Communicating Directly At Scale, With Personalized Marketing
People want businesses and organizations to know them and not treat them like a number. In fact, as Marketers know, 70%+ of people want a personalized experience. Yet companies repeatedly fire the same newsletter, promotion, or sales message to their entire base.
Through the MarTech discoveries we’ve conducted with 30+ clients in Manufacturing, Financial Services, e-commerce, and more, we’ve found similar challenges across the board, holding their teams back from delivering those personalized experiences.
Spoiler alert: it’s not the tools they have.
The processes and people (mainly the lack of access to ongoing training and juggling multiple priorities on any given day) impede the business’ ability to grow revenue and market share.
So, what are marketing teams to do? Let’s first understand the challenges.
What Is Personalization?
First, let’s make sure we’re all on the same page.
In marketing speak, personalization is tailoring messages to a specific audience so the recipient feels as though it was specifically for them. (And no, not simply addressing them by their first name… that’s a given!)
Communications can be personalized according to a wide range of information, such as individual data that you collect in a lead form or a transaction, external data like the weather where an individual is located, or even sales information (think ZoomInfo). There is quite a range of how personal you can get, and this goes beyond segmenting your base.
To dive into this further, let’s use the classic example of a newsletter since that’s often where businesses will start.
B2C Example
Say you’re an eCommerce business, selling clothing. You may have a mix of people who have never purchased from you, people who regularly purchase, and people who have only purchased once in your email list. On top of that, you likely have multiple product SKUs and customers who have a mixed purchase history across all of them. The permutations become endless.
Suppose you have a person who has never purchased but has shown interest in dresses from web clicks or email content engagement, and another regular customer who has purchased men’s pants. Should you send both people the same content in your newsletter?
The short answer? No.
B2B Example
Let’s say you’re a manufacturer, working with multiple approvers, and with +6+ months in your lead cycle. For instance, one of your accounts may have people such as a Vice President, a Director, or an Engineer who entered into the CRM through different sources: trade shows, sponsored events, outreach, Business Development Representatives, etc. Ideally, the content you send to a VP should differ from the content you send to someone at the working level to try to help sales close those deals faster.
Essentially, personalization is a marketer’s ability to tailor messages (content, offers, wording, images, calls to action, time of send) according to the stage of the lifecycle that someone is at, what data is currently available, and what the next preferred action is.
The typical challenges businesses face
Now that we’ve defined personalization, let’s see why it can be so hard to achieve.
When we engage with clients, we often find that the main challenges they face are similar across industries and stages of business. What our team typically sees:
- They have a team member working off of the side of their desk to try to build out personalized campaigns while also taking care of alongside content creation, branding, and other sales/operational demands
- Their data isn’t trustworthy
- There’s no alignment internally on what the benefit of personalized campaigns could be
- Sales team members want to understand how this can help them before trusting anyone with their contacts and processes.
- Marketing can’t access data or has trouble receiving the data they need
- Teams aren’t sure where to begin
- Ongoing training isn’t readily available, so teams only utilize 10-20% of their tool’s capabilities.
- Processes aren’t set up to support ongoing sales & marketing initiatives
Personalization can feel daunting, especially when various skills are needed to help bring it to life: strategic, analytic, technical, creative design, copywriting, and execution. It’s difficult for one person to master all these skill sets, especially when they’re not in the tool daily.
Here’s how to move forward, despite these challenges
Step 1: Understanding your customer or buyer journey.
This is where it all begins. In all of our engagements, we ask if there’s a journey map to start with.
A journey map identifies how your target market makes buying decisions before interacting with you, during the sales/purchase process, and after.
It’s essentially a roadmap of every experience they have with your brand.
Think of interactions with your advertising billboards, joining a webinar, seeing your digital ad, visiting your booth at trade shows, or perusing your website.
We often find that the goldmine of information needed to make a journey map can be discovered within sales and operations. In most cases, it’s not documented, but rather known by multiple individuals. Your sales team is a great place to begin sourcing that information but they will likely need other teams to add in the information before a prospect is actively engaged with sales—i.e., when that buyer is in the research stage, before any interactions with team members.
Operations teams are another great resource, as they often field customer questions and hear customer pain points through conversations.
When marketing combines these collective insights and layers in primary or secondary research, trend reporting, competitive insights, and prospect behaviour, the real magic happens.
Questions the journey map needs to explore:
- What are the pain points these clients have?
- Throughout various stages of awareness, consideration, purchase, advocacy/loyalty, what is the buyer experiencing?
- How do they conduct research?
- What are some of the clues that indicate someone is ready to purchase?
- What are some of the typical objections?
- How do these buyers make their purchasing decisions?
- What do approval processes look like?
- What do they compare against competitors?
- How do they make the purchase?
- What happens after the purchase is made?
- What does renewal or second purchase look like?
- What outreach is there?
- Why and how does the client get in contact with the business?
- What makes a client become an advocate?
Step 2: Understanding the data that’s available today.
Data is the backbone of personalized content.
Once your team is clear on the stages, from prospect through to advocate, you’ll need to understand what information you have from these clients along their journey, and what’s missing.
Start looking at where in the journey you’re collecting customer information:
- Business cards or registration lists from trade shows
- Webinars, downloads from the website
- In-store quotes or purchase orders
- Lead form submissions.
