Today's consumers are more tech savvy than ever before. They know how to use technology to their advantage to promote and punish a brand, but they also understand how marketers can use it to give them a better deal. Which is why consumers don't just appreciate communications that are personalised to them, they expect them. And it seems that marketers are catching up with the task.
In fact, the recent report 2017 Email Industry Census has revealed personalisation is the key focus this year chosen by 30% of in-house respondents, bumping automation from the top spot it occupied in 2016.
With many marketing basics on the list of possible choices (such as data quality and segmentation), the fact that personalisation is so far ahead the wish list goes to show its perceived effectiveness. Low cost and high segmentation capabilities have always favoured email marketing as an effective channel for bringing in revenue, but increased volumes have put more pressure on marketers to develop stand-out campaigns. This is where personalisation comes in but the industry has taken a longer time than expected to go past ‘batch and blast’ and ‘Dear Firstname’.
It’s no surprise then that when asked what they can't currently do to their satisfaction, both in-house and agency marketers (66 % and 56 %, respectively) expressed the desire to be better at using personalisation as their top choice (2017 Email Industry Census).
Kath Pay, founder & senior consultant of Holistic Email Marketing, said: “Personalisation at scale is a no-brainer. It can result in providing the consumer with relevant and valuable offers and content served up specifically for that individual based upon their past behaviours (both email and web) and transactions, as well as their lifecycle or buying funnel stage that they’re in.”
However, this is slightly inconsistent with the tactics marketers declare they used in the report: content personalisation beyond just name has actually dropped since last year (37% down to 33% for companies and a similar decrease for agencies). Could this be a sign of a lack of understanding where to focus or a future uplift in the year ahead as the focus shifts?
How far are marketers down this road?
When asked about their ability to provide personalisation, the majority of respondents place themselves in the early stages of implementation. Only 15% of in-house marketers believe they can send emails based on individual activities and preferences throughout the funnel at scale, but this number has almost doubled since last year. Despite the low numbers in this category, this is positive news for the industry as it highlights it as a key area of development for marketers.
Supporting the benefits of focusing on personalisation is the fact that almost three-quarters of companies adopting it at scale report an ‘excellent’ or ‘good’ performance from their email campaigns, compared to only 35 % for companies who say they ‘are not yet working towards this’.
What is stopping marketers from using more personalisation?
The ability to integrate email marketing systems with other channels, to gather, process and segment that information, remains the most significant hurdle to email personalisation, according to respondents of the survey.
Riaz Kanani from Radiate b2b, said: “It is no surprise that despite the rise of big data, many companies still have multiple silos of data that make delivering truly personalised email campaigns a challenge. Technology continues to make this easier, but prioritising correctly, and at the right speed, remain a challenge that needs to be overcome.”
Integrating data has been selected as the top challenge by 55% of companies and 43% of agencies. Rather worryingly, understanding where to focus is the second biggest challenge identified by agencies, showing the need for a partnership approach to technology service providers in order to guide general strategies.
Introducing more personalisation is a multi-channel strategy
So if customers expect it, and marketers find it effective, how does one go about implementing personalisation or moving past the early stages? Rather than launching head-first into an overhaul of your marketing strategy, take the time to analyse the bigger picture of how your customers interact with your brand.
You need to consider personalisation at scale throughout the customer journey not in silos. Because if your customers come to expect a high level of personalisation from one channel, but don’t receive it on a different interaction with your brand, its effectiveness could be considerably diminished.
Marketers that will succeed in reaping the benefits of personalisation are those who adopt a First-Person Marketing approach where personalisation, automation and integration are addressed in their strategy, while keeping an open mind to testing and optimisation and never settle for the status quo.
By Anca Staples, content executive at Adestra
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