There is no denying that personalisation is the need of the hour. If you’re planning to take your business products or services to your target market with a sales pitch in hand, you’re headed only towards one thing – doom.
As a matter of fact, almost 60% of Internet users or online consumers, expect businesses to approach them with value propositions that are ‘relevant’ to them. For instance, they no longer want to read the list of features your product offers. They prefer a good read on how those features will add more value to them in their day-to-day lives and why they should choose it over the other options available.
But according to Social Times, almost 36% of marketers consider personalisation across the various digital channels a big challenge for their business. They also expect it to continue being one of their top challenges for another year or so.
The top three personalisation challenges are lack of internal resources, lack of technology that enables personalisation, and inaccurate or redundant market data.
While the challenges continue to pertain, marketers seem to have found their way out to personalise their efforts for business growth – or let’s just say, that’s what they think.
A lot of marketers today are focussing on personalising the experience a business website has to offer. Right from the kind of content that the visitor has previously shown interest in, to tailored offers and more – almost the way Amazon personalises their online store experience.
But the truth is, personalization isn’t just about your website. It is about seamlessly communicating with your audience across multiple digital channels with real-time contextual messages.
To reiterate, personalisation refers to the marketing tactic that makes use of consumer data across the Internet to create a relevant, contextual, one-to-one communication. But often do we move beyond creating the initial segments for our personas?
Here’s taking a look at the other aspects that businesses need to implement personalisation in, apart from their website and landing pages:
The Customer Journey
While your target audience can be defined by general demographics, it is impossible to make them all like the same thing and convert on the same value proposition. Each of your consumers in the various target segments of your audience have different needs that need to be dealt with different communication.
If you want them to convert, you need to ensure that their journey to becoming your customer is highly personalised. Using data like their previous interactions, purchases, purchase triggers and more, you can implement a journey that is tailor made to suit one:one interests.
This only goes to say, that marketers have to create holistic customer personas for their businesses. Since it is difficult to collate data points from multiple channels while doing so, a good idea is to get Wigzo to do the same. This removes
This removes manual error, redundant data and also ensures there no loss of data when it comes to knowing your customers.
The Social Outreach
Just like the customer journey, you also need to ensure that your outreach to your audience on social media is personalised. Identifying who your target audience is, what they do, where they are the most active, the kind of conversations they are indulging in and the type of ads that they tend to convert on the most, personalise your value proposition.
It is important to note here, that while targeting your audience on social media, you need to maintain a contextual approach. So tap into their data points to understand them better (in this case, use the holistic personas you just created in the step above), and target them with messages that they relate to the most.
Also, running retargeting campaigns for those who have visited your business website or have interacted with you before is a great way to personalise your social outreach. So before you start executing your social media campaigns, ensure you have a data backed strategy well in place.
Weekly Newsletters
Email marketing continues to be one of the most effective channels for businesses to communicate with their existing and potential customers. The weekly, biweekly or monthly newsletters play an important part in these email campaigns.
But there are nearly 60% of marketers who struggle to personalise their content and other collaterals for their target audience in real time. But 77% of these marketers believe that real-time personalisation is crucial because even the newsletter needs to take into account the reader’s current interests to get a high open and click through rate.
But you can’t possibly imagine a marketer sitting down to create individual newsletters for all your subscribers! This is where companies like Wigzo come in.
Wigzo offers tools powered by machine learning to analyse and identify the changing market trends as well as interests of the users and sync them with the previous interactions he has made on the business website. The tool then helps you auto-populate newsletters that are tailored to suit every individual’s interest to the t!
Personalisation on a 1:1 basis is guaranteed to get your newsletters a higher click through rate. The higher the CTR, the better are your business conversions – for all the emails you use to touch base with your audience.
Cross-channel Communication
A typical Internet user is active on multiple digital channels and expects businesses to reach out to them in the way they expect on all the channels. They want the interaction to be absolutely seamless – irrespective of the platform the choose. This preference has led to the movement from single channel to omnichannel communication.But to create a personalised cross-channel or omnichannel experience, businesses need to take strategical approach. Instead of trying to implement it all together, marketers should focus on taking a step-by-step approach instead.
We created a five-step guide to omnichannel marketing and you can read it right here if you’re starting off with it.
Personalisation can be a challenging task, considering the increasing number of digital platforms and the fast changing needs of the consumer market.
Businesses don’t just need a well documented strategy for acquiring their customers, but also robust tools that will help them simplify yet not lose out on customer data that unravels market opportunities for them.
[This post by Umair Mohammed first appeared on Wigzo’s official blog and has been reproduced with permission.]
