For a marketing campaign to succeed you need to send the right message to the right audience at the right time. In other words, you need solid segmentation practices, ways to personalize each communication with each prospect and customer, and methods to monitor and improve each piece of marketing communication that leaves your organization.
The good news is personalization is in its relative infancy even though the concepts and theories have been around for awhile. In the past, a lack of shared data access, limited printing technologies, and scarce expertise made it cost prohibitive to implement truly personalized marketing campaigns. A lot of that has changed, but personalized marketing is still growing in popularity and adoption.
For instance, David Daniels of Jupiter Research stated that "only 4% of marketers personalized messages. Of the marketers who do personalize, 76% use five data points or less in the personalization process." With all the data at a business' disposal, the time has come to start leveraging that data in the form of increased revenue and market share.
The Case for Personalization
If your goal is to exponentially grow your business, there can be little argument that personalization can play a large role.
For instance, personalization has been shown to increase order frequency by nearly 50% and order value by almost 1/4. Those are two of the three primary ways to effectively grow a business (the other being acquiring more customers). Furthermore, the rate at which people respond is improved by 36% and the time it takes them to respond is improved by a little over 1/3. All of this leads to increased overall profitability of 31.6% as a result of personalization. In and of itself, this is a strong enough argument for incorporating personalization into your marketing efforts, but there are more benefits to experience.
Benefits of Personalization
- Reach the ideal customer
- Break through the clutter
- Capitalize on cross-sell and up-sell opportunities
- Create company and brand "ambassadors"
- Engages & prepares prospects to buy
- Rescues inactive customers
- Strengthens relationships
- Creates loyalty
