3 Reasons You Should Care About People-Based Marketing

One thing that we’ve all been hearing about in the Martech world lately is People-based Marketing.

If you haven’t read much into it, you might be wondering what all the hype is about. What’s so great about People-based Marketing (PBM)?

Let’s start by examining what we’ll refer to as “legacy solutions”. Legacy solutions are anything that rely on older tracking methods like cookies. You’ll find that most of the tools you work with now fall into this category:

• eCommerce platforms
• Ad networks
• Traditional onsite popup and modal providers
• Etc.

So, what’s wrong with legacy solutions? Why is it worth considering spending time, effort, and money to switch to a people-based approach? Why should eCommerce and brand marketers care?

If you’ve ever shared any of these frustrations, then you should be paying close attention to going beyond cookie-based platforms and seriously evaluating a PBM solution:

1. You’re running a promotion for new customers, but your existing customers are getting the offer as well.

2. Customers have learned to “game” your cart abandon system, and they know exactly how to get a discount on every order.

3. Your customers build carts, but when they return to the site their cart is lost.

4. You have a large offline customer base, but you have no idea if they’re actually visiting your website or not.

Have you ever run into any of those pain points? We hear all of these problems and more from our clients on a daily basis. They are extremely frustrating, but there is good news: PBM solutions can help.

Note: If you’re already looking into People-based Marketing solutions, read the 6 Things to Consider Before Investing in People-Based Marketing.

Let’s take a deeper dive into one of these use cases and highlight the difference between legacy marketing platform capabilities and People-based Marketing.

Here’s a scenario:

You represent a home appliance brand. Among the many items you sell, two big items are refrigerators and replacement water filters (for the refrigerators). Right now, your initiative is to increase sales of both of these products.

Jane is a customer that recently purchased your refrigerator at a local store and mailed her warranty in shortly after taking delivery.

Now, the end of this story can play out in one of two ways.

First, here’s how your marketing campaigns might look running on your legacy infrastructure:

1. Jane comes to your website to research water filters a couple months after she got the fridge.
2. Once she arrives on the website, she sees the same offer for the latest fridges that everyone else sees.
3. She ends up ordering a generic filter from Amazon because it’s cheaper.

Next, here’s how the same scenario might look with a strong PBM solution running the show:

1. Jane comes to your online store to research water filters.
2. Jane is identified against the PBM’s network and matched against your CRM. You learn that she has recently registered a fridge.
3. You show her filters for her fridge plus some education about the cheap filters on Amazon (they’re literally filled with recycled trash!) and she decides to purchase a filter from your store.

Quite a difference, right?

Essentially, the value of People-based Marketing boils down to this:

With your legacy solution, at best, you can’t show relevant campaigns to your website visitors. At worst, you’re showing them campaigns that turn them away.

So what exactly is it that gives PBM so much power? Here are the top 3 reasons that make people-based Marketing so much more effective:

1. Legacy solutions rely on cookies & devices, so people are easily lost

Almost all legacy solutions utilize browser cookies, which by nature, are tied to devices. This is the root of the problem.

Cookies were a decent solution up until the late 2000s, when mobile devices exploded on the scene and people went from an average of 1 device or so per person to about 3 now.

The issue is this: devices are finicky. For example, when you browse for things on your phone and then pick up your search on your computer, your information is lost.

Then, compounding the problem further are the cookies themselves. Cookies are also unreliable. People can clear cookies or even block them altogether, which wipes all of the tracking that you had built up, so you’re constantly starting at square one. It’s even worse now that certain platforms, like Apple iOS 11+, now clear out cookies every 24 hours.

In the end, legacy solutions fail because you can’t build a good foundation for targeting. The base elements (cookies and devices) are always changing and, as a result, your data never lasts long enough to be useful.

2. Cookies don’t talk to your CRM

In addition to the short-lived nature of cookies, they also come with another problem: they don’t communicate. A browser cookie on its own is nothing but a small piece of saved information on your device.

That means a stored cookie is worth almost nothing by itself (especially because it probably won’t last long). The problem with legacy solutions is the story pretty much ends there. They use cookies to track whether or not a campaign has fired, for example, or perhaps which pages the visitor has seen.

The issue here is there is no personal context.

So what if Visitor X saw campaign Y and has looked at pages A, B, and C? These cookies can help prevent your marketing tools from doing something stupid, like showing the same campaign over and over, but they can’t query your CRM to see if that visitor is a new or a returning customer — much more useful data.

People-based Marketing solutions can.

They can match a visitor browsing your site against your CRM, ESP, or any other data source. You can then leverage the meaningful data that is returned to decide what marketing campaign to show in the first place. This is what we mean when we say market to people, not cookies.

3. Cookies don’t give you net-new emails

The last major shortfall of legacy solutions — and many inferior PBM solutions! — is that they don’t do anything to help you market to people that you wouldn’t be able to market to ordinarily. They don’t have network of most people in the United States that they can match against to enrich your marketing campaigns.

For example, AddShoppers has a first-party proprietary data network of over 300 million unique users. When visitors come to our clients’ websites, we can identify a large quantity of people that are known to our network, but unknown to the website. Then, because they’re a part of our network, they can enable campaigns like triggered emails once the visitor abandons the website. These are net-new people that they would have never been able to target without our network, because they didn’t have that email in their database yet.

This has a number of advantages, the primary two being increased performance and cost-savings. On the performance side almost all marketers agree that emails convert significantly better than ads. On the cost side, emails are also cheaper to send because you don’t have to buy media.

These are the main reasons that cutting-edge marketers are switching to People-based Marketing solutions. Are you excited about the potential?

Get in touch with us and we’ll show you how to leverage PBM to grow beyond the limitations of your CRM.

If your company is already looking into PBM solutions, don’t miss the 6 Things to Consider Before Investing in People-Based Marketing.

This post originally appears on the AddShoppers blog: https://www.addshoppers.com/blog/3-reasons-you-should-care-about-people-based-marketing