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.
Basics need to be fixed across all channels and touchpoints: while the Deutsche Bank example is an whitemail example, web personalization also often falls short of just delivering upon the “no brainers”. For any website engaging in e-commerce, it has become a basic feature of personalization to recommend new offers based on customer’s previous transaction and / or search history – amazon.com has been cited for many years as a champion in that discipline. For an airline it might be a different challenge to anticipate where I would like to spend my next holiday. However, detecting frequently occurring flight patterns, or at least remembering past searches and purchases and using the information in a meaningful manner is no rocket science.
The lufthansa.com screenshot below falls short of the “using the information in a meaningful manner” part. The webpage gives me the information which itineraries I was checking out previously, which might be useful for very recent searches. In this case, the information is simply outdated: in May I am surely not “still searching for itineraries in March”, as the highlighted title suggests.
These are but two very recent examples that highlight the need for fixing the basics of personalization even at seemingly advanced companies. The basics should entail:
- If contact details are known, address the customer personally in all digital or physical mailings
- On webpages use the cookie information to reference to the customer’s recent browsing history – if and only if this information is relevant for the customer
- Give the customer the possibility to state preferences, e.g. regarding the preferred contact channels
- Make sure that the experience across touchpoints is consistent and avoid personalization efforts confined to only one touchpoint
- Incentivize the customer to keep at least basic contact data up-to-date
- Assess if your current customer segmentation method employed is really supporting personalization efforts. If not, take the first-step to needs-based segmentation (e.g. lifecycle stages) – I will elaborate on a later post
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