It’s Time to Get PersonalBoost Your Business with Hyper-Personalized, Connected Marketing

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Chances are the marketing department you direct or work in has historically been considered a cost center by the company’s bean counters.

Going forward it shall drive the growth of your brand.

Saying as much is easy to proclaim but difficult to pull off. It takes a serious commitment to applying the new principles of marketing, a continuous pursuit of exploring the full potential of marketing technology, building an amazing team, and above all …Communicating meaningful messages.

You may have heard this before: Success depends on delivering the right message to the right person at the right time.

Today, we often call this “hyper-personalized marketing.”

Understand. Hyper-personalization is not basic personalization or even segmentation. You need to know more than your customer’s name or gender. You need to understand their motivations, behavior and intent. And you need to apply the right technology to put it to work. You need to serve your customers along their unique journey and connect the dots at every turn.

The game has changed. You must now recognize:

• Customers build loyal relationships with brands that make them feel special. Your communications must be relevant and empathetic at every turn.

• The customer experience has become more important than price and product.

• Your business must now connect to prospects and buyers across the connected customer journey.

• The journey belongs to the customer.

• The journey spans marketing, sales, and service. To become truly customer-centric, your company must eradicate its silos.

Connecting with each customer—individually—and expeditiously, is still more of an aspiration than a reality for most companies today.

But you need not remain among the wanna-be’s. You can deliver a seamless experience to your customers that makes them feel known and valued. Doing so requires putting a handful of new pieces in place, which probably requires knowledge and guidance you don’t yet have.

Let’s fix that.

Introduction

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BUYERS WANT TO BE UNDERSTOOD

OF CONSUMERS WANT BRANDS to understand them better and know when and when not to approach them.

Source: Accenture

OF CUSTOMERS WHO ABANDONED a business relationship last year did so because personalization was lacking.

Source: Accenture

OF U.S. INTERNET USERS said personally relevant content from brands increases their purchase intent.

Source: Emarsys

OF CONSUMERS GET FRUSTRATED when content, offers, ads, or promotions on a website appear to have nothing to do with their interests. Source: Janrain

OF CONSUMERS ARE GENERALLY COMFORTABLE with retailers, new sites, streaming services and service providers collecting personal data if they are transparent about how they use it.

Source: Accenture

“Customers expect brands to know what they’re interested in, what they need now, and even what they might need in the future.”

- Wilson Raj, SAS

Hyper-personalization by the numbers: Buyers and marketers are all in

4 Powerful Benefits of Personalized Marketing1. Improve Customer Experience 3. Drive Revenue 2. Increase Brand Loyalty 4. Create Consistency Across Channels

Source: Emarsys

81%

33% 78%74%

70%

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MARKETERS BELIEVE IN PERSONALIZATION

OF MARKETING PROFESSIONALS across multiple industries believe personalization is important, very important, or extremely important for meeting their existing marketing objectives.

Source: CMO.com, from Adobe

WHERE TO HIGH PERFORMERS PUT DATA TO WORK

OF MARKETERS STRUGGLE TO PERSONALIZE content in real time, yet 77% believe real-time personalization is crucial.

Source: Adobe

94% 60%

% of high performing companies who said yes to “Does your organization use data in the channel to target customers?”

Source: Lexer Data Culture Study, June 2018

Email

Paid Social Ads

Website

Programatic Ads

App

Television

0% 25% 50% 75% 100%

IT PAYS TO PERSONALIZE

OF COMPANIES ALREADY performing personalized marketing campaigns are seeing an uplift in ROI.

Source: eConsultancy

PERSONALIZATION CAN DELIVER

the ROI on marketing spend and can lift sales by 10% or more.

Source: McKinsey

85% 5 TO 8X

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Put Your Trust in Hyper-Relevance from the team at AccentureStrategy looks at how a brand can—and did—use personal data to deliver exactly what a customer needed, exactly when it was needed.

It says that by doing so the company serves their best interests and engenders a new level of trust that can become its hallmark going forward.

