Personalized Marketing: Strategy to Bespoke Customer Experiences

71% of customers expect personalized experiences, while 76% get frustrated when they don’t find it. Its why marketers are laser-focused on their personalized marketing strategy: your current and future customer relationships come down to the quality of experiences with your brand. But what’s the reward for getting it right?

McKinsey found that companies excelling in personalized marketing witness a staggering revenue boost of up to 40%.

Now, have a look at your inbox. How many emails address you by name instantly? Multiply that by the hundreds of other marketing emails, and you’ll see why customers are becoming numb to common personalization practices.

In this blog, we’re spilling the secrets of how to nail personalized customer experiences every single time. So, let’s dive straight in!

TABLE OF CONTENTS

What is personalized marketing
Why marketers struggle with personalized marketing
Activate customer data to create personalized marketing campaigns
5 best practices for your personalized marketing strategy
Case Study: How Prenatal’s marketing emails hit the mark

WHAT IS PERSONALIZED MARKETING?

Personalized marketing is tailoring marketing activities using the data you’ve collected from your customers. By collecting relevant data, analyzing customer insights, and using marketing automation, you can send your customers messages that are just as unique as they are.

But devising a guaranteed personalization strategy isn’t easy. You need to crack the personalization puzzle:

• Who are you targeting?
• What type of content is most relevant to your target audience?
• When is the best time to message your customers?
• Where are you interacting with your customers in the customer journey?
• How are you using your marketing channels to communicate with customers?

Personalization shouldn’t come from gut-feel and guesses – it needs to make sense. You need a clear view of customer journeys and interactions with your brand to answer the right questions about your customers. For instance:

• Do they repeatedly view a product without adding it to their basket?
• Which channels do they prefer?
• How does their average order value (AOV) change over time?

If you struggle to answer these, it could be a sign that a lack of insights may be limiting your personalized marketing strategy.

WHY CUSTOMERS ARE STRUGGLING WITH PERSONALIZED MARKETING

Over a third of brands struggle with personalized marketing because they work with siloed data, tools, and systems. This makes it difficult for your team to conduct revenue-driving marketing initiatives that work.

Every business has more data than they know what to do with, and when they’re usually stored in separate systems from different sources. These data silos create gaps and inconsistencies in customer insights about their wants, needs, and pain points, leading to misaligned teams.

Data siloes aren’t only an internal problem for your brand; it shows in your external marketing communications through your interactions. From irrelevant content, poor timing, unfamiliar channels, wrong frequencies, and overlapping messages, you’re accidentally fuelling a poor customer experience with these inconsistencies.

ACTIVATE YOUR CUSTOMER DATA FOR PERSONALIZED MARKETING CAMPAIGNS

Data needs to be at the center of it all. Just as personalization can’t work with a universal approach, the same applies to how you leverage data in your business. Being data-driven requires a bespoke infrastructure for the following reasons:

• Various data types, sources, and channels available
• Your individual business goals
• Data usage and scalability plans for each team
• Knowledge and culture
• Data security and compliance
• Costs and resources
• Integrations and tools

To help combat this, marketing technology vendors and their support teams can bridge the gap between businesses embarking on their data-driven journey and a data-driven way of working. In the context of personalization, adopting technologies such as Mapp Marketing Cloud can ensure alignment across teams, leadership, and external agencies.

CDPs + Marketing Automation + Analytics = Insight-Led Customer Experiences

Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) unify, centralize, structure, and enrich your data to help you build unified customer profiles enriched with zero-party and first-party customer data collection. Using custom dashboards aligns marketing, data, and leadership teams. This unity streamlines decisions, boosts efficiency, drives data-driven choices, and keeps the team concentrated on core business goals.

Additionally, it’s the execution of those insights that’s important, too. Consider a CDP + Marketing Automation solution that’s marketer-friendly enough to enable you to act on this data to create personalized cross-channel experiences.

But the real game-changer is CDP + Marketing Automation + Data Analytics platforms, such as Mapp Marketing Cloud. This trio goes beyond personalization, as it fuels insight-led marketing. This means putting customer insights at the core of your marketing to create personalized experiences on the right channel, at the right time, with the right content.

With Mapp Marketing Cloud’s AI-powered predictions, you’ll succeed in an insight-led approach, ensuring proactive responses to customer behavior and staying ahead of evolving needs throughout their journey.

FIVE BEST PRACTICES FOR YOUR PERSONALIZED MARKETING STRATEGY

1. Identify times and channels:

Don’t just follow market trends for email timing; leverage your data instead. Investigate the effectiveness of your message’s content and identify high-engagement channels and peak times. Evaluate whether certain messages could perform better at different times, even if they are currently low-performing.

