For any strategy to be successful, it is crucial to find the right balance between marketing automation and personalization.
Brands have embraced automation to carry out a spectrum of everyday tasks. According to a survey published by Social Media Today, 75% of marketing teams across industries are using automation tools. The same survey suggests that 61% of marketers are concerned about the lack of personalization due to marketing automation. Another global study by PWC found that as technology advances, most consumers wish brands to use technology as a tool for enhancing personalized support. To simplify their decisions, customers want more human interaction to trust a brand.
That is why it is vital for today’s businesses to strike the right balance between personalization and automation. Companies that go overboard on automation technology can come across as generic and detached. On the other hand, the ones that get too personal with customers can sound intrusive. Brands need to experiment with martech strategies to strike the right balance to maintain a trusting relationship with their customers.
Push Valuable Content Across at the Right Time
Email campaigns are a low-cost, effective way to leverage personalization and automation, but marketers need to be careful about not clogging consumer inboxes. Instead, they should focus more on offering relevant and valuable content that does not involve any intrusive data.
Most consumers are familiar with receiving personalized marketing content based on an action, such as an online purchase, featuring a related service or product. Using transactional data to send personalized automated emails can be less intrusive as it is a natural and expected component of the relationship.
Marketers also use geographical data, such as a customer’s address or zip code, to deliver personalized content, like- creating a segmented list of customers nearby and inviting them for a B2B seminar. Although consumers discourage brands from bombarding them with irrelevant, generic messaging, they also dislike overly personal messages that infringe on their privacy.
Respect and Uphold Consumer Privacy
Research shows that 81% of consumers want brands to know them and understand the right time to approach, but not at the expense of risking their privacy. There is a thin line between highly relevant tactics and content that take marketing personalization too far.
For instance, sending mass emails to consumers with the same promotions or offers is not an effective strategy. Consumer interests vary significantly over time. Marketers need to pay attention to their target audience, considering what would make them feel that the product or service is designed entirely for them. Customer data can be used effectively, but too personalized content can disturb customers, thus putting them off the brand.
Enhancing Customer Experience
Marketers must leverage technology to improve the consumer experience by keeping the human touch alive. For example, the British grocery chain has delivered an exceptional customer experience with its campaign called “This Time It’s Ultra Personalized!” The store used smartphone location data to design personalized offers to customers through their mobile phones as they walked around the store. The campaign not only did promote in-store offers but also helped the company to gain insights about how people navigated the aisles. The brand was able to make improved merchandising decisions to improve its in-store customer experience. Marketers must remember that relationships are crucial to business growth and that automation tools provide additional support.
Giving Automation a Human Touch
There are multiple ways marketers can mix personalization and automation, such as by inserting tags to add customer’s names in emails.
If personalization and automation are expected to be effective, it is crucial to find the right way to balance the two. Overdoing automation can make brand messages seem repetitive, robotic, and irrelevant. Likewise, getting too personal can overwhelm consumers. A successful relationship between consumers and brands ultimately relies on the right blend of both.
