Personalization and the Era of Privacy
Many screens inside a dark airplane. An illustration of personalized messaging among a cohort.
Does your business need help to connect with your customers, and does your message feel lost in a sea of competitors? Would you like to know that your marketing efforts resonate with your audience? The solution you've been looking for is personalization, but perhaps not as you know it.
Personalization is familiar to marketers. It's a tried and true method proven to increase engagement, conversions, brand loyalty, and more—but it's easy to think it's too complex or expensive. Or, even more often, your company's processes and systems are too disconnected to make it a reality.
The challenge, however, is to understand that we are in a new era of communication with our customers, and as a result, our methods have to adapt. As we personalize our marketing, customers may have privacy concerns. Customers want to know that their personal information is secure and used responsibly. That's why in addition to a commitment to putting your company's relationship with customers first, facilitating this relationship through marketing automation systems, CRM, and custom systems integration is essential. The privacy era is an opportunity for businesses committed to responsible, streamlined, and thoughtful customer data management. By implementing a secure, centralized system and corresponding process to manage customer data and personalize your marketing messages, you can build trust and confidence with your audience and, ultimately, increase your sales.
So how does a company evaluate its current personalization efforts, and how can it improve them? Here are five steps for assessing and applying your personalization efforts:
Ascertain the value of data to your business. This statement may sound foolish for any modern company, but countless businesses determine their marketing strategies from misinformed or misinterpreted data. So how important is data to your company, and most importantly, how will you take action on your customer data?
Determine how you can use customer data to create value for customers. Many companies collect customer data but fail to act on it. What is the value of your current data? How can you use it to improve personalization efforts, build trust and increase revenue?
Build a data-driven culture. Data is only as valuable as the decisions made from it. To create value from customer data, businesses must invest in people, processes, and systems that allow them to make informed decisions based on accurate data sets.
Set goals for personalization efforts using customer data. Personalization is about more than just using customer data to tailor a brand's messaging to an individual consumer's preferences or needs; it also involves being able to measure the impact of these efforts on relevant business metrics such as sales revenue and customer retention rates over time. These goals should be defined in the middle of your organization's structure, with trust given to department, segment, or business unit leaders to create objectives that match senior leadership's overall business strategy and vision.
Measure the results of your efforts and deploy changes quickly. Be sure to measure your progress before the end of the quarter or year. Instead, use real-time data to make decisions and deploy changes quickly. Iterating quickly will help ensure that you don't get stuck on any strategy for too long and that your efforts constantly adapt to customer preferences and behaviors.
These steps, combined with powerful tools such as HubSpot and Salesforce, or many other outstanding CRM tools, and integration with marketing platforms that directly connect to your customers, will enable you to find a deeper relationship with your customers, create brand advocates, and drive sales results. In the end, you will be able to be seen as a trusted advisor who is always on your customer's side, even when it comes to your competitors.
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