Personalisation. Personalised marketing. One-to-one marketing. These are just a few of the ways marketers are pushing the boundaries of relevance in today’s digital world. Often coined as the most extreme form of targeted marketing, personalisation refers to targeting a product or service to an individual or very small group of customers, with relevant content at the right time in the customer journey.
Imagine a barista who calls you by name, recalls precisely how you like your morning coffee, understands when you’re likely to buy more and suggests additional products at that time to pique your interest. I recently had such a barista and can attest to the loyalty and additional spend this individualised approach delivers.
More importantly, my barista experience is realised in a much wider context, with significantly positive commercial impact. For example, BMW increased their conversion rate to 30% by personalising MMS messages to 1,200 customers, reminding them to buy winter tyres and netting over $500,000 in revenue in the process. Similarly, since implementing personalisation on their website, Co-operative Travel documented an increase in revenue of 217% and have seen an enviable 95% increase in site visitors.
As a result marketers are – with the help of technology – utilising valuable big data insights to develop and target personalised campaigns to specific customers.
However, personalisation shouldn’t only be utilised for direct consumer interactions. Media partners (affiliates for example) personalisation is often a largely overlooked asset in the customer acquisition cycle, but one that presents significant opportunity.
Personalisation for partners as well as consumers
In the same way personalisation for the consumer is high on the agenda, there’s increasing pressure for modern day affiliate marketers to tailor promotions, product feeds and creative assets to the individual needs of their partners, in the same way personalisation for the consumer is high on the agenda. The modern day performance marketer has to manage a vast range of partners, from content sites and coupon depositories to price comparison websites. As a result it’s paramount to consider the audience and engagement model of each respective partner’s site.
Thankfully, today’s enterprise technology leaders make it possible for affiliate marketers to achieve this level of partner personalisation. Utilising big data-driven platforms helps facilitate an ecosystem where advertisers and their partners reference a central, unified data source and subsequently enhance their partnerships as a result of accurate, real-term conversion and performance data.
Customised partner content enhances consumer experience and spend
To facilitate this customisation, marketers require a technology that enables them to upload multiple personalised product feeds, inventories and associated creative assets, and assign them to partners quickly and without hassle. Partnering with a technology that facilitates this automated workflow ensures that advertisers are able to translate performance-data-insights into actionable optimisation of their active campaigns – a seamless circular workflow.
Ultimately, the key here is to continually test and measure. Ads should be optimised for the needs of a partner, their performance analysed and then re-optimised. This iteration will improve partner performance, campaign performance and in-turn, user experience when interacting with advertisers directly or via one of their trusted partners.
One such example is to feed conversion data back to performance partners in real-time, enabling partners to understand their own performance and optimise their use of advertisements and/or promotions. This builds an ecosystem where personalisation happens on both sides instantaneously. Advertisers can monitor conversion data and actively optimise their campaigns, whilst partners can analyse that same data and personalise it for their individual audience.
Repeating this process, and creating a continuous feedback loop between the consumer, marketer and performance partner in which all stakeholders are informed and influenced by one another achieves a symbiotic relationship that delivers a significantly improved consumer experience, whilst simultaneously increasing revenues of these living-campaigns as a result.
The future is most definitely now, and it’s most definitely personal!