Personalized Marketing: Strategy to Bespoke Customer Experiences

Every marketer is laser-focused on personalized marketing these days. In fact, McKinsey found that nailing personalized marketing could potentially boost revenue by 40%.

Now take a moment to look at your inbox. How many emails did you see with your name in the email subject line? Well, if you multiply that by the hundreds of marketing messages your customers receive daily, you’ll quickly grasp why these practices have become so common that they’ve lost their impact.

Because of this, the biggest challenge for marketers now is personalizing more than the basics to create bespoke experiences that engage customers.

Generally, 36% of brands struggle with personalized marketing. The root of the issue? A lack of unified customer data leads to a fragmented understanding of customers. Without delving into their content, behaviors, and intent, you miss the very essence of personalization.

So, how do you craft exceptional experiences that cater to each customer’s needs, on a large scale? Remember, every aspect of your customer is unique. How you store, structure, activate, and utilize your data plays a pivotal role in becoming more customer-centric and delivering those remarkable customer experiences.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

What is personalized marketing
What Forrester discovered about Mapp
What marketers are actually doing with their customer data
Activate your customer data for personalized marketing campaigns
5 things missing in your personalized marketing approach
Case Study: How Prenatal’s marketing emails hit the mark

WHAT DO WE MEAN BY PERSONALIZED MARKETING?

Personalized marketing is simply creating and delivering customized content that’s relevant to the recipient, based on real-time customer data and insights. By collecting data, analyzing insights, and using marketing automation, you’re able to uncover the blueprint of your personalized marketing strategy:

One-to-one marketing, or personalization, involves tailoring the overall customer experience in your marketing efforts. It encompasses customizing the message content, how you engage with customers, and when and where they receive the messages. To guide your personalized marketing strategy, your customer data technology should provide decision-makers with easy-to-visualize key insights. That’s why we commissioned Forrester to conduct a study to assess Mapp Cloud’s impact.

HERE’S WHAT FORRESTER DISCOVERED

After commissioning Forrester Consulting in 2022 to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study on Mapp Cloud, it highlighted common challenges our customers struggled with before using our solution: missing a foundation for understanding customers and limited capabilities to reach and engage customers. 

“Missing key insights means missing the mark with your customers. From interviewing our customers, Forrester found this gap resulted in overlapping and irrelevant messages being sent to customers, generating low engagement. These elements are just some of the types of essential CX personalization that can make every bit of difference to what you’re creating, how you’re interacting, and knowing what works per customer, at scale,” explains Ricardas Montvila, VP of Global Strategy at Mapp.

By using Mapp Cloud to unify, analyze and act on their data, the composite organization would achieve greater value from increased engagement and more personalized messaging.

This bears an important question …

WHAT EXACTLY ARE MARKETERS DOING WITH THEIR CUSTOMER DATA?

Companies using advanced personalization have seen a $20 return for every $1 spent. Having hailed data as king, businesses are adopting data-driven strategies to streamline their marketing accordingly. Yet, these same businesses have more data than they know exists, stored in separate systems and sources.

From CRM to transactional and behavioral data, each piece of your customer’s profile and journey with your brand is essential. For instance, understanding if they repeatedly view a product without adding it to the basket, their preferred channels of interaction, or any changes in their average order value (AOV) over time.

Yet, data silos restrict you to a fragmented view, leaving different stakeholders and teams misaligned and uninformed due to a lack of a single source of truth. As a consequence, your marketing efforts become fragmented.

Despite access to a data goldmine, siloed data means your internal teams are unaligned. This can come through externally in your marketing communications. Fragmented marketing creates inaccuracies, gaps, frictions, and information overload, making it difficult for your team to make your marketing work together for revenue-driving customer experiences.

ACTIVATE YOUR CUSTOMER DATA FOR PERSONALIZED MARKETING CAMPAIGNS

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to customer data, as every business needs a customized infrastructure of how data needs to be structured and visualized. To build this, it’s crucial to align with various stakeholders (data teams, senior leadership, and even agencies if outsourcing) about how data is used between your teams.

The better a company’s ability to use data to increase customer knowledge, the more accurate you become in your personalized marketing.

CUSTOMER DATA PLATFORMS (CDP)

Customer Data Platforms unify, centralize, structure, and store data from your data sources for better digestion and flexibility. It builds on top of this by collecting zero-party and first-party customer data from your multiple touchpoints to help you segment your data to create and enrich customer profiles, giving you real-time insight into their behaviors.

