Personalization—an Overview

Marketing today has evolved into something much more than creating advertising collaterals and sending them to everyone in the company database. Marketers can no longer survive with a blindfolded approach to prospecting. In fact, leading companies are looking to create superior customer experience through personalization. In today’s internet age, prospects are more informed than ever before. They also have a lot of choice when it comes to selecting the right vendor. In order to strike a chord with the prospects in such environment, the marketing team has to focus on establishing a personal, one to one relationship with the prospect. Only building this relationship and cementing it over a period of time will enable the business to gain an edge over competition. In this scenario, Personalization becomes an indispensable tool as it helps you connect better with your audience. In this write-up, we provide you a few tips that you can put into action when looking to introduce personalization into your marketing strategy. This is because the prospect profiles have changed radically.

1. Get data—you cannot create a personalized experience for your prospects unless you understand them. And you can understand your prospects only when you have meaningful prospect data. So the first step towards personalization is to capture prospect data.

2. Rope in technology—Prospects today don’t have the time to answer too many questions. You should use technology to automatically capture prospect preferences and profile them, so that you don’t rely too much on the prospect to provide the information. There are various marketing automation platforms that track prospect behavior and provide you with detailed prospect information.

3. Be customer centric—adopt a customer-centric approach to business, which extends beyond marketing and sales. Think from the customer’s perspective as to how you can help them have a experience with your company that is truly unique and personalized.

4. Centralize data—bring all your functions on a common platform that facilitates easy data exchange. That means, sales team should know about every complaint or suggestion that the customer service team receives, and the marketing should know about every feedback the sales team gets. Easy information exchange will help you approach the customer with more relevant offerings.

5. Use next generation marketing tools—Earlier print advertising was probably the most common method to reach out to prospects. Today, a prospect is everywhere, thanks to Web 2.0. You need to be present at all these various avenues, and build a relationship with them. Be it Social Media Networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Blogs or sites that promote data sharing like YouTube, SlideShare—you need to follow the prospect in a bid to understand their needs.

Personalization can help connect better with your prospects by creating a one-on-one relationship between you and the prospects. Individualizing prospect experience helps you build a more transparent, direct and value adding relationship with your prospects and can help drive sales and generate revenue.