Imagine if you could say the same.

Every company has an opportunity to distinguish itself by delivering a more personal touch. So it’s time to do what’s required to welcome your customers to the world of hyper-relevance.

You do so with real-time, hype-personalized marketing—and a new form of customer experience. No, it’s not nearly as easy as flicking on the “hyper” switch. You have to want it.

A brand of hyper-relevance that can set you apart is always on. It’s dynamic.

Rather than focusing solely on a customer’s purchasing preferences or fixed attributes (address, gender, etc.), companies that hyper-personalize their marketing and customer experiences focus on understanding customers’ needs in a given circumstance and context in which they make their purchase decisions.

To simplify, your brand recognizes the connected customer journey and responds in real-time to the customer’s changing circumstances. Of course, you don’t do this with a slew of live sales pros and support agents. As powerful as that may sound, it’s entirely unreasonable.

Software makes it happen. New technologies and their integration make it possible to achieve new levels of insight from multiple customer touch points and respond.

We’ll broach the subject soon, but let’s first look at what it means to “get personal” and where it’s done.

What does it mean to get so personal?

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Marketing automation leader Marketo cites research claiming highly personalized mobile and web experiences can lead to a 30% increase in conversion rates and up to a 270% increase in content consumption. Marketo simplifies the approach into 3 big W’s.

Who—Who will you personalize for?

What—What will you personalize?

Where—Where will you present personalized content?

Broadly speaking, let’s look at potential use cases across the marketing spectrum.

B2CHyper-personalization in consumer marketing can be applied based on:

Location—Where is your customer and how can your product be more relevant based on the answer?

Demographics—What information about your buyer’s age, gender, and more can inform your messages and offers?

Behavior—How has your prospect or customer reacted to various offers or content?

History—What have you learned about the customer that would help you nurture new or ongoing sales?

B2BHyper-personalization in business-to-business marketing can be applied based on:

Account-Based Marketing (ABM)—How can you target and personalize for specific companies or existing customers?

Persona-based—How might you target specific buyer personas by title, job functions, needs and pain points?

Location—Can you target businesses based on location?

Behavior—The holy grail of hyper-personalization targets buyers based on behavior and data drawn from analytics across their journey.

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The road to hyper-personalization is marked by technology challenges.

Traveling down the road requires leveraging the necessary technologies to develop an efficient hyper-personalization framework that seamlessly connects systems and processes. A tightly integrated martech stack must inform decisions and:

• Enhance collaboration between marketing and all departments integral to the customer experience to ensure fast and satisfying fulfillment

• Mine huge data volumes to create effective campaign strategies

The growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) heightens the challenge. Hyper-connected customers not only connect via computers, smartphones and tablets but we can now add to the mix wearable devices, car navigation, entertainment systems, and home appliances.

For many brands, offline systems must factor in as well. Consider, for example, the important data generated at the point of sale.

Essentially, every action at every touchpoint in the connected customer journey is a source of data.

Therefore, three questions become crucial:

• Is the data collected?

• Is the data integrated?

• Does the data inform action across the marketing, service, and customer experience your brand delivers?

These are simple YES/NO questions, but confidently checking three YES boxes is far from easy.

The continued maturation of AI and machine learning are helping to address the challenge with technology. Platforms including CRM and marketing automation enter the equation as well. Above all, a new breed of software, the customer data platform (CDP) is emerging as the connective tissue that delivers the ability for marketers to tap into a system that reveals needs-based data regarding the individual buyer.

CDP opens the door for marketers to employ hyper-personalization. We can use omni-channel data in real-time to tailor digital experiences to customer journeys.

Technology is the engine of personalization

yes

yes

yes

no

no

no

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Overwhelmed? Don’t be. The first step is tapping into the know-how of marketing technology experts who will:

• Assist in defining how your existing martech stack addresses your business goals. The process involves auditing the technology platforms you have in place and discerning the capabilities they do or don’t deliver.

• Present effective integration strategies, processes, and applications.

