Personalisation Key to Ensuring your Communications Stand Out

Today’s consumers expect and value personalised marketing. As such, brands using data-driven campaigns to tailor content to their target audience are getting results.

According to Marketingprofs, businesses that adopt personalised marketing see an average 19% increase in sales.  In addition, an Epsilon report found that 80% of consumers are more likely to do business with a company that offers a personalised experience.  Research from Adobe found that personalisation can influence which brands consumers prefer and lead to greater customer loyalty, with almost two thirds of consumers saying that they are loyal to brands that tailor experiences to their needs and preferences.

Personalisation is about delivering communications that are tailored and relevant to your target customer in order to provide a richer experience. While this is not new information for marketers and the industry has been talking about personalisation for years now; for a number of reasons, many companies are still not delivering on this.

The Difficulty of Personalising Messages

Big brands such as Amazon and Netflix have raised consumer expectations by delivering personalised experiences such as recommendations based on what they have been looking at and interacting with on the websites. This has put pressure on smaller businesses to do the same, however with less resources at their disposal, it’s not as easy for them to deliver the same level of personalisation.

Effective personalisation should be a strategic goal for the whole business. It requires clear objectives and targets that are supported by various departments within the company so that it can be incorporated as part of an overall strategy and not delivered in isolation.

The key to effective personalisation is data. So the first step to personalisation is to have a clear data strategy with the right sources in place to identify and prioritise the key areas for personalisation.  While demographic data is a common starting point, behavioural data that targets people based on their personas and the actions they take can be extremely effective.

The following are some of the ways to implement a successful personalised marketing strategy.

Gather as Much Customer Data as You Can

As mentioned above, data is key to an effective personalised marketing campaign. With the right technology in place, marketers can collect customer data at every touch point across the buying journey. By tracking what a customer is searching for or clicking on, marketers can then tailor their approach to provide relevant content to them. To collect this data, you need a program that tracks metrics such as email opens, link clicks and shopping cart data. Reach out to a content marketing agency Aucklandor help with your personalised marketing campaign.

Have the Right Technology in Place

There are a number of tools that you’ll have to ensure are in place before starting a personalised marketing strategy.  You need to have a marketing technology platform in place that can deal with the data, segmentation, and automation necessary for the campaign.  With effective technology in place, you can automate processes or analyse big data, which gives you more time and resources to dedicate to other aspects of the campaign.

Personalise Your Campaigns Across Channels

Once you have collected your data and segmented it into relevant target audiences, you can start executing your personalised campaign across channels and platforms.  Depending on how and where you advertise, most platforms offer sophisticated technology solutions that can deliver targeted messages to customers that are specifically designed to drive action. These programs can record how an individual consumer has responded to previous campaigns to deliver the most relevant to them that is likely to drive results. This personalised messaging should be across every stage of the digital customer journey.

Continuously Optimise the Personalisation Process

Just like any other marketing strategy, personalisation campaigns require continuous testing, monitoring and optimisation in order to be successful. Best practice is to run a campaign for a couple weeks, then analyse the results. Depending on your audience size and level of interaction, two weeks should be enough time to give an accurate representation of results.  If you have a smaller list however, this may take longer.  After analysing this data, you can move on to the optimisation stage of the campaign, where you evaluate elements of the personalised marketing strategy to see if they are working.  If you identify areas that could do with improvement, try changing elements of the strategy and monitor how they impact results.  If results are positive, update your campaign for maximum effectiveness going forward.

Personalised marketing comes down to creating a seamless experience for your consumers that makes them feel valued. This can create a loyal consumer-brand relationship.

Enlist the help of your digital marketing company Auckland – Digital Squad. Contact our team today for a candid chat on how to take your digital marketing to the next level. We also provide Google Adwords Management, Content Marketing Auckland, Remarketing Strategies and Facebook Marketing Auckland.