Navigating the paradox: authentic personalised marketing automation

Crafting a personalised marketing automation experience

Start with strategy

First, consider personalisation on a strategic level: do you know your audience and their wants and needs? And how will you align your communication to their state of mind? Personas and customer journeys are well-known and commonly used tools to help you answer these questions.

Creating persona’s: think about who your most important customers are. What do they do? What do they love? How do they spend their time? Where do they get their information? You’ll quickly discover you have certain “types” of customers – these are your persona’s. Once you have crafted a few persona’s (it’s okay to get going with just 2 or 3), you can start to align your messaging to their specific profile.
Mapping the customer journey: of course, your audience isn’t always ready to buy. That’s why mapping the customer journey is a great exercise. Think about each stage in the buyer’s journey (awareness, consideration, decision) and each touchpoint with your business, including those after the initial purchase. For an optimal and personalised marketing automation experience, you would create a customer journey for each persona. But if you’re new to this, it’s okay to get going with just a general one. Then, start thinking about your persona’s state of mind at each stage of the journey and how you can attune your messaging to that.

Keep in mind: creating personas and customer journeys based on your own (or your team’s) assumptions is never a good starting point. You will always be biased towards your own business. Therefore, it’s best practice to organise focus groups with a sample of customers so you can learn about their needs and perspectives.

Yes, it takes time to get to know your audience, create persona’s and map customer journeys, but it is essential if you want to ace personalisation. Putting yourself in your audience’s shoes will give you a clear direction for crafting a personalised marketing automation experience, even if it’s a largely automated one.

Decide on tactics

With personas and customer journeys in hand, you can move on to tactics – the ‘how’. This implies using a marketing automation tool that supports you in implementing your strategy. (We won’t go deeper into the tools available on the market right now, but if you’re curious about Salesforce Marketing Cloud, this article explains the differences between MC Engagement and MC Account Engagement.) Most advanced automation tools will enable you in applying these tactics:

Build customer journey flows: you’ve got your customer journeys on paper (or a digital canvas), and now it’s time to translate them into actual automation flows. Start by focusing on those parts of the customer journey that will impact your business the most. Always keep your persona’s and their state of mind in mind to provide the right content at the right time. Don’t just think in emails, marketing automation can be applied cross-channel.
Use personal information (but not too much): addressing leads and customers by their name is common practice these days, but don’t stop there. Think about how you can go one step further. Which information do you have about your audience that you can use to make your messaging more personal? You can be creative here. Just be careful not to overdo it – it may start to feel kind of Big Brothery to the reader if you exaggerate.
Display content dynamically: this relates closely to the previous point. Based on the information you have about your audience (think about their location, their interests, their stage in the customer journey,…), you can dynamically adapt content based on real-time customer interactions.
Let your audience choose: rather than assuming you know what your audience wants, you can simply ask them to disclose their preferences and interests when they opt in. This way, you allow them to actively participate in personalisation. As a result, your messaging will be more relevant and to the point.
Get used to A/B testing: to find out if your approach works and if your messaging resonates with your audience, incorporate the practice of A/B testing in everything you do. Create different versions of your content, measure the results, and optimise. It seems so simple, but you have to make a habit out of it.

This will get you started in working towards a more personalised customer experience. But don’t just get started and then leave it at that – the best thing you can do is to keep optimising. Review your personas and customer journeys regularly (ask yourself if they are they still relevant today) and take a deep dive into your marketing automation tool on a regular basis to re-evaluate the flows, assets, and content you created. If you keep up, your audience will barely notice it’s actually a little robot turning the gears. 😉

Did you know HAVIK can help you to zoom out and tackle personalisation on a strategic level, and zoom in to assist you with the tactics? Feel free to contact us for sparring session.