If you’ve attended any customer marketing conferences in the last decade, it’s very likely you’ve listened to panellists and keynote speakers extolling the virtues of personalisation. Lauding personalisation in marketing has become ubiquitous at these events over the years, and yet, we’re still talking about it as if it’s a new concept. Why? Despite the widely accepted benefits of personalisation, marketing teams are struggling to achieve it. In this blog, we’ll explain what personalisation in marketing is, why it’s important, and what’s stopping marketing teams from doing it more effectively at scale.
What is personalisation in marketing?
Your customers are all unique, so why would you market to them as if they’re all the same?
Consumers today want to feel seen and understood by the brands they love. Personalisation in marketing goes well beyond using a customer’s first name in an email. Rather, sophisticated marketing personalisation aggregates all available data associated with a given customer to curate tailored journeys, experiences, recommendations and offers, ultimately deepening the customer’s relationship and loyalty with your brand. Personalised marketing spans across channels, such as email, social, website, direct mail, push notifications and more.
Why is personalisation important in marketing?
Today’s customer is savvy and tends to be less brand loyal, often shopping around to find the best deals, products and experiences to suit their needs. Time and time again, effective personalisation has proven itself a driving factor behind consumer decision making.
Customers don’t just want personalisation, they expect it. And there are plenty of statistics out there that prove marketing personalisation works; for example, 75% of consumers stated they want to buy from brands that offer personalised digital experiences (Yieldify), and 97% of marketers saw a rise in business outcomes from personalisation (Salesforce).
Benefits of personalisation in marketing
Personalisation in marketing has been proven to boost loyalty, increase purchase frequency and expand the breadth of shop. Not only that, but personalisation drives conversion rates and ROI, turbocharging incremental customer value and revenue.
Boost customer loyalty
Whether or not your business has a traditional loyalty programme in place, personalisation plays an integral role in helping customers feel connected with your brand. Delivering a personalised offer or communication to a particular customer on the verge of lapse might be enough to keep them from churning, but in order to do that, you’ll need to have access to enough data to identify them and understand the types of messages that will keep them engaged.
Ultimately, customers want to build relationships with brands who they feel understand them. Personalisation helps brands embrace the nuance in their relationship with each customer, making them feel seen and valued.
Increase purchase frequency and breadth of shop
Personalisation is a great tool for encouraging more frequent purchases and influencing customers to browse new product categories. An obvious example of this opportunity lies in post-purchase journeys. Using behavioural and transactional data, marketing and CRM teams can deploy AI and predictive modelling to score products on categories based on a given customer’s propensity to buy. With this information at hand, they can then customise that individual’s experience, promoting the most relevant products and categories on the customer’s homepage, post-purchase emails, push notifications and more. By sharing the most relevant products and categories, marketing teams will be more likely to reduce churn and drive that next purchase sooner.
Drive conversion rates and revenue
Sending targeted messages that speak to a customer’s interests and needs increases engagement and brand affinity, ultimately leading to higher conversion rates and increased revenue. In fact, we’ve seen personalisation drive engagement by 20-30%, which leads to increased frequency, larger basket sizes and higher customer lifetime value, ultimately driving incremental revenue.
Successful personalisation marketing examples
When thinking about marketing personalisation, a few standout brands probably come to mind that do it very successfully. Businesses like Spotify, Netflix and Amazon have masterfully leveraged AI to deliver hyper-personalised recommendations at scale that keep their customers engaged and loyal. Plinc uses similar tactics with our clients to create tailored customer experiences. For example, we helped M&S increase the relevancy of their regular email newsletters, using predictive targeting to dynamically personalise the content. It was a simple implementation that consistently drives a 20% uplift in engagement versus non-personalised emails and has resulted in £100ks in incremental revenue.
Why aren’t more businesses effectively personalising at scale?
According to research by McKinsey, 71% of consumers expect brands to personalise their customer interactions. Indeed, our work in personalisation over the years has shown it to be consistently impactful, increasing channel engagements and driving incremental revenue from campaigns. Yet, our latest research finds that only half (53%) of senior B2C marketing professionals feel their brand’s personalisation efforts are sophisticated, and 30% admit they’re not personalising communications at scale across channels at all.
With personalisation being such a hot topic over the last 10+ years (and with the benefits being proven time and again), what’s stopping marketers from doing it successfully?
The devil is in the data
When asked what was holding them back from effective personalisation, our research respondents’ number one answer was accessibility of customer data. This isn’t surprising, as only 23% were confident they had a fully functional Single Customer View.
Without the ability to understand a customer on a singular level, how can you tailor their experience just for them?
What is an SCV, really?
A Single Customer View (SCV) brings together data from both online and offline sources and matches it to a single customer record or unified ID. When the data is joined up in real time (as is the case with Unilyze), marketers can deploy AI for decisioning, advanced audience selection, triggering, and personalised customer journeys and communications. Not to mention, SCVs help marketing and CRM teams gain a clearer picture of their customers’ behaviours, unlocking valuable insight and enabling them to action those insights with agility.
Plinc’s real-time data platform
Unilyze, Plinc’s AI-enhanced, real-time data platform, is the ideal tool for marketing and CRM teams looking to deliver more sophisticated marketing personalisation. With Unilyze, you’ll get a full, continuous Single Customer View, seamlessly joining up in-moment and historical data points from across channels. With codeless data ingestion and plug-and-play channel integrations, Unilyze delivers unparalleled time to value, enabling you to achieve next-gen personalisation and tailored customer experiences fast.
Want to learn how you can use personalisation to unlock new opportunities and drive retention with your campaigns? Get in touch.
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