For the past decade we’ve heard the same mantra: “the right product, for the right person, at the right time”. And for a while, performing basic customer database segmentation was “good enough” to meet minimum requirements for personalization. But that’s all changed. Consumers are demanding more relevant experiences, from the type of content they read, to the offers they get, to the way they holistically experience your brand. Going forward, targeting broad, generic personas will no longer be enough.
Personalized Marketing Yields Better ROI
Some have called this a transformation “from B2C to B2Me”. The reality is that everyone likes to feel special, including your customers. They want to feel like you’re paying attention to them – to their interests, their wants and needs, and to help them create an emotional connection to your brand.
In fact, 78% of respondents to a consumer survey said that personally relevant content from brands increases their purchase intent.
Personalization is the key to exceeding customer expectations, which leads to improved ROI. And in our multi-channel world, you need to think about how this personalized experience happens across all touchpoints, not just one or two.
Want to make your customers feel special and buy more? You’ve got to get personal.
The Path to Industry-Leading Personalization
But how do you go about implementing this new level of personalization? For most companies, the most effective way to make the transformation is with a phased strategy. In our white paper, The Retailer’s Guide to Personalized Marketing, we lay out three suggested phases of implementing a personalization strategy, how and why each
phase needs to happen and include some real-world examples.
In the Guide, we suggest the following phases:
- Gather Your Data
- Activate Your Data
- Infuse Your Data with Intelligence
The first phase should be centered around data consolidation – making sure that every piece of customer data you can find is centralized, made available and shareable. This means matching, merging and deduplicating all the data from multiple platforms, such as your CRM, email, website, point of sale and more. This phase is where CDPs come in - bringing the data together to create holistic views of individual customers.
Once the data is gathered in a CDP, the second phase is data activation. Here’s where you find a way to inform your campaigns across all channels – email, digital advertising, direct mail and in-store – with real-time data.
Finally, the third phase involves putting intelligence behind your data – by using AI and machine-learning to optimize your data and create the most relevant and personalized shopping opportunities for your customers.
Over the next several years, successful marketers will have a common goal – to prioritize the collection of customer data to provide a more meaningful, personalized and ultimately profitable, experience. To learn how to phase in an effective personalization strategy, read our white paper, The Retailer’s Guide to Personalized Marketing.
