Personalising Your Cross-channel Marketing

Many organ­i­sa­tions are real­is­ing that Cross-chan­nel mar­ket­ing (CCM) is becom­ing the holy grail of mar­ket­ing. So many know its poten­tial val­ue, yet so few have expe­ri­enced suc­cess. One of the cur­rent chal­lenges to effec­tive cross chan­nel mar­ket­ing has to do with per­son­al­i­sa­tion. Per­son­al­i­sa­tion is the quest of the moment for so many mar­keters, with 70% of exec­u­tives inter­viewed by For­rester say­ing it is now of strate­gic impor­tance to their business.

But per­son­al­is­ing cus­tomer expe­ri­ences remains elusive.

When it comes to mul­ti­ple chan­nels, cus­tomers are surfers. They often jump from one chan­nel to the next, pro­vid­ing mar­keters with count­less oppor­tu­ni­ties to cre­ate delight­ful, per­son­alised inter­ac­tions with their brands. Get­ting it right requires the right mes­sage to the right audi­ence on every chan­nel. In fact the chan­nel should be irrelevant.

Per­son­al­i­sa­tion Has Gone Mainstream

Per­son­alised cam­paigns have gone from cut­ting edge to main­stream. Brands now know they need to pro­vide con­sumers with an effort­less, con­sis­tent and rel­e­vant expe­ri­ence across all touch points, not just with­in each chan­nel. If mar­keters do not take this approach, they risk irrelevancy.

We know one-to-one per­son­al­i­sa­tion works. Using mar­ket­ing data to adapt dig­i­tal con­tent to con­sumers’ wants and needs not only low­ers cost-per-acqui­si­tion (CPA), but also increas­es ROI for mar­ket­ing cam­paigns. Adobe cus­tomers switch­ing from gener­ic mes­sages to per­son­alised com­mu­ni­ca­tions saw a 50 to 150 per­cent increase in rev­enue per mes­sage; this was true for email, web, and even direct mail.

Today’s con­sumer is dig­i­tal­ly empow­ered, so per­son­al­i­sa­tion is crit­i­cal to every touch point. In a mat­ter of sec­onds, peo­ple can research your brand or prod­uct and your com­peti­tors to make well-informed deci­sions about pur­chas­es and where to put their loy­al­ty. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, 96 per­cent of con­sumers receive irrel­e­vant ads or pro­mo­tions, so per­son­al­i­sa­tion is lost. Worse yet, 94 per­cent state they would go so far as dis­con­tin­ue their rela­tion­ship with a brand because of this.

Time to Shake Things Up

Tra­di­tion­al media mar­keters who have focused on TV, radio, video, out­door sig­nage, etc. have lim­it­ed them­selves to non-per­son­alised adver­tis­ing. One-to-one mar­ket­ing has tra­di­tion­al­ly been the exclu­sive purview of direct mar­ket­ing chan­nels, such as direct mail and point-of-sale, and lat­ter­ly email, web, mobile SMS/push noti­fi­ca­tions and apps, and social media. In the future, new and emerg­ing chan­nels like Aug­ment­ed Real­i­ty, Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty and Inter­net of Things will enter the fray.

So the time has come to shake things up a bit. Con­sumers have grown weary of mass media adver­tis­ing, there­fore, media mar­keters must final­ly adopt per­son­al­i­sa­tion best prac­tices with much of the gran­u­lar­i­ty that dig­i­tal mar­keters have prac­ticed for years. Through data aggre­ga­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion tech­nol­o­gy, com­pa­nies have more data about their tar­get mar­kets than ever before, and with that comes the abil­i­ty to cus­tomize con­tent to include spe­cif­ic lan­guage, images, videos, and more to each indi­vid­ual consumer.

**Take the Right Approach to Per­son­alised Cross Chan­nel Marketing
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As a brand, you are no more than the sum of the expe­ri­ences your cus­tomers enjoy or endure. It’s not about what your brand may say it is; it’s what your cus­tomers expe­ri­ence and what they say it is. Mar­keters who con­nect with indi­vid­ual con­sumers and tru­ly deliv­er val­ue across chan­nels and devices will grow cus­tomer rela­tion­ships both emo­tion­al­ly and finan­cial­ly. This, in turn, will cre­ate the pos­i­tive impres­sion you need to build cus­tomer loyalty.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, mar­keters often lack a cen­tralised place to cre­ate, man­age, and orches­trate cus­tomer expe­ri­ences, pro­hibit­ing com­plete cross-chan­nel suc­cess. Data from crit­i­cal chan­nels like dis­play aren’t yet inte­grat­ed, mak­ing it dif­fi­cult to tar­get the right cus­tomer with the right mes­sage at the right moment. Fail­ure to bring data togeth­er has mas­sive oper­a­tional con­se­quences, many stem­ming from the obvi­ous fact that inter­nal team divi­sions will cre­ate incon­sis­tent mes­sag­ing, so cam­paigns are bound to be exe­cut­ed and mea­sured in iso­la­tion from each other.

How­ev­er, through robust cus­tomer expe­ri­ence man­age­ment tools that pro­vide as clear a view of your con­sumers as pos­si­ble, cou­pled with a sol­id val­ue exchange, mar­keters can offer per­son­al­i­sa­tion with­out over­step­ping bound­aries that cus­tomers may per­ceive as “creepy.” Dig­i­tal natives tend to be open to per­son­alised mar­ket­ing because they’ve emailed, texted, post­ed on social media, reveal­ing who they are and what they like and dis­like, and they know that online activ­i­ty can be tracked. But some peo­ple are less recep­tive to per­son­alised mes­sages. It’s there­fore crit­i­cal to get tar­get­ing right, hit­ting the right con­sumer with the right mes­sage no mat­ter what device or chan­nel they are using.