At this year’s (Re)Think by Movable Ink, Iterable’s Head of Strategic Initiatives, Craig Elston, took the conference stage to address how consumer brands can deliver value to customers by keeping data at the heart of their marketing strategies.
The session offered personalization tactics any marketing team can quickly implement to understand their audience better, create seamless cross-channel experiences, and utilize existing data to build 1:1 customer journeys. In case you missed Iterable’s session at (Re)Think, here are a few key takeaways every marketer should keep in mind.
Personalization Should Be Top Priority
Consumers want empathy and understanding. While it's no secret that personalization should play a significant role in every brand's marketing strategy, it’s important to see it as more than just bells and whistles. As one of the most vital tools in a marketing team’s arsenal, personalization is critical for building relevant experiences that recognize each customer's unique needs. In turn, brands that unlock customer value deeply understand what their customers are looking for and deliver tailored communications that urge them to engage.
However, consumer value is not one-sided; personalization also boosts revenue and marketings’ influence within the company. A study from Sprout Social showed that when customers feel a brand understands their needs, they're 57% more likely to spend more money with them, and 76% are willing to buy their products or services over a competitor. While digital native brands tend to have a leg up on sophisticated personalization, more traditional brands are quickly catching up and investing in personalization. Gartner found that 14% of marketers dedicate their budget to personalization, and 40% have a clear personalization strategy and roadmap. What's glaring about this statistic is that most brands do not have such a strategy or roadmap, showing that there's still tremendous growth to be had in improving the customer experience.
Creating Value Starts with Data at the Center
If there's one thing every marketing team has in common, it's figuring out how to extract the most value from existing data. With data now sitting at the center of almost every marketing conversation, brands face the challenge of figuring out how to utilize all that data, whether big, small, structured, or unstructured. To help make the most of data, marketers should grasp three concepts to propel effective and efficient marketing campaigns.
- Understand Audiences through Customer Data - Organizations can make an effort to better understand demographics and then go deeper into the actual behavior of each customer. How are they behaving? What are their motivations? Brands should analyze historical data to understand what their customer may do next or discover if they belong in different segments.
- Create Seamless Cross-Channel Experiences - Customers expect seamless experiences. Their interactions are not with channels but with a brand. With this in mind, it's essential to acknowledge preferences and meet customers in the channels where they prefer to spend their money. How brands orchestrate different channels impacts the overall customer experience. Marketing teams need to ensure that their strategy and technology allow for intricate, 1:1 experiences that are seamless across email, mobile, and other digital channels.
- Let Data Dictate the Direction of the Customer Journeys - When building customer journeys, brands must understand each customer’s context. By observing data over time, marketers can begin to infer a customer's intent and create customer journeys that anticipate and respond to their needs with compelling cross-channel messaging. By analyzing data, brands can develop guardrails along the journey and find moments of opportunity to surprise and delight customers in a way that feels organic.
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When Personalization Is Done Right, the Opportunities Are Huge
Brands that excel in delivering meaningful personalization generate higher revenue and strengthen loyalty. Forrester’s research found that personalization can yield 200% higher year-over-year growth in retention, repeat engagement, and lifetime brand fans. Organizations that can scale personalization strategies across their marketing programs will create a fast-track to long-term loyalty and attract more customers excited to get behind them.
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