Data & Customer Relationships – Essential Ingredients of Personalized Marketing?

Personalized Marketing is increasingly the hot topic in marketing meetings, with the executive chasing customer retention and customer lifetime value (LTV). Landing page headlines changing as ads are clicked, restyling email newsletters for specific sub-groups of subscribers – cutting-edge marketers laud their results but why the hype? Conversions, it appears – plain and simple. Personalized Marketing Works Spotify’s “Discover Weekly” is classic personalized marketing. Simple and effective, it’s a song playlist using the list of songs you’ve listened to before to suggest others. Songs you’ve skipped are dismissed, not appearing again – generally, although the algorithm is continually tweaked. As basic as that might appear, “Discover Weekly” ’s user base has grown to over 200 million, downloading 5 billion tracks – and that’s considering that Spotify’s total user base at “Discover Weekly” ‘s launch just four years ago was just 75 million. You want another example? Amazon uses a recommendation algorithm, continuously updated to tailor to customer experience, aimed at not only suiting the individual but also the various parts of their personality. It works: when they instituted the algorithm back in 2003, profits rose dramatically – up 29% on the same quarter the previous year – and they’re still using it today! So, What Makes Consumers Respond So Well to Personalized Marketing? If we want to be close to someone and show care, one way is remembering stuff about them and using it positively – their birthday, favourite food, favourite music, first meeting… Just knowing stuff isn’t enough: it needs action – buying a present, organising a party, rearranging our schedule etc.. That builds relationships. Spotify’s app works is successful because it remembers the music you’ve chosen before, knows appropriate music to complement it and offers it to you. Amazon’s tactics work because it collects a vast amount of data about your past usage of their services and correlates it with emotions to suggest further items suiting your mood again judged by correlating your current selections against reported moods.

Build The Right Relationships and Marketing Personalization Will Be Easier Marketing and sales is moving into a Relationship era, which emphasises those relationships it’s always used. Business relationships require effort (like any relationships): that’s what’s important. Businesses tend to try to reap the rewards of a relationship (i.e. information) without taking the time and effort to build it properly first. Marketing articles often advocate “authenticity” but exactly what they mean by “authenticity” tends to be hushed up (if indeed their authors know!). We acknowledge campaigns are important; however, everyday we have to create or maintain relationships with everyone we work with, especially prospects and customers. Every email, phone call and social comment forms part of that relationship: all that done properly is what makes personalised marketing so successful and that starts way before any sales opportunity! How do we facilitate that relationship-building? Relationships with prospects and customers are not built easily but the marketing they permit will be genuine and maximise your chances of success. It also means your brand will become noted for its human touch. Collect the data, start using the right tools and those relationships should start falling into place!

1. Make Your Customer and Prospect Information Easily Searchable Leaving notes for yourself won’t do the job. Invest in a decent CRM. Let that to take care of all the administration while you get on with those relationships.

2. Log Every Interaction After every interaction with customers and prospects, log all useful information in your CRM – meetings, after-calls, emails, social comments etc. Little things like their love of dark chocolate or their favourite football team may well come in handy later: After-Eights at your next meeting or arranging cup final tickets as thank you’s or rewards will be well valued.

3. Keeping Everyone Informed Going over the same material as your colleague covered excellently earlier with a customer or prospect is just about the best way I know of wishing yourself six feet under! It can seriously damage your brand, make you appear disorganized or incompetent and, although it might not kill the relationship, cause dismay – even obstruct future dealings. Collaborate with the appropriate software and devices to keep everyone singing off the same songsheet.

4. Measure, Analyse and Feedback Your business needs personalized marketing but you’ll only know it’s effective by checking. Having the necessary devices to automatically, regularly, churn out the figures you need is perfect. Even better, have them integrate with your existing software and save hours transferring and checking that data.