Marketers know personalising their communications is a sure-fire way to improve and increase the conversion. While it’s an easy statement to make, getting it right in an omnichannel environment isn’t always quite so simple. In this blog, I will explore how, by simplifying omnichannel delivery, it’s possible to deliver high-impact personalization at scale.
Today, marketing success depends on the ability to reach the customer wherever they are, over any channel, on whatever device, and ideally, at the most appropriate time. It all starts with the data. But, as we all know from experience, leveraging customer data to drive personalised customer interactions across all touch points is no little task. In fact, according to Forrester Research, the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) and others, it’s the No.1 challenge for most marketers.
The problem isn’t limited to sorting the wheat from the chaff of customer data. Once you have insights, building them into your email, social networks, and web interactions is a challenge too. Be under no illusion though, today’s channel agnostic consumers have high expectations and they want to be treated as individuals. Not doing so returns low open rates, limited interactions and low conversions.
Jumping seamlessly between the web, mobile and in-store, today’s consumers look for interactions that are contextual, consistent – and most importantly, relevant for them. Eighty per cent of customers surveyed by Lytics complain that brands are not familiar with their needs. A quarter (26%) said the offers they receive via email, social networks and mobile are never relevant to their interests.
That’s a major missed opportunity. According to McKinsey, when it’s done well, personalization can lift revenues by 5-15%, and increase the efficiency of marketing spend by a significant 10-30%. While marketing is a creative and often nurturing discipline, it’s the returns that count.
Personalisation at scale – the BIG challenge
Personalization can be a big problem in more ways than one. Moving from the traditional mass marketing approach (still practised across the industry) to a more customer-centric approach, where personalised triggers are sent in response to individual signals, means shifting to a radically different way of working. Here’s where many organisations come unstuck.
According to the DMA, just 6.7% of organisations were fully satisfied with their ability to leverage audience identifiers and attributes in one channel for targeting and engagement across other touch points.
So, what’s hampering the ability of these companies to execute personalization at scale – and across multiple channels?
Bridging the gap between multiple siloed data sources to create a 360-degree view of the consumer – and map the customer journey – is part of the challenge. But integrating all this data – and leveraging behavioural data that’s been gleaned along the way – is key to making effective 1:1 personalization possible.
But that’s not the only issue
All too often marketers find themselves grappling with multiple disconnected systems and platforms that make it nearly impossible to execute both context and customer specific personalised marketing in a timely or efficient manner.
And that’s frustrating when you know more interactions, across more touch points, shape the degree of engagement a customer feels with your company.
So how do you cost-effectively exploit and optimise your digital marketing operations while scaling up interactivity and targeting personalization across all channels? The answer is taking advantage of the cloud to bring everything together on a single customer engagement platform.
Boost effectiveness with a single app
Today’s customer engagement platforms make it much easier to bring disparate data sources together – turning vast amounts of data into meaningful and actionable insights. Armed with this contextual data from real-time interactions and behaviours, you can now initiate personal and relevant conversations on every channel, across every device.
What’s more, you can orchestrate fully automated multi-step customer campaigns that successfully combine email, social and mobile to speed up the decision-making process.
Too good to be true?
When Probikeshop used its customer engagement platform to send more relevant and personalised emails, and deliver a more unified customer experience across all channels, the results were impressive: email open rates up over 40%, a more engaged audience, and increased returns from its online channels.
Personalization isn’t an option – it’s a requirement
Make no mistake, consumers are more likely to act, buy and recommend when marketers serve up messaging that’s tailored to their wants and needs.
A staggering 86% of the 1000 consumers surveyed by Infosys for its ‘Rethinking Retail’ report say personalization plays a role in their purchase decision – with 48% saying they purchase more when marketers leverage their interests and buying behaviour to personalise the experience. In addition, 62% say they have chosen, recommended or paid more for a brand that provides a personalised service.
In a world where going beyond basic segmentation strategies is fast becoming an imperative, the pressure is on to identify each customer’s true affinity and preferences – and to quickly achieve the deepest engagement across every channel.
Having a customer engagement platform in place makes it all a whole lot simpler!
By Omar Janabi, senior director of marketing at Mapp Digital
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