How to Personalize Your Marketing

In study after study, personalized marketing has been shown to increase conversion rates, improve customer loyalty, boost social sharing, and raise revenue, overall. But if personalized marketing is so good, then why is it that we we don’t see more of it?

We don't see more of it because personalization involves a unique set of customer operations and business strategies based on treating different customers differently, one customer at a time, at scale. So, even with all the interactive channels and computer processing capabilities available today, true one-to-one marketing remains just an aspirational idea for most companies, and not a reality.

After all, the traditional form of marketing, invented and refined throughout the 20th Century, is based on treating all customers the same, depending on whatever “market” is represented by those customers altogether, whether it is a mass market of millions, or just a tiny market segment. No matter how small the segment, however, segmented marketing doesn’t use the same mechanisms and strategies as personalized marketing requires, because segmented marketing just mass marketing to a smaller mass.

Truly personalized, one-to-one marketing starts with customer-specific data or insight to tailor the way each individual customer is treated, or appealed to, or communicated with, one customer at a time. And because of this, the one-to-one marketing process itself becomes interactive. In personalized marketing, each customer’s own behavior or response triggers some customer-specific action or message on the marketer’s part – an action taken or message delivered for the benefit of that single customer. And the only way to do this in a cost-efficient manner is for the marketer to automate its actions, using AI and ML technologies to continually analyze individual customer activities and then mass-customize its own interactions and offers, in a process requiring little or no manual input:?

• Profile A generates Offer X.
• Response B triggers Message Y.
• Click-Through C activates Call-to-Action Z.?

In short, personalized marketing at scale requires digitizing your marketing actions, but at a very fine resolution.?

Essentially, one-to-one marketing is to traditional marketing somewhat like a digital compact disc is to an analog record.

The good news is that the automation capabilities required to do such one-to-one marketing are available from several different vendors today. What’s not readily available, however, is a good source for acquiring more of the knowledge and thinking needed to use these tools proficiently! And in terms of personalization, this knowledge is critical, because the methods, dynamics, and incentives of one-to-one marketing are entirely different from traditional marketing.

This is what my friend and colleague Karl Wirth , whom I’ve written about before , has created with his new Personalization Academy , an all-online course for marketing professionals who want their companies to profit from and maximize the benefits of one-to-one marketing practices. I took this course myself, and I can personally attest to its usefulness and practicality. Nor is the course tied to any particular software vendor or supplier; it will be helpful for any professional using any vendor’s product to facilitate and automate the one-to-one marketing process.

Take this course and in just a few hours I guarantee you’ll be more familiar and comfortable with the whole variety of tactics, methods, and digital tools of personalized marketing. In fact, you could easily become your company’s very own subject matter expert in this field – with a highly valuable expertise in the strategies and tactics your business can use to improve topline revenues by personalizing its customer relationships, at scale.

And the best part is, you can get 20% off the normal price for taking Karl’s new Personalization Academy course , just by using the coupon code Peppers20.

Still not convinced?

Then take a peek at this 2-minute video I recorded to highlight some of the interesting (and enlightening) content included in the Personalization Academy.