As an online business scales, its marketing strategies have to change. Small business owners once accustomed to fielding individual inquiries have to pass this job off to someone else, and eventually automated responses — or even no responses — become the main way that a business interacts with prospects.
This is unfortunate, especially given that consumers are increasingly wary of impersonal branding. According to a 2016 report by Accenture, 75% of consumers are more likely to do business with a company that personalizes their experience in more than one way:
But while some businesses are still lagging behind, a fair number of them have also taken note. Since personal interaction with thousands of customers or prospects is impossible, many rely on automation combined with “Big Data” to give customers a much less cookie-cutter experience.
Specifically, data gives companies the opportunity to personalize customer messaging through automatic processes in more than one way —
- By building an average “profile” of prospects, businesses can target individuals who fall into a very narrow range of parameters.
- By tracking website visits, a business can tailor its website to individual visitors, retarget them with personalized ads, and show exactly the products they want to see.
- By segmenting audiences based on their profile and past behavior, marketers can launch highly personalized email marketing campaigns that deliver exactly the right information to exactly the right people.
Being Creepy
Surprisingly, online consumers are not only aware that their information is used by marketers to create a personalized experience, but a majority of them approve of the practice:
However, the story doesn’t end there, because human beings are complex.
“I feel like I’m being tracked because I’ve seen ads for items I’ve bought in the past” — 79% of Hubspot respondents*
Paradoxically, although consumers dislike mass messaging that doesn’t take their personal needs into consideration, they also dislike overly personal messages that border on an invasion of privacy.
They do have a point.
London-based firm Cambridge Analytica has a comprehensive psychological profile of every consumer in the United States, based around 32 characteristics that include Openness, Extraversion and Agreeableness. One thing is for sure: 300+ million people did not agree to such an evaluation.
Moreover, when businesses use this level of data to try being helpful, the results can backfire. In 2012, Target began sending targeted advertisements for maternity clothing, cribs and baby coupons to a teenage girl in Minneapolis. Her father was not impressed, and confronted equally bewildered company personnel at a nearby outlet.
Only later did he learn that Target uses an internal system that tracks the buying patterns of its customers to predict the likelihood of a prospect’s pregnancy — and in this case, it was absolutely correct.
Relevancy vs. Intrusion
It’s easy to speculate on the reasons why some personalization is okay, and some isn’t. For instance, consumers show a clear bias towards companies they have already done business with in the past — and this makes sense, because relationships usually go both ways. It’s weird for a stranger to greet you by name, but not so weird for an acquaintance to do the same thing.
In digital marketing, a good rule of thumb for personalization is relevancy to stages of the marketing funnel. For instance, when using outbound techniques like targeted advertisements or email lists, there is a tremendous range of information to target for — most of it is irrelevant.
By overpersonalizing this early in the marketing process, businesses can not only alienate prospects, but stunt their opportunities for growth by putting themselves into an overly narrow box. As Lauren Leonardi observes,
“ If you fixate too completely on what you know about customers based on their past behavior, you may be creating echo chambers for members of your audience.”
At early stages in the sales funnel, businesses should cast a wider net more intelligently by focusing on key aspects of a target audience that should be discussed carefully and researched thoroughly.
Later on, as prospects become visitors, and visitors become customers, and customers become repeat customers, your business relationship justifies an increasingly more personal approach with every stage.
Listening to Feedback
But more important than any method or strategy for personalization is a company’s willingness to experiment and let customer response determine the best way forward.
CaliberMind CEO Raviv Turner notes that customer response is all about “not being able to control the outcome.” Consumers seem to want contradictory things, because they do: they just want different amounts of each, from different companies, for different reasons.
Giving them a say is what differentiates a stagnant business from a dynamic one. At every stage in the process of bringing personalization to your business model — or dialing it back — using analytics and A/B testing to see what works and what doesn’t makes personalized marketing a two way street.
OMI is dedicated to helping small businesses navigate new marketing technologies more effectively, with practical education from experts across digital marketing fields.
To learn more about integrating personalized approaches into your marketing and finding a balance that works for your customers, consider viewing our brand new courses. For ten days, access to our entire library of classes is completely free.
