Over the course of your brand’s relationship with your customers, it’s in your best interest to make it easy for them to engage with you seamlessly—all the way from click to cash.
This is a key component of omni-channel relevance, of which we’ve spoken in great depths about previously. Moving not only in-step with your customer but also anticipating their next ones is what separates the good from the great digital brands. Inside a successful omni-channel marketing program, all touchpoints are personalized and no opportunities for conversation are left untouched.
In our list below we’ve highlighted five unique events that many companies tend to overlook when it comes to personalization. In a hyper-connected world, today’s consumer isn’t bound to traditional buying paths or sequenced events—it’s all about fulfilling a need when the timing is right for them.
Welcome Campaigns
You only get one shot at a first impression, so remember to roll out the red carpet for all of your newest customers. Whether you’re confirming receipt of a purchase or welcoming new subscribers to your newsletter, immediately utilizing new customer data to personalize your multi-touch welcome campaigns is a great way to “wow” with memorable brand experiences from the start. To take it further, consider the use of multi-channel welcome messages (email, direct mail, in-app, push, and SMS) to strengthen rapport while showing off the high-touch communication experiences they can come to expect.
Pro tip: Incorporate a data collection strategy as part of this campaign (surveys, quizzes, preferences, etc.) to learn more about your customers—feed this back into the elements of your welcome series to build their loyalty.
Transactional Messages
Similar to the welcome campaigns we mentioned above, rethinking your current transactional messaging experience can be an oft-overlooked opportunity for personalization. We tend to think of transactional messages (e.g. shipping notifications, purchase receipts, etc.) as formalities and little more than documentation of actions—but this is flawed logic. Confirmations tend to have high open and read rates and some enhanced personalization here can go a long way. Use these messages to reinforce your brand’s value to help customers shrug off buyer’s remorse. Go above and beyond by integrating dynamic content to promote upsell or add-on items which complement their latest purchases.
Pro tip: Assign secondary objectives (upsell items, loyalty building, social interaction, etc.) to your transactional messages to strengthen the growing relationships with your customers.
Direct Mail
Brands who keep a close eye on their customer’s behavioral data can read the early cues which signal that buying is imminent, and a well-timed mailer is a perfect tool to initiate action. For example, you can experiment by triggering automated mailers which promote specific items (e.g. jeans) once your data signals that certain customers have engaged other similar web or message content (e.g. jean sales). When you consider that 82% of direct mail is read for a minute or more, capitalizing on this window of high engagement can reinforce affinity to your brand—personalize these mailers by applying your most effective online strategies to this offline channel.
Pro tip: Integrate your direct mail efforts in tandem with your campaign emails, mobile messages and social ads for a truly omni-channel experience. Well-timed triggers and outreach sequencing are the foundations of memorable brand experiences.
Promotional Campaigns
Promotional campaigns—everyone sends them. They’re great for hyping up sales, making company or product announcements, launching new services, and the list rolls on. But personalizing these campaigns will take your messages much further. Creating customized messaging or featured content for specific audience segments will help you transform your catch-all outreach into personalized experiences. By curating news, products, or sales to unique audience cohorts, you’re likely to increase engagement, and most importantly, conversions.
Pro tip: Consider the lift generated from artificial intelligence, which can sort through your customer data to automatically determine individualized windows of peak activity and channel interactions to drive maximum engagement.
Unsubscribe Pages
As growth marketers, our world revolves around the nonstop sending of messages and campaign launches. But as we can all attest to, not all customers care to stay looped into all our latest news. When customers unsubscribe from certain content, they are typically taken to a bare-bones subscription center or unsubscribe page. Personalizing these pages using customer-specific content might just make them change their mind. Demonstrating the value they’ve received from your brand or reminding them of the specific things that they (as individuals) will miss out on after they leave may or may not help you win them back, but personalizing these pages ensures they won’t be leaving on a sour note.
Pro tip: Let the personality of your brand shine. Whether customers know you for cuteness, humor, or any other characteristics, weave these elements throughout the language, imagery and , tyling of these pages. Emoting the feeling of “breaking up” with another human is more powerful than the feeling of doing so with a brand.
As you think about your own brand’s end-to-end customer journey, consider revisiting an individual’s unique milestones to see where there are opportunities to add some personal touches.
If you’re interested in learning how your organization can achieve 1:1 personalization at scale, tune into our webinar tomorrow, April 26, at 11 am to hear Forrester Research discuss the importance of omni-channel relevance to today’s consumer.