It’s helpful when your tools support this. For instance, Mapp Marketing Cloud’s AI-powered Best Sendout Time feature uses campaign feedback data to pinpoint the perfect moment for sending your message, boosting engagement and nurturing customer loyalty.

2. Avoid overlapping, irrelevant messages:

You want to stay in your customers’ minds, but the more you communicate, the higher the risk of overlapping messages between different campaigns. If you’re working with different platforms, it becomes even harder when using trigger-based communications.

Ensure all customer data is unified to get an overview of your communication activities. All event-based or scheduled communications can be coordinated to help you contact customers at the right time, with rules in place. Your personalized marketing strategy will benefit from reducing the risk of overlapping and tailoring certain campaigns based on all available data and improving your customer reach and engagement.

3. Segment your audiences:

Deliver a message that isn’t for the masses – but for your customers. While trying to break down your customers into different audience segments, it’s crucial to be detailed and/or specific to better target customers on their interests, behavior, history, and more. Rather than creating broad, large segments, you can use a range of metrics and insights to get more accurate targeting. Here’s how it would look in Mapp Marketing Cloud.

For instance, our client Riverford used Mapp Marketing Cloud to run a targeted trigger campaign. On the day of delivery to all customers who had a set vegetable box delivered Riverford used their customers’ order data (related-data tables) to both target the audience and show recipes/veg guides specifically related to the veg products customers had received in their box that day. Inspiring customers in the kitchen, it aided customer retention. Having sent this campaign to approximately 42k customers a week, they received on average 6.3k total clicks to the website, from 4.4k unique clickers each week – with a click rate of 10.4%.

4. RFM Modelling

RFM modeling is one metric that can be used for advanced segmentation in an automatic way. You can identify a loyal customer who will appreciate more tailored content, while a customer at risk, or a valuable churning customer, might need an extra incentive to (re)engage with your brand. From there, you’ll be able to offer discounts, cross-sell and upsell initiatives to lead them to conversion.

By leveraging RFM modeling, you can avoid the pitfall of inadvertently sending customers irrelevant messages, which could make them feel misunderstood or frustrated. Instead, you’re able to tailor their customer journey to enhance their overall experience and foster stronger connections with your brand.

5. A/B testing and performance:

While 59% of organizations use A/B testing, many don’t explore its full potential. Don’t stop at tweaking subject lines or copy. Go further by changing the Sender ID to make messages feel more personal, such as changing it to ‘Jane at ACME.’ This approach can lead to significantly higher open rates.

Also, focus on active users and tailor your content based on first-party data to improve conversions while avoiding the trap of reaching out to inactive users who might be tempted to mark your emails as spam. This targeted approach to A/B testing is a central part of a successful personalized marketing strategy.

HOW PRENATAL’S PERSONALIZED MARKETING EMAILS HIT THE MARK

Prenatal is one of Europe’s largest childcare and toy brands specializing in products for new mothers, babies, and children.

Prénatal’s Customer Success story with Mapp – YouTube

After unifying their data, the brand decided to take its digital communications to the next level with Mapp Marketing Cloud through the ‘Mamma/Mother’ program. This campaign was an automated workflow that used customer data to target customers based on their due date and provide monthly content, relevant products, advice, and more. This created a personal relationship with customers, as they helped to become a part of the customer’s pregnancy lifecycle.

The results:

• The average receipt of users who purchased within 7 days of receiving the Mom Program doubled
• Email marketing KPIs increased significantly: Open Rate x2.1 | Click-through Rate x6.4 | Click to Open Rate x6.9 compared to the average KPI of promotional communications
• Analyzing online purchases made within 7 days of sending the email, was a x2.1 increase in eCommerce sales
• Lastly, in the 7 days following the opening of the program email, there was a 16.7% growth of in-store purchases

Read the full case study here.

Unlock Data-Driven Personalized Marketing with Mapp Marketing Cloud

At Mapp, we believe insights should be at the core of everything you do. It’s why we built Mapp Marketing Cloud with marketers in mind, to help them move away from gut-feel marketing and master insight-led customer experiences. That’s why we commissioned Forrester to conduct a study to learn the impact of an insight-led customer experience platform like Mapp Marketing Cloud on key marketing activities such as marketing personalization.

It highlighted one of the most common challenges Mapp Marketing Cloud customers struggled with before adopting our solution: missing the foundation for understanding customers and limited capabilities to reach and engage with them. Forrester found the composite organization would achieve greater value from increased engagement and personalized messaging by using Mapp Marketing Cloud to unify, analyze, and act on their data.

Discover how the power of the Mapp Marketing Cloud platform in your personalized marketing strategy in Forrester’s Total Economic Impact (TEI) study.

Download the Forrester Total Economic Impact study on Mapp Marketing Cloud

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