Personalization isn’t exactly new to the world of marketing but, getting a perfect balance is still something that eludes many. Whether you are simply adding your customers’ first name to the top of an email or hyper personalizing all of your content based on historic interactions and preference data, making the experience consistent on all touch points can be a challenge.
Personalization in Adobe, Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Tealium
Marketing technology stacks such as Adobe’s Experience Cloud and the Salesforce Marketing Cloud allow you to personalize your marketing content for every single customer on a 1:1 basis. Since the respective clouds also integrate with the technologies within them it means that level of personalization can be consistent across every channel the stack serves. For example, an email could be sent from Adobe Campaign that contains a personalized offer based on previous purchases or preference data. By passing this information to Adobe Audience Manager and Adobe Target means that the same offer can be presented when that customer visits your website or external websites that contain impression display ads.
This is fine when working within a single marketing technology stack but many businesses approach their marketing with a best in breed approach. This often means you realize greater benefits within specific areas of the marketing suite but compromise on integration capabilities and creates data silos.
A CDP such as Tealium is designed to break down those integration barriers and remove the data silo challenge essentially bringing you to a position when you can create your own marketing technology cloud regardless of vendor. So if you choose to send out a personalized email from Salesforce Marketing Cloud, prefer to analyze the results using Adobe Analytics and like to manage your CRM using Microsoft Dynamics then this is all able to be a consistent customer experience through using Tealium.
Effective marketing personalization & retargeting
The key to personalizing effectively is to be consistent and relevant at all times to every single customer. This means your marketing technology and any touchpoint that a customer may have with your business needs to be up to date as soon as anything changes for each customer or prospect.
It also means your whole marketing schedule needs to be considered and the communication that a customer is receiving needs to mirror their recent behavior. There is no point sending a blanket email to your customers with an offer for product A when some of them already added product B to their basket and abandoned the purchase.
5 tips for effective personalization
- Use your data to your advantage – Your business will have a wealth of data available. Ensure you can break down data silo’s and get that true level of understanding about your customer so you personalize with relevant and timely content.
- Understand your customers – When you truly understand the different characteristics of your customers you can build out custom audiences and segments with similar traits, preferences and interests. This knowledge distributed across your marketing landscape makes for powerful personalization potential.
- Keep it consistent – Ensure any personalization and, as an extension, the experience you are providing your customers is consistent anywhere they look. This means if you are sending them a highly personalized email based on browsing and previous purchase behavior make sure you are informing your mobile app and website tools to provide the same content.
- Don’t take it too far – Don’t give a creepy level of personalization and be smart with the language used within your personalization. “We saw you looking at this product” isn’t likely to give you much favor in terms of brand advocacy. Instead use the information to improve your customer profile and leverage more subtle retargeting opportunities.
- Keep your overall marketing and business strategy in mind – Any personalization or retargeting should be used to enhance your existing marketing approach. Similarly use up to date information to keep every communication relevant right up to the last interaction a customer had with you.
If you’d like some help with marketing personalization, be it via Adobe Marketing Cloud, Tealium or Salesforce Marketing Cloud, contact our experts today.