• Extend the exercise beyond technology to examine where expertise plays a role in ongoing execution, at scale.

The bottom line:

You don’t want to simply “tool-up” yet again; it’s time to closely examine your business goals, identify precisely where hyper-personalization will help achieve them and assemble an efficient set of marketing technology that will serve your strategy effectively.

Integration between technologies remains a big challenge. There remain too many competing marketing technologies and too few people who know how to make them work together effectively.

Without a unified repository of data, it is difficult to integrate disparate customer data sets, integrate cross-channel media planning and ultimately understand ROI as a whole and on a per-channel basis.

CMOs should consider having a technologist or systems integrator on staff (or via an external vendor) to manage the marketing technology that the company employs. A technology implementation of this sort has multiple moving parts and requires a commitment of time, resources and an investment in high-quality data to be a success.

- Excerpt from The Nielsen CMO Report 2018

Cut by Eric Solomon

A smart starting point

Keep in mind:

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There’s a major ground rule in the age of hyper-personalization:

Your customer must be the epicenter of your business.

Let’s hone in on a big problem:

Disparate customer data is trapped in separate systems.

And so we arrive at a new challenge:

Great marketing demands an actionable single customer view seamlessly weaved into marketing and service workflows.

Enter customer journey analytics.

Customer journey analytics, defined by Gartner is:

The process of tracking and analyzing the way customers use combinations of channels to interact with an organization.

Forrester’s take:

Customer journey analytics is an analytics practice that combines quantitative and qualitative data to analyze customer behaviors and motivations across touchpoints and over time to optimize customer interactions and predict future behavior.

Customer journey analytics overcomes the gaps between analytics and action

Customer journey analytics allow you understand what customers are thinking, feeling, and doing across touchpoints. If the goal is to identify points where you can influence and enhance the journey, journey analytics are indispensable.

And finally, the big idea:

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Let’s examine how they differ.

Marketing automation platforms usually automate engagement for a single channel.

Customer journey analytics platforms overcome this challenge. An effective journey analytics tool aggregates and presents actionable data you use to engage with customers via the right channel when it matters most.

Again, processing large amounts of information and analyzing the data to convert to actionable insights isn’t strictly the domain of software. You’ll want the know-how that can only come from experts that know precisely what to measure and how to apply the data to improve marketing results and enhance the customer experience.

Based on a small sample of subjective, interpretive observations.

Relies on an imaginary journey that may fail to reflect the variety of paths customers actually take.

Is produced manually.

Removes subjectivity by basing discoveries on hard data extracted from an unlimited number of interactions captured over time across a myriad of sources.

Reveals the numerous paths customers actually take as they engage with your brand across channels and over time.

Makes your analytics live dashboards to provide an array of KPIs which can be monitored continuously.

Provides a static picture.

Is powered by sophisticated machine learning algorithms. Gives you the ability to predict customer behavior in real-time and decide on the most appropriate method of engagement.

Enables marketers to identify opportunities for real-time engagement based on a deep analysis of customer behavior. Connect the dots between customer interactions and business outcomes in seconds.

Relies on a static journey map based on a stand-alone, rules-based systems to code the ways you wish to engage with customers.

Customer journey analytics and customer journey mapping are not the same thing.

CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAPPING CUSTOMER JOURNEY ANALYTICS

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Let’s say you’ve made major strides and you’re tapping into a marketing stack that enables you to execute real-time personalization across the customer experience like a 21st century titan of communications.

You can personalize across channels such as:

• Email

• Paid search

• Paid social

• Your website and landing pages

• Mobile

• Offline

• And more

You can personalize across content types too, with:

• Blog posts

• Ebooks and white papers

• Infographics

• Images

• Video

• Case studies

• Offers

• Calls-to-action

• And more

But wait. All is not yet good because delivering hyper-personalized messages only works when it’s persuasive. When it compels action.

You need to be able to summon “persuasive content” up and down the funnel, across every touchpoint, in the precise moment it’s most relevant.

You need to understand and apply brain science to create consistently persuasive content.

