being followed or bombarded as they explore your website or other communications.
Their experience should be easy, seamless, relevant and appropriate – reflecting the knowledge, courtesy and intelligence you’d provide in a face-to-face customer interaction.
Want to discuss the options?
Want to consider personalisation for your marketing communications? Get in touchwith us for an initial chat over the phone or on Zoom, if that suits you better.
Already playing around with personalisation but need advice and support in taking it to a higher level? We can help with this and then some. We do everything from marketing strategy to website user journey and experience analysis and digital media services.
Get in touch to take the next step in marketing personalisation.
References
1 Econsultancy Conversion Rate Optimisation Report, 2017
2 Notonthehighstreet.com boosts average order value by a third through personalised recommendations, Internet Retailing 2013