And what about behavioural data?
- Email opens
- SMS clicks
- Repeat visits to a web page or landing page
- Content interacted with on a digital platform
- Surveys or preferences on what type of information they’re interested in
- Historical purchases, POS data
- Consent
And, of course, demographic or psychographic data:
- Age
- Job title
- Timeline to purchase
- Company size
- Survey data
In addition, look for any external data you may have collected. This includes research, purchased data such as postal code demographics, and more.
All of these items can be used to craft personalized messages.
Next, you need to determine if the data is trustworthy and available, and determine any other critical data you need and how to gather it.
For instance, a language flag. One of our clients had a language flag that would default to English, and customer service representatives weren’t filling it out as they were entering the language preferences elsewhere. If data is available, it must be validated before you use it to communicate with any clients.
Once there’s alignment on what trustworthy data is available, it’s time to match it up to the goals of your campaign and outline what you’d like your campaign to do. Below are two simple examples.
B2C Example
As an apparel retailer, you may be looking at how to send a newsletter to your base with your new drop. You’re only featuring your new arrivals and sending a 20% off coupon to those who have signed up but haven’t purchased in the last month. Those who have purchased clothing in the past 30 days receive the latest drop without a coupon. And all of this is done with one email. The minimum data you need for this campaign is:
- Consent flags
- First name
- Language
- Category of purchase
- Last purchase date (null for those who have never purchased)
B2B Example
As part of your manufacturing newsletter, you’re inserting an exclusive invitation to accounts that sales haven’t spoken to in the last 30 days, as well as additional content, including new product information for their vertical. Those you’ve spoken with recently receive the same newsletter, but only with the content about new product information for their vertical. The type of data fields you need for this campaign are:
- Consent flags
- Account
- Account last activity date (email, phone call, meeting, etc)
- Account last purchase date
- Record associated to the account: First name
- Account iIndustry/vertical
- Account owner
- New product cCategory
- Account purchased category
Step 3. Triggering communications when it’s relevant to the customer.
The next step is determining when and how we’re sending communications out. The highest engagement rates are typically seen after the customer has taken some sort of action. As examples, typical triggered communications you see are:
- Abandoned shopping carts: happens maybe hours/a day after someone left without purchasing
- Being retargeted with ads after visiting a website and not making a purchase
- A popup inviting you to contact sales because you’ve spent 45 seconds on a single page
- Post-purchase email for someone after they made their first purchase
- An email reminder the day before a webinar and post-webinar
If you’re using tools such as Klaviyo, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Pardot/Customer Engagement, Mailchimp, and so on and so forth, you’ll have options as to how and when you’re sending out the communications (website pop-up, advertising, email, SMS, landing page, etc).
Some platforms may allow you to send the communication at a specific time. Some allow you to send it in 15 minute increments. Some even allow you to send it over several days, and have AI determine when is the right time to send it to each individual. In addition to these typical choices, you can build your campaign into a flow or journey, with wait times (say, wait for one day from action ABC or wait until a certain date), or fire once somebody clicks the email, etc. Many of these activities can be captured and used as triggers for when you feel it’s best to get in front of that customer.
Step 4. Building dynamic content.
Now that you understand what data you’re using, when, and how it will be sent, you’ll want to look at building your content. This is where we get into the technical and production details.
Typically, when we design a communication piece like an email, we think about it in blocks. A block can consist of an image, copy, button, link, etc., but it has a clear defining point of where the block starts and where it ends. In an email for instance, these sections allow us to create ‘dynamic’ blocks and with some coding, using techniques such as AMP script, dynamic features in tools, or even AI to determine which block to show.
In non-technical terms, the developers help us code each block to look up the data, instructing the email to show what’s important. ‘IF’ statements for Excel are similar. If the data shows XYZ, then show content block XYZ. If the data shows ABC, then show content block ABC. It can also be configured to either show or hide the block. For instance, IF the data has nothing, do not show this block. If the data has a value, then show the block.
As great as it sounds, starting small is best. Don’t overcomplicate each email until you get the hang of it. When doing this type of work, you need to think through different scenarios and test the dynamic blocks (typically using a preview tool in your platform) to see how live records would appear if the email was sent.
Step 5. Test and learn.
With your journey, data, triggers, and content in hand, you’re almost ready to hit deploy.
Before you do, be sure to use your platform’s preview/test and flow/segmentation validation tools. Test using test lists from your own team. And most importantly, use a seed list at least 30 minutes before anything goes live.
A seed list is a list of people who receive the communication as if they were clients. This allows you to see if there are any errors with fresh eyes. These people can call out typos, problems with the information they received, etc., before it goes out to your audience. It’s a great way to catch any issues.
From there, it’s all about watching the results and optimizing your campaigns. As time goes by, check your data and see if there are any ways to evolve what you’ve built to make sure the content stays relevant.
If this all sounds familiar and you could use some expert help, this is where Sensible Marketer comes in. Our team can see this through from end to end, with a Martech Discovery to optimize your SaaS investment or even Marketing & Campaign Strategy to help you get going from beginning to end.
We’ve consulted with multiple businesses to help them get their first campaigns up and running, as well as coordinated efforts across teams. We can fill in where there are gaps on your team and help you build the test cases to back the importance of personalized communications. Get in touch today.