The Power of Personalization: Gaining Deeper Insights on Your Customers

Personalization sounds very optimistic when you’re working at a start-up and just getting started but for bigger brands its essential part of everything they do.

Why do you want to know your customers?

• Marketing/messaging – personalized messages will engage your customers better
• Will generally perform significantly better
• Your customers & subscribers have a lot of choices around where they opt in to receive messages – if you worked to get their attention you have to optimize your content to what resonates with them.
• Improved ROI
• General brand representation management – personalized messaging will represent your brand better with consistent and relevant messaging.
• Maintain a positive and deliverable environment for your marketing campaigns

What is Personalization?

• Creating a unique experience for every customer based on individual demographics, interests and characteristics or even different triggers.
• Making your customers feel like they are a top priority: treat them like a valued customers, not a number. The email content that your customers receive will be relevant and meaningful to both who they are and how they interact with your site.
• The display and pages will be relevant and make sense to their interests.

Example: MLB.com vs ESPN

MLB.com –> A White Sox fan goes to MLB.com everyday and searches for White Sox scores during the baseball season. Giving that customer to same experience by not personalizing the website and making the fan click through the menus to find White Sox content is frustrating and takes a lot of time.

ESPN.com--> The website recognizes the White Sox fan and shows the White Sox scores right on the homepage and wins over the fan by saving them time and making the experience a lot more straightforward.

Personalization 101: Who are your customers?

• RapLeaf takes an email or postal address and turn it to deep insights on your customers.

Example: BG24@gmail.com–> RapLeaf–> Male, Married with children, owns a home, just bought a new car, and a certain age bracket.

• With this information, you can give this person a much better and relevant experience to keep them happy.
• Not only is the experience essential, but also giving a better first impression.

Effective segmentation

• sending the rights products to the right people.
• Use interest segment data to personalize offers effectively to people based on individuals’ interests, demographics, and more
• Increase your purchasing power by sending them deals they are more likely to buy.

Example: You can identify what offer is better suited to a married man with children vs a young single woman.  However, both segments are probably interested in an great valued offer like an airplane ticket to New York City to stay at the Waldorf Astoria for a weekend for $400.

The way you communicate the offer will dramatically change the way that person responds:

For the married man: come to New York, stay at a great hotel near the theatre and park, rest and relax for a great rate!

For the young single woman:  come to New York and stay at a hotel where the action is, close to great bars and enjoy the city that doesn’t sleep.

Changing the copy and spin on an exact same offer will dramatically increase your ROI.

Case Study #1 : Daily Deal Site

The offer: a mani-pedi package for $20. The company didn’t just send a copy that read ‘you deserve a mani-pedi’ because most men would not respond to that.

Instead, they sent this copy to married men in their segment:

“If you are like other married men you screw up and end up at the dog-house from time to time. Next time don’t send flowers, they die. You wife really wants a mani-pedi so have this ready next time you end up and the dog-house. And by the way, don’t think you’re too manly to get a mani-pedi yourself, your wife would probably like you with better nails”

The result: a 30% lift in sales.

Case Study #2: Big Clothing Retailer

The company was launching a new clothing line and wanted to target three cities in particular, NYC, LA & SF. They identified their most influential customers using first party data such as : how often do they click on emails; how often do they mention the brand using social media.  Using segments they were able to

Case Study #3: Non-Profit Direct Mail Fundraising

The company segmented the postal list based on their likelihood to respond. They identified people who were active online (using social media, clicking on emails) and excluded them from their postal list.

The Result: 210% greater ROI and 121% greater monetary donation than un-segmented control group. They were also able to save significant amounts of money by not mailing those people who were unlikely to respond.

Alluring Logic: Seeing Social ROI by Inviting Your Customers Where You Sell Best

How Personalization Works:

Companies like RapLeaf partner with hundreds of data providers that feed data such as census and public records into a centralized system.  They then sort and connect the dots to process data associated with an email address.

Seeing Social ROI by inviting customers where you sell best

Retail & Social Today:

• High consumer engagement with products: We know that Social drives increased visits to a store and that consumers are going to the Web to gain product knowledge and data prior to shopping in store.
• High spending by brands on social
• Hard to define ROI in social: the huge value in social is data, but how do you use it to your advantage?

Retailers need to start listening and gathering data:

Traditional marketing was a one way conversation and Social  has opened up two way communication and the ability for retailers to listen to what the consumer is telling us: where they are spending their time, their lifestyles, what their favorite activities, what they are sharing, etc.

Social aspects of communicating with brands are driving more consumers to cross shop: these customers are your highest valued customers. Using social to drive traffic to brick and mortar stores is essential to gain the experience and the emotional ties to a brand. Its still an amazing shopping experience to walk into a store and touch and feel products- its the strongest way to gain the trusted advisor relationship with the customer.

Learning how to use data:

The largest value from Social today is DATA – data that is directly shared by the consumer; lifestyle statistics; items shared with friends and others; statements made and posted; feedback; conversations; participation; content.  It’s important to have content that is meaningful on line and in Social that identifies the customer to their social lifestyle and engages them – providing retailers with “data” to personalize the marketing and experience = spending more and visiting more

How can you properly use this data to engage customers, and see social ROI? You need to have the right tools to help you see how to leverage data to create personalized and delightful experiences for your shoppers. Then drive them to your best channels (in this case, in store)

To create these personalized and delightful experiences you need tools that:

• Educate your ambassadors (people reaching out to your customers) on your brand. So they can provide information above and beyond what can be found else where
• Listen to your customers. Help you talk to them about what they want to hear. Engage them on what interests them. Become an opinion that matters to them.
• Catalyze organic 2 way conversations with your customers. Talk to them on their terms. They need to look forward to communication from you Ex. Talk about retailers sending media to consumers who have certain hobbies and how to communicate even when youre not selling

Loyalty is based on trust, relevancy and engagement. The best way to cultivate all these practices is through a clienteling application.

Learning how to segment data:

Segment your customer base to a manageable amount of customers who are actively engaging with your products online in their own time. In a real way. Find top followers.

Find customers with similar characteristics. Example segments:

• Highest spenders
• Most frequent shoppers
• Frequent brand “engagers”

Manage this group and listen to what they are saying. Don’t jump into the conversation on every topic. Seek out questions where you can add value. Learn why they engage and catalyze this action. Then group them based on characteristics that make sense to your brand for later reference.