Personalised marketing is not new. Whether it is the simple use of your customer’s name to begin your marketing email or the introductory letter accompanying your print brochure, organisations have been looking for ways to make their customers feel unique, acknowledged and looked-after for many years now.
I recently read an interesting whitepaper entitled “Your Path to Personalisation: A Framework For Digital Marketing Advancement”, which looked at the desire by many companies to better understand effective methods for personalised marketing.
The whitepaper argues that through a recent survey ‘we found that companies are planning to invest more in understanding the customer journey and personalisation in the next 12 to 18 months.’ It is argued ‘the key to progress is a purposeful data-driven marketing approach that allows you to reveal deeper insights to better understand your customers’, and that above all it is important to create a personalisation strategy which fits your company and your customers, rather than adopt a one-size-fits-all approach to building your personalised marketing campaign.
Webtrends identifies 5 key areas for digital marketing advancement to enhance personalisation, among which are segmentation of customers and the creation of ‘high value audience segments’, and the mapping of the customer journey to ‘maximise the end-to end experience across digital touch points.’ They argue ‘the pace of advancement and the order in which you focus your investments will vary, but our goal is to share a framework so that you can set your own path to personalisation.’
Often when you think of personalised marketing, it is easy to picture small-scale campaigns fixated on the minutiae of a customer’s needs and desires. But personalised marketing can be effectively rolled out and scaled up to ensure that it becomes a feasible, measurable strategy that delivers results for your organisation.
According to a recent article by The Guardian, what industry experts have dubbed as ‘personalised marketing at scale’ is fast becoming big news for the digital marketing industry and ‘represents a new way of thinking that will permanently transform our media approach.’ It is argued that by ‘subtly tailor[ing] your executions based on demographics, interests, location or even purchase history,’ it is possible to reach millions of consumers but each with something that seems personally relevant and interesting.
More recently personalisation has reached a new level of sophistication, with filtered advertising, uniquely triggered special offers and individually tailored calls to action aiming to create a strong relationship between a brand and its consumers. This increased level of trust and the possibility for greater engagement between brand and consumer is seen to be a key driver of increased buy-in and sales translations, with more and more organisations seeking to reap the benefits of this increased personalisation.