Personalization is all the rage in marketing. Considering each member of your audience as an individual as such is becoming a major challenge for companies. And this, in order to offer each person a personalized experience.
For this, of course, it is necessary to acquire a certain amount of knowledge about each customer or prospect, and technological advances, in particular artificial intelligence, make it possible to present each individual with unique content, offers and experience. In its guide to marketing personalization, Salesforce discusses the importance of this strategy and explains how to implement it.
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4 steps to prepare a personalization strategy
The challenge of personalization is enormous. 84% of customers believe that only companies that treat them as individuals and not numbers are trustworthy. To succeed in your marketing personalization strategy, you no longer have to ask yourself, as a company, what you want to show each individual, but what each individual wants to see. It is therefore necessary to plan your strategy well. And for that, Salesforce gives several tips:
- Set clear goals: they often meet the overall objectives of the company and the challenges of each channel, whether it is the website, the application, the emailing or the social networks… Without forgetting to set up a way of measure progress and results.
- Assemble a team: you have to know how to measure your needs and respond to them by adapting your workforce.
- Evaluate channels: each channel used to communicate with its audience must be personalized, so the focus must first be on the most important ones without neglecting the others.
- Identify data sources: collecting accurate and quality data will allow relevant personalization. And the opposite can completely defeat the strategy.
Choose your approach: rules and machine learning
According to Salesforce, there are two main approaches to personalization: rules defined by marketers and machine learning.
It is interesting to use rules for:
- Geographic targeting,
- persona marketing,
- Marketing of strategic accounts,
- Any communication based on a segment…
Machine learning is useful for offering:
- A unique product or content,
- Personalized suggestions or offers,
- Personalized experiences and messages,
- Continuous optimization of communications…
In its guide, Salesforce emphasizes the growth of AI and its importance in personalization. Indeed, 46% of marketers are already using machine learning for personalization (26% in 2018). These uses are becoming widespread.
The Importance of Channels in Marketing Personalization
In its white paper, Salesforce notes the importance of omnichannel personalization. Each channel is a customer entry point to the brand, yet 71% of customers use multiple channels to initiate and complete a single transaction.
- The omnichannel experience: it avoids the confusion and irritation of the customer who receives, for example, an advertisement for a product he has just bought in store, or a promotion by email different from that received by mail.
- Data summary: it brings together all the information and data inherited from the different channels in a single place, such as a unified customer profile (UCP). Thus, it will be possible to feed omnichannel personalization in real time.
- Setting up tests: it is essential to test the campaigns when they are ready, because experimentation allows the optimization of the efforts. It is also a great way to measure the progress, impact and results of the strategy.
To deepen the subject of marketing personalization and find all the advice from Salesforce, with the added bonus of provided and detailed examples for companies to set up an effective and relevant strategy, you can download the complete guide below.
Download the full guide
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