Personalization is Priority: How to Solve Omni-Channel Marketing Pain Points

The road to success is paved with obstacles. These obstacles can hinder continuous growth and make it difficult to reach desired results. How can marketers best combat incoming roadblocks? By identifying their culprit.

The culprit more often than not lies in a lack of true personalization. Movable Ink and Lewis Research found that nearly half of consumers receive inaccurate personalization from a brand or communication that does not fit the customer’s specific needs. Faulty messaging ultimately heightens the risk of customers unsubscribing (26%) or taking their business elsewhere (15%).

Personalized, omni-channel communications are imperative to overall brand success. This being said, barriers tend to keep marketers from producing the most impactful campaigns that drive conversions, ROI, and customer retention. Marketers must first understand what’s standing in their way before they take action. 

Here are the common pain points marketers face when it comes to bringing tailored, 1:1 experiences to customers:

Pain point #1: An Inconsistent Omni-Channel Presence

The marketers who gather data from customers at every digital touchpoint are doing it right. A study found that brands using data from three or more channels in any one campaign earned a 287% higher purchase rate than those using a single channel. However, this data is often isolated in various places such as third-party tech software, making it difficult to be absorbed in a way that is beneficial to the marketer. But don’t fret — this can be avoided. 

For example, if a customer purchases a product through a brand’s app and later browses their website, marketers can use the data gathered from each customer interaction to inform upcoming communications. This helps marketers avoid recommending a product the customer has already purchased. Additionally, it allows for a more streamlined approach to suggesting other products the customer might like based on their purchase history.

The more often a brand showcases relevant and fresh products to the customer based on their unique site behavior and preferences, the more likely the brand will experience increased revenue, strong customer loyalty, and enhanced engagement.

Pain point #2: Lack in Automation

Many marketers have small teams and don’t have the bandwidth to turn big ideas into a reality. Enter automation.

At its core, automation allows for a set-it-and-forget-it approach to marketing. To take it a step further, AI powered personalization creates 1:1 communications automatically scale, resulting in strong work processes, higher engagement, and increased conversions.

For instance, a retail brand released highly-curated editorial campaigns containing only relevant, up-to-date messaging. One of their main focuses was to save time by using an automation tool to eliminate the need to manually change the header image and featured products with each send. By pulling in the most recent product images from their website and implementing data-driven targeting, this retailer saw over $800k in incremental revenue in just three months, and over 18x ROI. The test was so successful they created a new campaign stream using this method of automation.

Pain point #3: Low Sophistication

When creativity feels like it’s gone out the window, it’s important to focus on innovation across channels to attract customers to wake up, engage, and take action. 

For instance, one retail company used a static header image to encourage customers to purchase outerwear, regardless of who they were or what was known about them. With the goal of driving revenue, the retailer started using subscribers’ last browsed category to ensure a more personalized creative experience in the campaign. Instead of the static header image, they now showed outerwear in a snowy, desert, wooded, or beachy area, based on the category the customer had last browsed. With this small change, the retailer saw a 123% lift in revenue, 295% lift in conversion rate, and 195% lift in click rate.

Another way marketers can increase sophistication is through data segmentation so that the most relevant information is consistently displayed. The bombardment of unrelated or off-brand messaging is one of the top reasons customers unsubscribe from a brand’s marketing communications altogether. 

A retailer that serves academic institutions needed to send personalized messaging to students across one hundred universities. Segmenting communication for each school would take a significant amount of time that the team didn’t have, so they turned to automation. The company was able to dynamically pull in the appropriate university logo and products specific to the student’s college, with no manual segmentation necessary. This email was A/B tested against a generic version, and saw a $4,000 lift over the non-personalized messaging.

Now that the common personalization pain points have been identified, how can marketers go about facing them head-on? 

1. Create a clear customer journey across all digital touchpoints. By connecting the omni-channel experience, marketers can effectively meet customer expectations.

2. Switch focus to automation. Production and time-saving wins leave room for more innovation and creativity.

3. Use your marketing tech stack to its full potential. Bring data together to foster the most personalized customer experience.

4. Embrace AI powered personalization. AI is the next step in personalization efforts, ensuring customers stay engaged for the long run.

Interested to see how Movable Ink can relieve your brand’s biggest personalization pain points? Request a demo today.