DECONSTRUCTING PERSONALISATION AN EBOOK FOR THE MODERN MARKETER
#AKLORACLEMARKETINGLAB
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PERSONALISATION LAB FINDINGS
LET'S GET PERSONAL
Personalisation is all about demonstrating that you know and care about your audience. It’s the difference between communicating the right message, at the right time, in the right channel, and 'spray and pray'. It’s the value you bring to your audiences in terms of products, services, pricing and offers that are genuinely created with the customer in mind.
I Love You!
As brands, our job is to connect with customers and prospects that have a challenge we can solve. The concept of brands needing a broader purpose has been around for years. Saatchi & Saatchi coined the Lovemarks theme about two decades ago. Yet, we still see too many marketers too overtly targeting and retargeting their audiences rather than building meaningful relationships.
I Target You!
I Retarget You!
We believe there’s a much smarter way and a lot of it starts and ends with personalisation. These are the outcomes of our discussion from our recent Oracle Marketing Lab on Deconstructing Personalisation...
PERSONALISATION LAB FINDINGS
TO BE INFLUENTIAL, YOU MUST BE INFLUENCEABLE Seek first to understand, then to be understood Dr. Covey - The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People People like people (and brands) that are like them. Demonstrate that you can adapt to their needs and you’ll build influence. To do this well requires a deep understanding of your audience, as well as your brand. What you stand for, how your personality comes into effect at various stages of the customer journey and why that matters to your audience, are all key factors.
Accessing data to enable personalisation and knowing where in the customer journey someone is and how they feel about your brand at that point in time will also determine the level of personalisation required.
At Marketing Cube, we work with our clients on the six tenets of exceptional CX. Each of these are important in terms of building a robust personalisation strategy.
You’ll need to develop enough content to facilitate personalisation, whether that be through adaptations of the same content or through the use of dynamic content.
For example, being clear on your brand values and tone of voice will determine how personal is too personal.
And finally, measure the impact to ensure you build on what works and stop doing what doesn’t.
MARKETING STRATEGY
CUSTOMER INSIGHTS
JOURNEY MAPPING
EXPERIENCE PLANNING
CONTENT STRATEGY
RETURN ON INVESTMENT
Do it well and the proof is in the pudding. According to McKinsey & Company: Personalisation increases the efficiency of marketing spend by up to 30% Personalisation reduces acquisition costs as much as 50%Â Personalisation lifts revenues by up to 15%
PERSONALISATION LAB FINDINGS
THE SIX PRINCIPLES OF PERSONALISATION To avoid falling into the ‘I target you’ trap, we’ve pulled together the six principles we think are fundamental to creating truly unique, personalised customer experiences.
1. EMPATHISE
2. TALK TO HEARTS & MINDS
3. BE BIGGER FROM SMALLER
4. TAKE GOOD RISKS
6. MAKE A RELEVANT OFFER
5. CONNECT
1. EMPATHISE Personalisation should be all about them (not you). To make it about the customer, brands need to listen more. Only then can you play into the emotional drivers of your audiences, which will provide that familiarity and influence needed to build a lasting, loyal relationship. Consider these questions when scoring your brand’s empathy: What do you know about them already? What do you need to capture and how? Do you use social listening? Do you understand your NPS?
2. TALK TO HEARTS & MINDS We’re driven by our beliefs - by our attitudes and values. If a brand can help us with that, we’re interested. Surprise and delight moments provide a perfect opportunity to talk to hearts and minds. Consider key trigger points in your customer journey to provide a personalised surprise and delight moment - it could be a key milestone, an anniversary, or something that reminds them of a positive experience with you the next time they land on your website. What are “the moments that matter” to your customers? If you’re not in a position to trigger a moment like this using status changes in your CRM or via an interaction with one of your digital channels, you may be missing a trick.
3. BE BIGGER FROM SMALLER “We do not see the world as it is. We see the world as we are.” - Anais Nin. Our own attitudes and values, and what needs are being met at any particular time, determine how we view the world. The opportunity here is to understand the details that matter to your customers and structure your experiences around those. The little things matter and they can amplify your brand if you pay attention to them. Consider these questions when determining this opportunity: How do you capture the things that matter today? How do you leverage those data points across product development, sales, marketing and service functions? Do the processes in your organisation align to provide a single view of your customer and to facilitate a truly personalised experience?
4. TAKE GOOD RISKS Personalisation isn’t just about fieldmerging the first name into an email. It’s about product/service design, language, imagery, signs, symbols and music. The beauty of marketing technology is that you can test and optimise - try different content and channels, and see what resonates. But make sure you’ve sorted the fundamentals: Understand the channels that matter most Manage and respect preferences
5. CONNECT
THE "Here's to a great day"
BUSINESS
THE "Symbols of 'I love you'"
BUSINESS
Know your business. Richard Branson understood years ago that “the brands that will thrive in the coming years are the ones that have purpose beyond profit.” That’s why instead of being in the airline business, Virgin is in the ‘entertainment business at 30,000ft.” This distinction sets the tone for the entire customer experience when flying Virgin. When determining if your brand has the connection right, ask yourself: How do you bring your brand purpose into every customer touchpoint? How does this relate to visual identity and tone of voice across all channels?
