3 Problems With Personalisation And How To Solve Them
A truly personalised experience is something coveted by both modern marketers and their consumers. And rightly so.
The truly personalised experience is something coveted by both modern marketers and their consumers. And rightly so.
What’s the point in communicating irrelevant messages to people whom the message doesn’t apply? It just wastes everyone’s time. The same goes for communicating the same message to everyone.
No one wants to be treated as a number, a face in the crowd, a cog in the works to be replaced as and when the machine operators deem it necessary. Likewise, if marketers can create an architecture around the constant streams of data that surround their brand, they can automate triggers and communicate meaningfully with millions of prospects and customers at once. Surely that is far more likely to drive success?
This Holy Marketing Grail of Personalisation is neither as easy to achieve nor as actively pursued as it should be. Why not?
There are three challenges surrounding personalisation:
Data Silos
Customer and prospect data is held in disparate silos across the organisation, making it impossible to leverage the available information for an optimal personalisation strategy.
Lack Of Data Focus
Marketers are focusing on the message rather than the inherent data problem, leading to a leaning towards broadcast-style messaging.
Brands Are Lagging Behind
The customer operates in the moment, in the now… in ‘real time’. Personalisation is too often dependent on historic events, which means messages are being created and sent that are based on information that is now obsolete, or even irrelevant.
At Innometrics, we believe each of these problems can be resolved most easily through the use of profiles in marketing campaigns:
Break Down The Silos
First, a profile contains both static and dynamic information, and is held centrally across all platforms. The profile itself can then be shared with any messaging platform to empower better, more relevant and timely communication with not just customers, but prospects.
Focus On The Data, Not The Message
Second, since profiles consolidate the data across these formerly disparate silos, marketers can move away from a broadcast mentality towards a targeted conversation. Profiles also go beyond historic data and incorporate evolving data streams, opening the door for anticipation of behaviour through predictive analytics, not only web analytics.
Solve The Problem Of ‘Now’… Now!
And finally, all of the information stored within a profile can be made actionable in real time. More than a single view of the customer, a profile enables you to do something with that view, immediately.
I believe profiles solve all these challenges and more, trumping a single customer view with the ability to act on the insight in real time. Add to that the allure of incorporating predictive data, and even external influencers (such as weather data) and that’s one rich customer profile.
Originally posted here.
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