Personalization – A Double-Edged Sword!

Marketing personalization is promising!

Marketers often adhere to 'personalization strategy' for the brand, i.e offering personalized features for emails, landing pages, SMS and newer marketing channels such as chatbots.

Personalized marketing is transactional. Consumers provide their personal information to the brand in exchange for a valuable and rewarding buying experience. 

With the evolving digital marketing technology and personalization tools, we can now offer targeted campaigns to customers based on their interests, previous buying preferences, demographic information, activity on the web and many more. 

With all the data that we gather from consumers today, we're sitting on a landmine of information which can be either leveraged for creating stronger bonds with customers; sending timely, relevant and valuable information leading to increased sales or blast them with creepy, irrelevant and unnecessary content, thus alienating them from the brand forever.

When a customer agrees to share their personal information to the brand, it means they trust the brand which if broken, can put them under the risk of losing customers forever. 

Here are 3 of my personal experiences with the brand where the personalization and targeted emails went down south. 

1. When a brand makes assumptions based on single interactions or purchases

This is one of the leading brands for selling and buying cars online. I enquired a year back when I was planning to buy a car and all my enquiries were related to ‘buying a car’. Clearly, sending multiple emails on selling the car is targeting the audience with a wrong message and making assumptions based on a single interaction when I was enquiring for entirely different information.  

2. When brands use out-of-date information about their customers

Sure, when I have one!

Although I did enquire for dance classes at this portal, this was uncalled for. This is not just annoying but targeting gone wrong at multiple levels. They have clearly targeted me based on their inaccurate database. 

3. When brands send too many personalized messages

This one’s my favourite. These emails are from one of the online institutes for digital marketing where I subscribed for a certification course a long time back.

The number of times they’ve sent me the emails and the kind of subject lines they’ve used makes it extremely irritating and offending for the end consumer.

Pro Tip: Please remove the customer from your database at least if they haven’t engaged to your zillionth email. 

Personalization is a double-edged sword!

It’s imperative to tailor your strategies fitting to your consumers’ needs and interests. And as the saying goes, too much of a good thing is a bad thing. Your good intentions can surely backfire if you ignore the risks of over personalization.

Exercising caution during personalization and putting yourself in the shoes of your customer will let you make the right decision and help you provide more meaningful and rewarding customer experience.