Many of you must be cursing me: I am still fighting to be able to convince my boss that we need to equip ourselves with marketing automation systems and you come along and tell me that we are already beyond that with marketing personalization! Well yes…Yes because once again, in technology, we have managed to focus on a step, that of automation, driven essentially by “internal” business needs and not instead driven by a real consumer need. If we take perhaps the most popular exemplification of this, which is email marketing automation (which is often improperly synonymous with automation), we will find that much of the benefits of automation have as their main focus on being able to streamline internal processes while trying to drive results, often without due regard to the overall customer experience. By overall experience I mean the experience, ideally personalized, experienced by the consumer across all touchpoints.I f you would like to explore this topic further we suggest reading this article: marketing automation is not just email marketing automation. Now we are a step further but it is a worthwhile read!After all, the term automation, with its cold meaning, should have suggested something to us. Several researches in recent years tell us how a personalized experience makes a huge difference in consumer perception.
“By 2018, organizations that have fully invested in all types of personalization will outsell companies that have not by 20 percent.”
Gartner, 2015
Personalized experience, however, certainly does not mean acting with communication that is, yes, automated but has very little that is personalized.
Also because, in this sense, personalization does not only mean to include within the communication a product that the user has recently seen on my site, but to communicate to him taking into account, for example, whether or not he is already my customer, whether or not he has purchased certain product categories, whether or not he lives near one of my stores. Personalizing the consumer experience means first and foremost taking all of these factors into good account.To the market’s partial detriment is the fact that technologically this was not an easy thing to do and that, without the support of a.i., this was all quite complicated….but there is a solution to this today.
Talking about omnichannel marketing personalization of the experience, moreover, means giving due consideration, aligning communication and intervening in real time on all the channels available to us, from the website to live chat, from social to direct communications via email or text message, to in-store interaction with the salesperson.
