What’s in a name, Shakespeare had once questioned. But ask any marketers and they will answer – ‘everything’! As consumers are flooded with marketing content, top advertising agencies and digital marketing organisations are addressing users by their first names in any promotional content.
Not just that, many brands and businesses are integrating other marketing mediums such as email, social media, and blogs to churn out personalised or specific content for consumers. If one had to define personalised marketing it would be defines as collecting data related to consumers and then using that data to design marketing experiences to effectively engage customers. For decades, personalisation has been debated within the field of marketing and only recently has its full potential been realised by marketers.
Today, many marketers argue that in an era of hyper digital, hyper connected individuals – personalised experiences are vital to not just grab attention but also sustain it. While personalised experience is important, which stage and medium it should be implemented becomes a question. So marketers suggest that personalisation should go beyond using first names in emails and actually involve personalisation in marketing, sales and customer service.
There are several reasons why personalisation has become important. Some are:
- Target Audiences – Personalisation techniques in marketing allows you to target specific audiences. The use of collected data means one can make effective campaigns to target audiences according to their purchase habits and interests. For example a person whose data shows more interest in movies, the marketing communication for that person can involve more of pop-culture references.
- Better content creation – Unique content created for customers allows you stand out from the crowd and such content leaves its memory on customers. Coca Cola’s campaign which had printed names on their bottles to attract millennial jumped their sales after a decade.
- Better customer relations – Showing gratitude to your customers, sending welcome, thank-you and birthday messages and personalising landing pages can go a long way to build lasting relationships with your customers. Personalising your marketing communication can help you make more personal relationships with your audiences.
- Show the human side of brand – For a personal experience using your marketing, one should consider giving your brand or business an identity and also attempt to show your brand’s human side. Including a working reply-to address in your auto response emails so your customers can ask questions or give feedback, including names or faces of your employees in your company emails allows one to show that a company is run by humans and not robots. Doing things means brands offer a friendly experience to all customers.
- Improved recommendations – The more data one collects about a customer’s buying habits, more perfect recommendations are possible by brands or businesses to offer relevant products or services. For example, Amazon and other retailers give better recommendations based on customer behaviour and sometimes even send emails with suggested product catalogues.
- Boost and conversions – Another advantage of personalised marketing is not that it improves relationships with customers but it also helps boost sales. A simple suggestion can mean better results for your customers and perhaps more sales.
A caveat to conclude the topic of personalisation is that while it may work really well online (through a login account), within an application or at retail but in for email, mobile sms, social media and some other forms of digital marketing, it can act as a detractor if not done correctly. Facebook’s predictive ads (which are based on past shopping preferences) have caused alarms among several users for being creepy or inaccurate.
