Personalisation has been around a long time in the world of marketing. Indeed, since the invention of direct mail, the first-person approach has been so heavily used it has made most people entirely immune to its supposed charms.
Yet the abundance of perfunctory personalisation that continues to surround us creates its own opportunities to surprise and delight. I know the owner of a direct retail brand who occasionally takes the time out to handwrite personal thank you notes for inclusion in deliveries to his best customers – a simple but seriously effective technique for communicating the family-run nature of his business as well as its commitment to great customer service.
Needless to say most B2B marketers tend to be interested in more automated solutions and as a result are looking to the wonderful world of digital to do the dirty work – or, as we tend to say these days, deliver a dynamic user experience.
While this is an increasingly innovative area which demands attention, you’ve got to recognise that the bar has been raised incredibly high in this field already. In a world where so many network users access the ultimate in personalised content on a daily if not hourly basis – I am of course referring to Facebook and Twitter – less sophisticated forms of personalisation may struggle to feel personal at all.
This piece sets out to take a somewhat broader view of this topic, offering four ways of achieving a more meaningful approach to personalisation.
1. Don’t mistake ‘personal’ for ‘personality’
The vast majority of personalised B2B communications are nothing of the sort: they are thinly disguised variants of the cold call. As such, they are intrusions into a working life that for most of us is full to overflowing with enough unsolicited communications already. I regularly receive emails that in my Outlook pop-up window appear to have a personal touch – ‘Dear Freddie, What are your plans for lunch?’ was the most recent – but which on closer inspection reveal their complete lack of relevance and, crucially, personality.
So if you’re employing first-name terms, at the very least you’ve got to do two other things. First, deliver something with genuine individuality. Putting the boilerplate approved copy for your product or service to one side, think about how you might talk about these things to a new acquaintance over the dinner table – employing simple language, a bit of humility or humour, some pithy facts. And if you have an opinion, share it. It’s often better to stick your neck out than to play it safe.
And secondly, you need to leverage at least one additional piece of data – name alone just isn’t enough. That might be gender, location, size of business, anything that enables you to connect more meaningfully.
2. Empower your teams
The traditional approach to brand management prefers to narrow the field of possibility and variation in favour of brand consistency and control. As a result it can be at odds with the drive towards personalisation.
Adopting a more sophisticated, active approach to brand management can solve this conundrum. In our work supporting O2’s national sales network, we’ve put in place a system that creates marketing toolkits – encompassing templates for ads, leaflets, html emails, texts and rich messaging – which are derived from centralised campaigns but are also carefully designed to enable local customisation.
It might sound like a brand manager’s nightmare, but ultimately there is more power in relevance than consistency. Enabling local teams to leverage their knowledge within a branded framework can save a lot of money that might otherwise be spent on approving and tracking these communications.
3. Not once but always
These days, CRM has the capacity to be fully integrated across everything you do. Yet it rarely is.
Attending conferences and networking events, for example, it’s extremely common to receive a wealth of personalised communication in the run-up to the event that strives to strike up a rapport and get the conversation going. Yet on the day itself there is rarely any follow-through.
The principle here should be one of using relevant information at every single touch point – not simply where it is necessary or most effective. So to return to my example, were your people given the necessary background information on the clients or leads to whom they’re talking, you could create much more relevant and relationship-building conversations.
4. Dare to differentiate yourself
Think about your brand, offer and services and what differentiates these from your competitors. Then think about how these can help you capture more interesting data than the basics of name, organisation, role, and contact information to create different kinds of segmentation that in turn support your own industry differentiation.
The underlying principle behind all of this is that the best marketing is also the most meaningful – and that to get at meaning, you have to be able see the world through the eyes of your audience.
