To personalise or not to personalise? Is there a line between cool and creepy?
A significant buzzword within marketing, ‘personalisation’ is definitely a hot topic. But with brands wracking their brains for newfangled ways to personalise the customer experience, has anyone taken a step back and put themselves in the customer’s shoes?
To personalise or not to personalise?
With 69 per cent of people receiving emails from retail companies every day, it’s clear that we have to do something a bit different for our marketing to be heard above the noise.
Customer experience is the battleground of modern marketing. Consumers are demanding, picky and quick to express discontent. As marketers we need to make each and every customer journey as seamless as possible.
Remember, each and every one of us is a consumer, and each and every one of us is an individual. To deliver as helpful, useful and seamless a customer experience as possible, we need to understand as much as we can about the people we’re communicating with.
Personalisation is the method of using what information we have on individuals to tailor the interactions we have with them – whether that’s email, direct mail, content on a website or how we talk to them in-store.
In an increasingly data-driven world it’s easy to get swept up in all the hype and get carried away with what you do with such great piles of data. But at what stage do marketers risk over personalising? In the quest for individually tailored interactions, are we annoying customers?
With this in mind Experian Marketing Services commissioned a study on consumer attitudes towards personalisation and combined it with a recent survey of digital marketers to investigate how and where marketers should adopt greater personalisation.
What we found was an understanding of what constitutes relevant personalisation, where it adds value, and – most importantly – at what point marketers risk achieving the exact polar opposite of their intentions by actually damaging the customer experience.
This is what we call The Customer Experience Conundrum – and it’s a danger for brands that don’t think through their use of personalisation or use unreliable data.
In our research 61 per cent of respondents said they’d be ‘put off’ by communications that use incorrect personal details – meaning they won’t respond to that campaign. Furthermore, 49 per cent said they think less of a brand when it happens – implying not just the loss of a potential sale but significant damage to that customer’s view of a brand. A personalised campaign based on inaccurate data may have a slightly higher than average immediate response, but what damage have you done to your relationship with the people whose data was incorrect?
The research also found that 87 per cent of consumers find it acceptable for brands to use their data to personalise communications as long as it is relevant to them or it’s from companies they have recently purchased from. So here’s the first trick – your message needs to be relevant to that customer.
However, it’s not just relevancy – you also need to think long and hard about adding value. When we asked people to choose which types of message they found it most acceptable to personalise, the top two answers were: ‘providing you with discounts on things you have bought in the past’ and ‘providing discounts on your birthday’.
Digging deeper, 53 per cent of respondents said they were happy to receive personalised messages offering them a birthday discount, compared to only 31 per cent who said they agree with personalised messages wishing them a happy birthday without a discount.
This 22 per cent difference shows that not only is relevancy key but value is, too. Value in this instance is a tricky thing to define as it doesn’t have to be monetary. Providing genuinely valuable information or a useful recommendation or reminder could also be described as adding value.
What is relevant and what can be defined as sufficient value can only be judged based on a thorough understanding of who those customers are. Couple this with the intrinsic risks involved with getting personalisation wrong due to insufficient or inaccurate data and it becomes clear that the ability to implement responsible and robust personalisation stems from the strength and your understanding of the data.
The key conclusion, and our advice to marketing teams, is to refrain from using personalisation for personalisation’s sake. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Personalisation strategies need to be well thought out and considered, but above all based on a rich picture of the people you are communicating with.
Start with the data and go from there.
To download a copy of the research, visit www.experian.co.uk/personalisation-report
Matt Dunn, Managing Director, Targeting, Experian Marketing Services
Email: marketing.services@uk.experian.com
Web: www.experian.co.uk/marketingservices
Twitter: @ExperianMkt_UK
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