Know Your Customer: Drive Personalized Marketing Experiences
To cut through the clutter and chatter, online and offline, marketers must know how to personalize communication for prospects and existing customers. By presenting people with the right messaging and customized offers, you’re providing a unique experience that drives interaction. In fact, 44% of consumers are willing to switch to brands that better personalize marketing communications.
Customized messaging based on data intelligence can drive loyalty, increase conversion rates and result in a positive marketing ROI. And the most successful programs consider omnichannel optimization across multiple channels including the company’s website, mobile app, digital ads and even the call center.
Where to Begin
The first step is always to know the customer. Conduct surveys, collect feedback from sales employees, hold focus groups, conduct interviews and review customer comments received via social media. Understanding what features and benefits about your product or service resonate with the customer will help guide you in understanding how to personalize the message to them.
For example, younger demographics may care more about your self-service options via the app, whereas a family might care more about your delivery options. Once you have identified segments and their psychographics, you can start to gather the data needed to target them with the appropriate message.
Data, analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) are essential tools for improving your personalized messaging. The types of data you should consider include:
- Demographic Data: Household size, income, gender, new homeowner, family attributes, and more. Many of these elements are available via CoreLogic’s prospect intelligence. CoreLogic strives for the most accurate data with the best coverage and recency.
- Behavioral Data: How have they interacted with your product and services? How much have they spent? When was the last time they purchased? Have they engaged in your email communication or on your website?
- Explicit Data: What have they shared with you via surveys or loyalty program registrations?
Putting Data to Work
AI and machine learning are the gold standard for personalization as it allows your data to grow and improve based on multiple sources and interactions. From there it can build patterns and predictions to drive real-time marketing messages.
In addition to these sophisticated tools, rule-based personalization is a foundational element to construct. By assigning segments to your database contacts, you then create rules that apply to each segment. For example, if a customer visited your website in the last week, has a high household income and has five household members, you could send them a special offer with a discounted rate for your family plan. Then you can remind them of that offer the next time they visit your website. The more granular you are in your targeting, the more rules you’ll need to build.
Test and Learn
You don’t know what works until you try it. Continually test and refine your approach based on results. Conduct A/B testing for calls to action, direct mail formats, subject lines, contact frequency and more. The most common metrics to track include lift over control, conversion rates, engagement, lifetime value and marketing return on investment.
In digital paid media, you can test which content and ad formats perform better across different platforms such as Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn. However, in defining your test plan, make sure you only change one variable at a time. For example, the messaging, timing and call to action must remain the same if you are trying to determine which site performs better. If you want to know if video performs better than a static ad, you should test both options on each platform simultaneously.
With Digital Audience Insights from CoreLogic, you can ensure that you’re targeting the right prospect in social media. Reach millions of consumers with a custom audience tailored to your unique business needs on the digital platforms such as LiveRamp.
Exceeding Customer Expectations
According to Epsilon research, 90% of customers prefer personalized experiences. They are willing to share data with marketing to make their purchase experience as streamlined and unique to them as possible. By being relevant with the right message at the right time at the right place, you’ll delight the customer and gain a competitive advantage.
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