More to marketing. Welcome to Modern Marketing, a podcast on product marketing, and everything in between. I’m Susan, your host, and today we’re gonna be talking about all things personalization. One thing I love is to be able to cut through the clutter and do personalized things to cater for people. So I went out to a couple of experts in their field and got a whole pile of responses back.
I’m gonna walk you through. There should be some great learnings in here for everyone, especially how to make the most of talking to your base or potential future prospects. So let’s dive right in. The first question I asked was, what is personalization and why is it important? So personalization is really important because it does allow us to target our comms, and also we can tailor them the experience for the customer then is more relevant.
So that’s all about that connection piece. And when it’s done [00:01:00] correctly, it makes the customer feel valued. They feel special, and they also feel engaged, which is fantastic because then they’re actually working with and talking with your brand or your products. This also means they’re gonna be more satisfied and hopefully you’ll turn into more loyalty in the long run.
So definitely personalization has its place for anything, product, service, et cetera. So the next question I asked these experts was, why do you think a lot of companies haven’t invested in personalization and still focus on mass marketing? I, myself am always getting lots of mass marketing messaging without any catered product.
It’s a bit disappointing because I just skip over it. And then probably when there is something relevant, I’m not opening those emails anymore because I’ve had so many of them. They’re just. Been catered for me, so I don’t really care about those items at all. I know in the past once. I bought some presents for my friends who were having kids or had kids, and then all of a sudden I was getting too [00:02:00] much personalization trying to sell me all these baby items or kids items, which weren’t relevant.
I just happened to be a gift buyer at that stage and they didn’t get it, and I continued to get that for months and months and months until I finally unsubscribe because it was just way too much. But the reason why a lot of companies may not do personalization, , there’s too much data, or the data quality might be really bad, might be complex data as well, because you might have a couple of different systems that are collecting it.
Maybe the company doesn’t have the resources or the expertise, so they’re lacking in that area, and sometimes it’s a combination of some or all of the above. My next question was if someone is starting out for the first time to improve their customer journey, where would they start adding in the personal.
What’s a really good place to start doing it? The response was overwhelming. Email would be a good place to start creating that personalization touch. After customers first interact with [00:03:00] you, it’s a good place to actually start adding those personal touches in. Even if it’s just their name, we should have their name at the very least, because they’ve been entering in all their.
And the customers are used to getting emails with their names on it, so it’s gonna be less creepy. It’s a lot better to have that personalization than that blanket, cuz then you think it is mass. The content itself can also be personalized based on, um, customer filling in forms or their purchase habits, what they’ve dropped in the cart and abandoned.
That’s a good one. And then also products that they’re viewed. So when you can merge all of those together, you get some really key insights and you can really start personalizing those messages to those customers. It’s always, Always stressed that you should do testing. Learn strategies to see what’s actually gonna work for you to start this.
Do it with a small cohort, get some learnings, and also work with what works and what doesn’t work in your [00:04:00] customer segments. So start making sure that segmentation’s happening. You’re testing it, you’re seeing which one of these types of strategies. . I then wanted to find out if there is something I would call as too much personalization.
So that creepy factor where you’re just like, whoa, how did they know that I did get creeped out when my phone starts popping up? Things that I’ve been talking about and I haven’t searched for. Uh, yeah, that does, that does creep me a little bit on the stalking campaigns. So I asked this question of the experts.
and they agree, definitely there can be too much personalization, especially when it becomes over the top and too much, but just because you have the data doesn’t mean that you need to use it all or use it all at the same time. It’s about catering your timing and planning this out and having that strategy behind personalization and when you’re gonna contact these people.
it comes a point where it can cross the line and [00:05:00] yeah, that creepiness. And also customers feel like Big Brother is watching and potentially privacy invasion, and that’s why they might stop wanting to subscribe to you. So that’s why you have, that’s why they might also stop sharing the information too.
So you gotta be careful on that, that line that you wanna cross. There’s definitely a balance that needs to be achieved. Even though the customers expect a level of personalization, they also don’t want to have, you know too much about them at the same time. So again, that balancing act also need to be careful about how data is collect.
This is huge. Um, there’s been lots of issues with data collection all over the news from many companies, and it’s probably gonna be a continuing trend, unfortunately, with digital and cyber attacks. So make sure that when you’re collecting it and storing it and using it, you’re doing it correctly.
Customers need to feel that they can trust you with their data. So data protection and security should be prioritized whenever you’re gonna start doing anything with. So an example of [00:06:00] how personalization can really work for you is, uh, one of the people I was talking to had actually done a testing campaign.
So they added personalization to SMSs when they were doing this particular campaign, and they got an uplift of 12%. That’s pretty big. 12% response rate is really, really good. So, and remember that was a test and learned, so it going to a small cohort, so they’ve now rolled this out to the whole base, which is amazing.
Sometimes you may start small, but it’s improvement. You wanna incrementally improve as well and not have that creep factor. And that’s exactly what that campaign did. They used SMS in this particular example. I wanted to find out if there was any key mistakes that we could learn from that they’ve seen marketers or product managers do.
But when it comes to personalization, and the call out here was not having consistency, personalization experience should be consistent across all touchpoints of the business no matter where the customer is engaging. [00:07:00] So, for example, you can have a great personalization experience in. Or in your comms, but you also need to carry this through to your phone, to your web chat, to your app, all other pieces as well.
So it’s all consistent in how you’re talking to that customer Now. Personalization is amazing. It’s got so many opportunities. With all the changes in technology, it’s gonna become even more relevant for all businesses. So it’s definitely great to get a good understanding. With the possibilities coming through artificial intelligence, there’s just so much that we can do and we can offer customers when it comes to ai, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.
IA can, and it already does design and create and deliver targeted campaigns, but we’ve only just scratch the surface. Not many companies are doing this, so it’ll be amazing to see over the next few years how it comes to about and how it comes to. So look, just recapping the main learnings we’ve learned today about personalization and how I can help [00:08:00] you make sure you use the data in the right way.
Always make sure you check spam laws and all that kind of stuff in your jurisdiction. Personalization to a point. So make sure you don’t get that creepy factor. Make sure it’s relevant and also when you do your test and learns that you have benchmarks to go against, so you can see the improvements.
Consistency across all channels and personalization is extremely important and always keep an eye out for future opportunities. So how can you integrate, uh, AI and any other types of software applications that could make it even better for you? And better for your customer. Cause I will equal loyalty, more sales, feeling satisfied, and actually feeling like you’re part of this brand and experience.
Hope you’ve enjoyed today’s podcast from water marketing. If you wanna hear more about products, marketing and everything in between, make sure to follow this podcast
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