With intuitive dashboards, these enable all relevant stakeholders to use and act on the same data sources. This allows companies to align in better understanding of their customers, aid personalization, keep track of KPIs, and never lose sight of the common goal: driving revenue.

TIP: For businesses with an offline presence, CDPs help bridge the online and offline data gap to offer a full omnichannel customer view. By collecting customer data at the POS, you can log what they’re purchasing or enquiring about in-store, to trigger messages based on in-store behavior.

FIRST-PARTY DATA AND ZERO-PARTY DATA

The death of third-party cookies has marketers readapting the way they understand their customers. Utilizing these two types of data is now seen as the way forward for marketers, to deliver more tailored messaging in an accurate and compliant way.

• First-party data: collected and owned by you as a company. It’s often through behavioral data, social data, purchase data, cross-channel data, and more. The most significant advantage – data is collected by your brand.
• Zero party data: customer intentionally hands data directly to you, which may highlight their preferences, email address, country, language preferences, and name. Gamification, quizzes, and surveys are often used here.

Using both in your strategy makes your data reliable, more qualitative, cost-effective, and GDPR compliant. Using this effectively with a CDP that structures and visualizes this effectively, helps to shape the customer journey across your multiple channels in real-time. This includes all data and events relating to customers’ browsing behavior, in-store behavior, and preferences.

FIVE AREAS MARKETERS OVERLOOK IN THEIR PERSONALIZED MARKETING APPROACH

1. Identify times and channels:

Customers open emails at various times—whether it’s a parent checking emails before school runs at 6 AM or during the 5 PM commute home. Emails are accessed from diverse locations and at different moments.

Rather than following market trends and sending emails during peak times or specific days, there’s an alternative that maximizes impact. You can leverage your customer data and use marketing automation to send messages and appear at the top of your customer’s inbox, precisely when they’re most likely to engage.  

With solutions like the ‘Best Send out Time’ feature in Mapp Cloud, you can gather campaign feedback data, including email open and click rates. Using this data, the message is sent at the most opportune moment within a suitable time window, avoiding unsociable hours and increasing engagement. This ensures that your communications remain relevant and fosters stronger customer loyalty.

2. Avoid overlapping, irrelevant messages:

This is often a significant pain point for businesses. Your goal may be to stay in your customers’ minds, but the more you communicate, the greater the risk of overlapping messages between different campaigns. If you’re working with different platforms, it also becomes even harder when using trigger-based communications.

To achieve optimal customer reach, ensure that all your customer data is unified with a CDP. All event-based or scheduled communications can be coordinated to help you contact customers at the right time. By bringing in all your real-time data in your personalized marketing strategy, you’ll reduce the risk of overlapping and tailoring certain campaigns based on all available data and improve your customer reach & 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 in your targeting.

For instance, our client Riverford used Mapp 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:

59% of organizations are already implementing A/B testing. However, many businesses don’t look beyond the basic elements you can experiment with when performing A/B testing.

Avoid looking at only changing elements of your communications such as the subject line or copy. For example, changing the Sender ID or Name of your email communications where modern clients such as Gmail, or Push Notifications, have the sender ID as the first thing people see alongside the subject line. Changing your brand name to ‘Jane at ACME’ for example, can increase the likelihood of your email being opened. This can make your emails feel more personalized rather than standard marketing communication.

Changing small but powerful aspects of your emails, such as the content that’s based on gathered first-party data and preferences of your customer can help improve conversions. But it’s crucial to focus on your “active users”, as sending to inactive users who may have no interest in your brand may cause them to send your emails to the spam folder.

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 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.

GO INSIGHT-LED IN YOUR PERSONALIZED MARKETING STRATEGY

Trying to conduct personalization in digital marketing for individual customers can seem impossible without the right tools and setup. In some businesses, there may be a lack of bandwidth to scale marketing efforts in their team. This makes it harder to action new targeted campaigns and personalize communications at scale.

To improve your customer reach and engagement, it’s essential to put customer data at the core of your marketing orchestration, with the right tools to support you. This creates a basis to learn who your customers are and how they engage with your brand, to help create hyper-personalized customer experiences.

Mapp Cloud makes your marketing reach more customer-centric by ensuring that every touchpoint brings them one step closer to action. You’ll easily combine real-time customer insights, cross-channel marketing automation, and marketing analytics to create insight-led customer experiences that customers love!

Discover how our platform can help your marketing in Forrester’s Total Economic Impact (TEI) study on Mapp Cloud. 

Download the Forrester Total Economic Impact study on Mapp Cloud

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