Personalization is about dynamically curating product offers and experiences to each individual customer and context in a seamless manner across channels. Personalization is one of the 10P of Digital Marketing which I introduced in a previous post. It can apparently be exercised at very different levels of maturity. At a high level of maturity, personalization is largely powered by predictive analytics, which combines all sorts of attainable customer data to anticipate the message most relevant to the customer in this very moment and to shape the message (channel, tonality, complexity etc.) according to the individual preferences of the customer. However, by thinking about these advanced forms of personalization, companies often forget that they haven’ fixed the basics yet.
Some days ago I received this letter from Deutsche Bank – I have an account there, they know my details, and the letter was not mass marketing but triggered by a specific trigger: I have not opened some legally binding communication in my digital postbox within a timespan defined – in that case law still demands a bank to send out the communication by whitemail. The letter below is everything but impressive from a personalization point of view. The very least should be to address me in a personal way. Instead, Deutsche Bank entitles me as “Sehr geehrte Frau Kundin, sehr geehrte Herr Kunde”, seemingly neither knowing my name nor gender.
