In this first article in our Catapult series on personalisation, we look at why and how you should implement omnichannel personalisation as part of your strategic efforts.
I think I speak for most marketers, when I say we are all aware of the benefits of personalisation. This begs the question as to why there are still a large number of organisations who have not fully embraced it as a strategic tactic. From my own observations, in working with a variety of in-house teams, it seems that senior stakeholders tend to focus on the negatives over the positives. By this I mean, that they understand that their customers really value personalised experiences and recommendations across channels, however they feel overwhelmed at the prospect of creating the content required and managing the data to enhance the myriad of customer journeys taking place. If this is your current position, we would like to challenge it and we want to help you with the process of taking the next steps.
CUSTOMERS VALUE THE EXPERIENCE, MORE THAN THE BRAND PROVIDING IT
We just have to take a note of the various brands we engage with on a regular basis, (Amazon.com, Uber or Airbnb to name a few) to recognise that we have replaced a number of brands we used to be loyal to. Why? Because these brands deliver a more convenient, faster and more personalised customer experience. It would be unwise for us, as marketers, to simply rely on our customers having loyalty to our brand, and we need to adjust to this reality and embrace the fact that we need to do far better at creating tailored, personalised experiences for them.
YOUR CUSTOMERS WANT YOU TO UNDERSTAND THEM BETTER
We tend to see most of our clients getting simpler personalisation right, for example personalised web content or emails. However, few are able to deliver personalised content at the right time in a customer’s journey, powered by contextual information held on their customers, to deliver a truly tailored experience across all channels they are managing. Context is the critical part and your customers want you to understand them better, they want brands to understand when they should or should not approach them. This is not a ‘nice to have’ anymore, but more of a demand from the consumer.
CONTEXT AND OMNICHANNEL, A MATCH MADE FOR MARKETERS
The brands that are getting this right, are putting their customers at the heart of their strategy and they see personalisation as a continuous customer journey, that does not end. They are combining context, with omnichannel marketing, so they can create a tailored experience through the multiple stages a customer goes through in their decision making process.
Data from Think with Google, has challenged us to rethink the traditional marketing funnel. New data reveals that people engage with brands in many unique and varied ways (an example below), even within categories and products. These days, no two consumer journeys are exactly alike which makes our understanding of context and embracing of omnichannel personalisation even more important.
This data from Google points to the fact that your customers are expecting you to engage with them on their channel and device of choice. This may include website content, mobile apps, online advertising channels, digital signage and even IoT devices. This is why it is so critical for you to embrace omnichannel personalisation.
Your goal should be to develop a consistent, continuous and personalised experience that encompasses all digital channels and touchpoints.
SO, WHAT ARE THE NEXT STEPS IN YOUR PERSONALISATION JOURNEY?
We appreciate that this journey will differ greatly for you, depending on the industry you are in, the type of organisation you work in, your budget and various other factors. We therefore understand that some of the areas below, may not be applicable to you, but we have highlighted the key ingredients we recommend you focus on in order to enhance your customer relationships with omnichannel personalisation.
Over the next 12 weeks, we will be releasing articles on each of the areas below, so please join us each week as we dig into each of these topics in more detail.
- Objectives, team & software – Setting realistic objectives linked to the long-term goals of your organisation, what are the key ingredients to build a team and choosing the right software to facilitate your personalisation plans.
- Centralise & leverage all data sources – Building the foundations to better leverage all your data sources so you can create and deliver personalised experiences to consumers.
- Audience segmentation and targeting – Creating audience segments, Personas and segmenting your audience by context, behaviour and demographics to enable you to deliver personalised content.
- Mapping customer journeys – Delivering tailored content to your audience segments at the right time, in the right place makes all the difference. How can you map customer journeys to deliver better personalised experiences?
- Planning experiences; your workflows & creative content – You won’t get personalisation right the first time. What workflows can you create to facilitate this? Content is the fuel that powers personalisation. How to best empower marketers to launch campaigns, test, learn & iterate quickly?
- Dynamic creative optimisation (DCO) – Why you should use dynamic creative to enhance personalised experiences? DCO, AI and machine learning will empower you to create personalised campaigns at scale, rapidly.
- Leveraging demographic, geo targeting & localisation – How can you use first party, behavioural and contextual data to better deliver localised dynamic creative content to the customer experience journey?
- Leveraging feed-based product campaigns – How can you use product focused dynamic creative campaigns to serve customers with personalised product recommendations and offers?
- Leveraging behavioural prospecting – How can you target consumers, with dynamic creative content, who are either researching or interested in specific products or services?
- Sequential story telling & creative content that mirrors the customer journey – How you can embrace the concept of showing ads to a specific audience, in a particular order, using a defined frequency, and structured narrative? Alternatively imagine targeting consumers with dynamic creative content at each stage of their journey with your brand.
- Mobile on the go & IoT devices – Take into consideration customers on the go, mobile devices, IoT devices such as smart speakers, digital signage or VR headsets which are all opportunities for device centric personalisation.
- How do you test if personalisation is effective? – What methods and tools can you use to work out whether your personalisation efforts are effective and meeting your goals.
JOIN US NEXT WEEK...
Please join us next week, as we look at 'Objectives, team and software - Setting realistic objectives linked to the long-term goals of your organisation, what are the key ingredients to build a team and choosing the right software to facilitate your personalisation plans'.
