As marketers, we keep trying to find new ways of making our customers feel valued, wanted, loved.
At the most basic, many marketers look at personalization as using someone’s name. They figure that by sticking someone’s name in either the subject line or body copy of the marketing piece, they’ve done their job. They’ve personalized and the piece will triple in response.
But that’s not the same as making our customers feel valued. We need to rethink what will make our customers feel like we understand them. What we can do to make it easier for them to shop or find what they want. It needs to be practical enough to make the experience more enjoyable. More convenient.
I am pretty tired of feeling “tracked”. If I browse a particular sweater, I don’t want to be followed by that sweater for the next 3 months. This has made direct marketers look like voyeurs. People feel that is creepy.
Delighting your customers
I read an article by Jon Reily in Total Retail magazine. I am quoting him: “Delighting customers isn’t about targeting them down to the individual. It’s about providing intuitive value, preserving trust through accurate communications, and solving long-term problems. Marketers who do that will have achieved all the goals personalization was devised to meet.”
Customer understanding is about driving lifetime value, not just a one-time purchase. In other words, if you want to maximize that long-term value, you need to focus on solving your shopper’s core problems associated with your business.
Consider Amazon.com. Amazon is the king of providing recommendations based on past purchases. That’s their way of personalizing promotions. But what has really made Amazon a real giant is that they solve the core customer problem. And that is Speed. People don’t have the time to browse products or track deliveries. They want to know they can find an item fast, order smoothly, and be assured of receiving it in two days. In other words, Amazon’s advantage rests on trust that it will solve the problems of busy customers.
Delighting customers isn’t about targeting them down to the individual. You want to provide intuitive value. This is what preserves customer trust. When a marketers solves someone’s long-term problems, this goes a long way towards making our customers feel valued. Marketers who do that will have achieved all the goals personalization was devised to meet.
Personalize your offer to drive a sale. Show the customer the item they browsed a week ago to drive a conversion today.