Organizations have been talking about one-to-one marketing for years. Everyone is aware of its tremendous benefits — increased response and higher conversion rates, greater profits, enhanced customer loyalty and so on. But are organizations truly executing personalized marketing? Is everything possible being done to maximize these benefits?
The good news is that marketing technology has advanced to make it even easier to make this one-to-one vision a reality. There are four key areas that have been impacted by these technology advances:
1.Targeting is a critical component in one-to-one marketing. It allows you to identify, distinguish and reach customers more efficiently and effectively. Targeting technology is now able to leverage rich customer knowledge by drawing on data in various formats and locations throughout a company to deliver a complete customer view. Integration with popular data mining tools enables organizations to perform even deeper customer analysis, segmentation, and profiling. New strategic segment functionality, allows organizations to define strategic groups of customers and centrally store segmentation information in one location so that all marketers can use and re-use the segment definitions across programs and channels, ensuring marketing consistency, reducing time to market and enforcing consistent use of business rules. Segments can be tracked and measured over time, providing an organization with a clear understanding of the business impact, value and ROI attributable to targeting within each segment.
2. Messaging is the hook that captivates a customer’s attention. If the message is not relevant it won’t garner a second glance. Technology now allows a message’s text, graphics, products and incentives to be customized at an individual level. Functionality that enables dynamic generation of thousands of offers based on customer attributes and business rules takes personalization to a new level. Additionally, messages within a communication vehicle may be tailored. For example, email communications, newspaper circulars and web content may contain numerous content areas that are personalized for an individual based on his or her preference, product purchase, or recent life event. Today’s technology not only enables this, it makes it possible to track responses to each content area as well as the offer in its entirety. This robust response analysis allows marketers to measure the performance and effectiveness of every marketing message.
3.Executing timely communications based on customer behavior and events is now possible. A critical component of one-to-one marketing is detecting and knowing when customers will be most receptive to a contact regarding a new offer or when to reach out because attrition seems likely. Based on business and customer-defined rules, marketing technology identifies when a significant change in customer behavior has occurred. It creates valid reasons to contact customers and provides marketing staff with consultative opportunities and opportune loss interventions. Event detection enables unprecedented success in increasing cross-sell, improving customer retention, and maintaining and increasing customer satisfaction because it signals when customers are most likely to respond to communications.
4.Delivering personalized messages whenever a customer connects with a company is powerful. Today’s enterprise marketing technology allows marketers to quickly develop and run all forms of marketing communications from scheduled campaigns, event-driven programs, and real-time dialogs across multiple channels – including electronic and print on demand. A coordinated approach makes it easy for marketers to drive effective interaction strategies that reach individual customers at the right time with the best offer on their preferred channel. Such integrated delivery creates customer dialogs that build loyalty, and increase ROI.
With technology advances in targeting, messaging, execution and delivery, organizations are now empowered to make the dream of one-to-one marketing a reality. The overall business result is satisfied, repeat customers and higher bottom-line profitability.