Your content needs to be personalized and persuasive

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Let’s look at the fundamentals of persuasion.

Awaken the old brainThere’s a great big part of the brain, the neocortex, that’s labeled the “new brain.” It’s analytical. A whitepaper may turn it on, but decisions don’t happen here.

Decision-making takes place in a smaller, different part of the brain. Brainy folks call it the limbic system; marketers call it the “old brain.” This component of the brain is dominated by a survival instinct. It fires neurons that do decide to buy—or not.

To generate demand, you need to awaken the old brain. You need to sound an alarm that says, “Status quo is no longer safe.”

Turn on the beta switchHere are some realities of what’s going on in your customer’s brain:

Reticular Activator (RA)—This part of your brain is forever on the lookout for things that are either familiar and/or problematic.

Alpha Mode—A hypnotic state of the brain habitually performs tasks without any conscious thought.

Beta Mode—This is the brain’s active state of engagement. The person consciously notices content as it’s on the lookout new ideas and solutions.

Brain science, in brief

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Interrupt, engage, educate and offerPersuasive content turns on the beta mode. Here’s a look at a four-step process that explains how it’s done:

1) Interrupt—People listen for the “What’s in it for me?” message. Attention is earned when the brain bites at something it considers valuable. Your headline will often be what does or doesn’t awake a receptive beta pattern.

2) Engage—You achieve engagement when the prospect detects helpful information will follow.

3) Educate—Most marketers play the “sales” card as soon as a prospect is engaged (or even before). Persuasive marketers tend not to. They favor the idea of delivering specific information (a.k.a. content marketing) focused on helping make prospects more informed and better buyers.

4) Offer—Ultimately, the marketer needs to provide a reason to act now—even if the action isn’t about purchasing.

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Starbucks

Spotify

Starbucks engages customers with its mobile app My Starbucks Rewards™ Program, which leverages purchase history, location data, and more. According to GlobalWebIndex, the introduction of the rewards system saw Starbucks’ revenue soaring to $2.56 billion, while the mobile app has generated around 6 million sales per month (around 22% of all U.S. sales).

Spotify has mastered the fine art of content recommendations. Users are sent personalized playlists based on listening history and concert notices about bands they’ve engaged with.

Profiles of hyper-personalized marketing

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Netflix

Naked Wines

Netflix combines behavioral attributes with predictive learning to present subscribers content recommendations. More than 75 percent of its website activity is driven by their personalization engine.

Naked Wines has adopted personalized marketing strategies similar to Amazon. The online seller allows you to buy wines and rate them, and delivers personalized recommendations based on your taste and palate.

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easyJet

Evergage

easyJet celebrated its 20th anniversary with emails that made personal travel recommendations to their subscribers. It created a model that profiled all the destinations the customer had been to, and made additional relevant suggestions. Open rates sky-rocketed, and they increased click-through rates by double digits. Nearly 8% of easyJet customers who received the personalized emails made bookings within the next 30 days.

Rather than generically promote content across its website, Evergage uses one-to-one content recommendations to show site visitors specific content assets based on who the visitor is, what they’ve shown affinities for, and what they’ve already downloaded.

Marketers are struggling with implementing personalized programs at scale.

Three Deep can guide you through hurdles that even the most sophisticated marketers face when bringing real-time, dynamic personalized interactions to market.

We partner with you to perfect your approach to marketing technology and creative execution by providing a comprehensive approach to data-driven performance marketing, with services that include:

Search engine optimization

Paid media strategy and execution

Marketing automation and email

Digital development and design

Persuasive content

Analytics

Connected customer journey specialties include:

• Personalization at scale

• Journey analytics

• Implementing, integrating and managing marketing technology platforms

Let’s start smart

The best way to start down the path of hyper-personalized marketing is to get clear about where you are today with your technology, processes, and capabilities. It’s a journey, but it’s a worthwhile one. Let’s talk about it.

Learn more at threedeepmarketing.com

Your path to profits with hyper-personalization

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