Marketing leaders share their top tips and personalization best practices brands can use to create personal connections with customers. Have a personalization tip to share? Drop us a line on Linkedin or Twitter!
In the modern marketplace, one that is fundamentally unpredictable and digital-first, delivering personalization at scale in marketing is no longer a nice-to-have, but something customers have come to expect from brands.
The reality is that consumers simply will not put up with static digital experiences anymore. Forty-nine percent of consumers say they will likely become repeat buyers after a personalized shopping experience, but 62 percent of consumers will lose their loyalty if they deliver an un-personalized experience.
Brands need to get up to speed on delivering personalization at scale, as 67 percent of consumers say they want to be able to interact with a retail brand on more than one channel. However, only 35 percent of companies feel they are successfully achieving omnichannel marketing personalization today.
CDP.com talked to some leading personalization luminaries and trend-setters to uncover some personalization best practices when delivering a modern, data-driven marketing strategy. Here is what we found.
Top 9 Personalization Best Practices
1. Create a Value Exchange
“Personalization creates value for customers and drives strong business performance. There is a value exchange between customers and businesses, whereby customers provide first-party data, which is then used to bring more personalized responses from the business thus driving profitable organic growth.” – Marianne Hewitt, Integrated Growth Solutions.
2. Build a Mutually Beneficial Relationship
“To me, offering quality personalization is about both buyers and sellers engaging in a mutually beneficial relationship. It is no longer about brands pushing messaging on a customer, but how a brand effectively offers value to customers by tailoring communications based on real-world user needs.” – Brian Carlson, RoC Consulting.
3. Communicate Effectively
“We are focused on expectation setting with digitally-centric customers. You want to make sure you have the ‘right’ information in your database, and you want to be certain that you are communicating effectively with your customers, all while acknowledging their help in growing your business.” – Jeanne Hopkins, OneScreen.AI.
4. Use Personalization to Drive Loyalty
“Sephora’s Beauty Insider is an example of serving up personalization at scale. Sephora’s loyalty program for its highest-level customers provides early access to new products, invitations to exclusive events. All company channels are updated with unified profile information. The use of triggered content has become commonplace.” –Marianne Hewitt, Integrated Growth Solutions.
5. Collect and Integrate Buyer Data
“We require all sales team members and customer success team members to rate each interaction with a customer or prospect. We then review that information weekly in a ‘Smarketing’ (sales & marketing) meeting.” – Jeanne Hopkins, OneScreen.AI.
6. Improve Key Metrics
“We have seen improvement in the following metrics due to personalization technology and tactics: Reduction of marketing costs; improvement in clickthrough rates; conversion rates; retention; number of service calls, and of course, CLTV.” Marianne Hewitt, Integrated Growth Solutions.
7. Set KPIs that Matter
“CLTV is considered a core KPI at our company. I cannot imagine any organization not considering it. However, in calculating this number you need more ramp to even out the lumpiness in data from the beginning. Growth brings challenges, and one of the more difficult challenges is having enough information to make better decisions.” – Jeanne Hopkins, OneScreen.AI.
8. Become a Data-Driven Marketer
“A data-driven marketer is integrating data in real time from all channels, blending in-store and online (including email), and plotting a journey that is personalized in multiple dimensions – including engagement in the channel of preference. Some enterprise-grade CDPs will engage in an omni-channel capacity.” – Marianne Hewitt, Integrated Growth Solutions.
9. Get the Right Tech
“You are not going to be able to do serious personalization at scale in a global, enterprise environment without the right technology solutions for your applications and industry. You have to be able to manage customer data centrally, with a unified profile, so it can be used to affect the personalized experience effectively across all channels. Being able to do true omnichannel marketing personalization at scale means deploying a centralized data management platform, like a CDP, that will combine and deliver all that unified customer data to the applications that need it.” – Brian Carlson, RoC Consulting.
Omnichannel Personalization is Table Stakes
Brands can no longer get away with limited personalization that does not offer real value to a customer.
Bringing quality customer data together and using it to improve the omnichannel customer experience is a step marketers will need to take. For many companies, deploying a customer data platform may be the right way to wrangle in, and make sense of, all that data. Forty-one percent of businesses report they are now using a CDP to activate real-time data today, and 53 percent of business leaders are investing in better technology platforms to manage customer data more effectively. Finding the right technology solutions are key to achieving personalization at scale.
Learn more about what’s driving the future of personalization in marketing here.