6. ONLY THEN, HAVE YOUR EARNED THE RIGHT TO TALK ABOUT YOU!
THE "This is me'" BUSINESS
Once you’ve mastered the previous five principles, you’ve earned the right and the ear of your audience to communicate your proposition or offer. Keep it relevant and targeted by taking all the above principles and weave them into your stories. To do this en-masse is the challenge, but there are tools and techniques that can help. We’re all about creating human experiences with technical capabilities, so let us know if we can assist.
PERSONALISATION LAB FINDINGS
WHERE ARE KIWI BUSINESSES AT? If you’ve read everything above and feel you have a way to go, do not fear. There was an appreciation in our Lab that most of us have more work to do and that seems to be the common view across New Zealand marketers.
PwC New Zealand's 2017 Digital IQ Survey reveals that when it comes to their digital investments, only 6% of Kiwi companies are thinking about creating better customer experiences. Data and analytics is an area we're really seeing local businesses lagging behind their global counterparts with only a third saying that they're making analytics a priority, compared to 44% globally.
In 2017, Oracle commissioned a piece of research with eConsultancy that investigated the state of marketing automation across Australia and New Zealand. The page opposite illustrates a few of their findings, most of which represent barriers to personalisation.
25%
ONLY A QUARTER OF COMPANIES ARE WORKING TOWARDS THE CREATION OF A UNIFIED DATABASE.
ONLY 7% OF ORGANISATIONS RATE THEIR ABILITY TO GATHER DATA FROM MULTIPLE DEVICES AND PLATFORMS AS ‘EXCELLENT’, WITH JUST OVER HALF (56%) RATING IT AS ‘AVERAGE’ OR ‘POOR’.
ORGANISATIONS ARE LEAST LIKELY TO CIRCULATE AND TRACK CONTENT BASED ON BUYER PROFILES (49%), OFFERING EVIDENCE THAT SEGMENTATION IS OFTEN NOT EFFECTIVELY ACTIONED.
THE ABILITY TO NURTURE LEADS AND CUSTOMERS WITH A TARGETED MESSAGE (44%) IS THE TOP REASON FOR INVESTING IN (OR POTENTIALLY INVESTING IN) MARKETING AUTOMATION.
PERSONALISATION LAB FINDINGS
WHAT DID THE AUCKLAND LAB ATTENDEES THINK?
PERSONALISATION RANKINGS The Oracle Marketing Lab included senior marketing representation from well know brands in tertiary education, telecommunications, financial services, automotive and grocery retail. The general sentiment was that while some steps had been taken to personalise customer communications, opportunities existed to create more meaningful interactions across the customer lifecycle.
OPPOSITE ARE SOME OF THE TACTICS ALREADY UNDERWAY BY OUR LAB PARTICIPANTS.
AUCKLAND
Basic email personalisation - field merges using CRM data, plus some dynamic content. An appreciation of extending this create a dialogue and relationship with prospects and customers, but not in place to date. Basic segmentation, largely based on profile data - little real-time trigger based engagement in place. Data available in various formats (portals, websites, CRMs, apps etc) but no full integration of data points and not leveraging what’s already in place to its full capability. Data and brand experience/activation contained in silos across organisations, with no single view of the customer or clearly defined ownership structure at relevant touchpoints within the customer journey. Focused on only one part of the customer journey, not across the entire lifecycle. For example, some brands had tackled the lead nurture stage, others were more focused on the on-boarding stage. Content production to facilitate deeper levels of personalisation was a challenge for many as marketing resources are stretched across competing priorities. Loyalty programs were based on what needed to be sold and rewards/discounts, rather than driven by customer needs. Product personalisation was a key strength for automotive participants. Localisation was a key strength for grocery retail participants.
PERSONALISATION LAB FINDINGS
There was an appreciation that technology will help manage and scale data and content, then automate meaningful experiences in real time enmasse. Â
With this in place, the Lab attendees aim to build on the above tactics with the following improvements...
AUCKLAND
Complete CX planning and start to connect journeys across the entire lifestyle of a customer. For some this meant expanding into more lead generation and nurture programs. For others it meant reactivating existing customers for cross-sell and upsell opportunities and focusing on long term loyalty. Align functional teams and data to provide a single view of the customer across the organisation. Integrate marketing automation tool with CRM to enable this. Enrich data by progressively profiling prospects and customers to build deeper insights for enhanced personalisation and customer service. Enhance content library - build a strategy to enable repurposing, increased personalisation and dynamic content. Tailor and align content, tools, experiences to customer personas. Increase the number of touchpoints to build lasting relationships, not just transactional communications. Enable ‘surprise and delight’ at point of sale through integrated technologies that connects the digital world with the real world. Develop analytics and marketing automation skills to enable deeper engagement through personalisation.Â
PERSONALISATION LAB FINDINGS
For those of you who attended the Oracle Marketing Lab and are ready to tackle some of these challenges, the opportunities are vast.
Whether you’re a large business or a small-to-medium sized one, differentiating with personalised, exceptional customer experience is what will make your customers and ultimately, your shareholders happy. If you’d like to speak to one of our team about personalisation or more generally about customer experience or marketing automation, we’d love to hear from you. Marketing Cube New Zealand Tel. +64 21 2287775 Email. marijke@marketingcube.co.nz Web. www.marketingcube.co.nz
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