With so many brands wooing customers and drawing their attention, it’s tough to make a mark. In a monopolistic market, there is a close competition and products/services are differentiated on the basis of distinct packaging and promotional techniques.
Where there is a close competition, marketing and branding become the prime differentiators. Since we deal with email marketing, which again is quite common amongst marketers, there is a need to be distinct and different to make your customer sit up and notice your brand.
How are you as a marketer going to do this? The key to this challenge is personalization; connect with a customer on a personal level. Marketers can tailor advertisements, promotions, and emails to a specific group based on their needs and preferences. Instead of ‘one-message-fits-all’ marketing, now marketers are trying to move towards one-on-one experiences that exceed customer expectation and sets the brand apart from the competition. This also leads to higher conversion rates.
Most marketers believe that personalization is extremely vital to deliver a great customer experience. A customer service agency, Verndale surveyed senior decision-makers from November 2017 to January 2018 and 9 in 10 of them supported this belief. 84% said that the potential of technology hasn’t been exploited to its fullest. Also, more than half of them accepted that often their organization fails to deliver the personalization which the customers crave.
The mantra to personalization is having the right content at the right time that too in the right place, for which it is imperative to have a one to one dialogue with the customer.
Here we delve into the challenges to personalization and its solutions:
1. Getting the right data and analyzing it:
Challenge: Each customer should receive the most valid, wanted and interesting content that meets the ‘now’ needs at any point in the customer lifecycle. The challenge is to collect data and analyze it so that you can map the choices of your customers thus, send offers, promotions, or another type of content at the right time to the right person.
Solution: This can be done by observing customer behavior; customers leave behind vital information at varied contact points. Like how they respond to the emails, transaction data from online shopping, at which point the consumer leaves your website or decides to buy your product/service? What products they buy and which content they click on in the email?
If in case customer visits your store what responses and comments on varied products/ services are left behind and the preferences have to be collected.
Once you collect all this complex data, your job is to decipher it to create an email campaign that is meant to be just right for each customer.
You have to observe customer behavior in the entire lifecycle as he/she engages with your brand.
2. Specific content:
Challenge: As individualization gets finer, content needs to be more specific. You need to know more about customers and analyze data efficiently and effectively.
Solution: When you apply the above solution, you keep generating new data. Customer knowledge is built up gradually and successively when it is aligned to customer needs with up to date communication. CRM and automation technologies are used since the manual handling of information isn’t practical.
Social media platforms are a great source of customer data, which need to be channelized to make your email marketing campaigns more personalized.
3. Collating the data:
Challenge: It’s tough to effectively use the data as there is a lack of resources to process the existing material. At times the required content is already available in the company but, its scattered across areas.
Solution: Cross-functional usage of the data has to be done. You need to establish processes to capture, share and merge content from varied sources across different departments/ platforms. Again, automation technology is the key to this challenge too.
4. How to personalize?
Challenge: Marketers need to understand the target audience and the customers for whom the campaign needs to be personalized? The other challenge is to identify the channels that should be used to reach the target audience.
Solution: You need to observe your customers and their responses to overcome this challenge.
5. Behavioral segmentation:
Challenge: It is tough to know what will be the basis of segmentation (parameters on which the audience will be segmented) so that the right message is sent to the right person. Traditionally, email marketers developed content like a newsletter or whitepaper and then segmented the audience who would find this content interesting. But, this didn’t get the desired results.
Solution: The responses of the visitors should determine the email content and it should not be the marketer’s choice.
Marketing automation and other Juvlon offerings make the path to personalization easy. Reach out to our team at Juvlon to know more.