You Need to Change The Way You Think About Personalization

Customer communication management is changing fast with retailers rushing to take advantage of emerging technologies to meet consumers’ ever growing personalization expectations and their desire for conversational integrity with their favored brands. Marketing automation, campaign management, and customer relationship management technologies are all tools to help you place the customer experience at the forefront of your marketing campaign planning.

Personalization is not just about beating the competition and making that ever elusive connection with your audience. It’s more than just addressing a direct mail piece to an individual recipient or sending someone a relevant special offer based on a past purchases. Done right, it’s about automatically guiding your customer on their brand journey and improving the entire and continuous brand experience at every touch point and at the right time.

Personalized campaigns give a higher return on marketing investment (ROMI) and are more successful than generic campaigns in the long-term because retailers can learn about their customer behaviors, needs, and objectives, enrich their data and adjust their strategy, as needed, for future campaigns.

These campaigns combine and enrich different customer acquisition techniques, replace repetitive manual marketing processes, deliver insights across all touch points and free up the marketer’s workflow.

Personalizing text, images and charts is just a first step towards launching a successful cross-media marketing campaign. You can now stand out even further from your competitors by adding new dimensions to your campaigns, such as an integrated personalized video experience.

Across many industries, including automotive, higher education, real estate, education, financial services, and non-profits, personalized video is already being integrated into print campaigns, driving higher response rates and greater click-through rates. Simply adding a personalized URL or QR code to a personalized print piece drives recipients to the personalized video, which is embedded in a unique personalized landing page for each recipient. Video is also an attractive source of content for recipients to share on social media which can spread the reach of a campaign even further.

As you learn more about your customers and prospects you can use that information effectively throughout each communication cycle to build a much more loyal customer relationship over time. Take, for example, these campaigns:

  • The Opéra De Montréal is taking advantage of cross media personalization capabilities by executing real-time cross media campaigns to capitalize on the emotions that ticket-holders experience immediately after a show as a way to solicit a repeat experience. Triggered emails are sent asking ticket-holders to rate the show with responses ranging from “excellent” to “mediocre” and to indicate whether they intend to return.

Based on their responses, ticket-holders receive limited-time, targeted offers. Guillaume Thérien, director of sales and marketing for Opéra de Montréal explains that sending emails directly after the performance underscored the importance of capitalizing on emotion, and capturing and acting on immediate customer feedback.

  • With goals of improving loyalty in its cosmetics business, educating consumers on a 1:1 basis and boosting consumer willingness to try new products, Maybelline NY looked to Strategies, a relationship-marketing agency based in Canada. Strategies developed a B2Me campaign using information about an individual’s ethnicity, hair and eye colors, eye shape, skin conditions and other qualities to drive a series of three, highly-engaging, full-color and fully personalized 20-page booklets containing cosmetics lessons, personal product recommendations, and trackable discount coupons. Sales, as measured by the coupon redemption rate, are multiple times greater than those from previous, non-personalized campaigns, and most is new business from people who previously bought.

A personalized cross-media marketing campaign can seem more intensive up front than a generic campaign but it’s a smarter investment over the long-term so that you can concentrate on higher-revenue features.

One key factor to consider is whether your solution can integrate data, rules and design into a single framework that can be managed and automated across all stages of development. Another is to ensure that all campaign brand messages are consistent with the dialogue, no matter which print or digital channel is added to the marketing mix. These features will generate higher quality leads throughout the campaign lifecycle so that your ROMI will be even greater.

By designing your campaign with personalization in mind you’re on the road to maximizing campaign response and conversion rates and minimizing the waste and redundancy caused by manual generic campaign execution. If you need additional assistance outside of your internal marketing department to get started with a personalized cross media campaign, reach out to a multichannel marketing service provider with expertise in customer communication management technologies. They will help uncover a greater understanding of your customers and ultimately shape the way you connect with them for years to come.

Now is the time to change the way you think about personalization!

 Josie Stein is the marketing and communication manager of XMPie, A Xerox Company