4 Steps to Implementing Marketing Personalization at Your Company
If you are at all interested in implementing marketing personalization at your company, follow this quick 4 step guide.
1. Determine whether or not you really need it right now.
How do you know when you’re ready to start personalizing your messages? First, decide what state your company may be in. Are you a growing consumer facing business that has reached a plateau in revenue and is looking for a new marketing/growth strategy? Or maybe you’re in a slow moving industry and you want to jump ahead of your competitors. Perhaps there are more pressing issues that must be solved first, such as branding or strategy.
What most consumer facing companies have realized is that customers are almost expecting some kind of personalization during their digital experience. Recent studies have shown that 71% of consumers would be more likely to purchase from a brand if a company’s emails were tailored to their customers’ likes and preferences (source).
Marketing personalization could be your answer.
2. Do your research
At this point, you’re still in the preliminary stages of determining whether or not personalization is a right fit for your company. It’s important to find out what you’re really looking for in a marketing personalization suite. Do you need a powerful e-mail, customer relationship management, and personalization tool? Or do you have an email deployment platform already and are looking to supplement your email service provider with marketing personalization?
If you’re still new to the world of personalization, we cover the basics of marketing personalization in our mass customization article. Additionally, here are some quick data stats on digital marketing to kick start your research.
3. Build a Business Case
Convince your boss you will need personalization by building a business case. Your business case must have buy-in from the CMO and the CFO. Make this happen by demonstrating the power of personalization as not only a customer experience management capability, but also a strategic investment to grow profitability by increasing revenue and decreasing costs with a strong ROI.
In building your business case, you can use metrics such as open rate, click through rate, and shopping cart basket items to portray a potential increase using personalization. Really think through how personalization can be beneficial for your organization. If you’re an apparel retailer who is constantly seeing shopping card abandonment, you may want to consider implementing card abandonment emails along with personalization such as “Based on your shopping cart items, we recommend:”
nectarOM founder and CEO Amrit Kirpalani explains how hyperpersonalizing will garner gratitude from not only your CFO but your customers as well in this Direct Marketing News article.
4. Choose a vendor
Personalization is relatively new in the digital marketing space, which means the companies that offer the technology are relatively young as well. Many companies will claim to have some degree of omni-channel personalization, but it’s very difficult to really evaluate a product without being extremely diligent in your research and taking a deep dive into each solution. It is very common for companies to offer pilots and short test periods before implementation, so take your time before signing the dotted line.
