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4 Ways to Customize Your Marketing without Annoying

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Group FiO
4 Ways to Customize Your Marketing without Annoying

There’s no denying the fact that the personalized marketing approach is beyond hot right now. Countless market research studies by leading business pundits have told us that people want to receive relevant, customized recommendations from the brands and organizations they’re interested in. And what’s more, they’ve grown to expect it. But when personalization is sloppy, people get annoyed.

Consider the following scenario all to common to many of us: You’ve been online shopping for a new major purchase, let’s say a new oven. You want to ensure you get the best deal on the highest quality product in your price range, so you’ve hit many websites, done lots of consumer reporting research, and signed up for mailing lists and special offers hoping to score a decent coupon on your purchase. Your efforts have paid off, and you finally decide on which unit you’re buying, and even score a 15% off for new customers coupon for a brand that has a storefront near you. 

You’re feeling great about your purchase and looking forward to delivery, and then you open your email and feel a big old pin pop your smart buy balloon.

Maybe you see that the same business has just sent you a 25% coupon for a special oven sale coming up that week. Or maybe they’re following you all around the internet, relentlessly pitching other kitchen appliances to you, and you think to yourself, “Hey, I just made a major purchase from your store; could you lay off for a little bit?” Sometimes it’s that they simply keep marketing ovens to you as if the purchase you just made never happened.

This is because the brand doesn’t have a data empowered platform that LEARNS and adapts the level of personalized content it sends you; to them, you’re either stuck in the silo of “consumer shopping for oven” or are just added to the “kitchen appliance” segment and will now get inundated with content pushing you toward another sale. There are few things more irritating to modern consumers than feeling as if you were just an anonymous purchase to a brand, and it’s one of the most cited reasons as to why a brand loses clientele even though they think they are using personalized messaging correctly.

While there’s no denying that personalized content provides the bricks that build a solid path to true customer loyalty, it’s vital that you use that personalization to delight rather than turn off your customers.

Here are some potential pitfalls to be aware and beware of when it comes to personalized marketing efforts.

  1. Failed Email Campaigns

Have you ever received an email from a business that you can tell messed up on their attempt to personalize their message? Maybe they got your first name wrong (“Hello John” when your name is Ted) or it’s obvious that they were sending out a mass email because the content that is supposed to be just for you is in a different typeface, making it readily identifiable as a mass mail merge off a spreadsheet.

Email marketing is one of the most common areas where marketers employ personalization, and it makes sense why this is: personalized subject lines increase open rates 26%, and email marketing products make it easy to automate the process of filling in your customer’s name and other relevant details. However, the unfortunate side effect of how easy it is to personalize your recipient’s name and targeted information in an email is that it’s also easy to screw the personalization up. While it’s an understandable error, it’s also one of the quickest ways for your business to look like it doesn’t know what it’s doing when it comes to personalization, and this notion can spill over into their opinion about your products and services.

This is why conducting thorough testing of an email campaign is crucial. These personalization issues can be fixed by simply making a habit out of developing an internal test list and sending test emails to your internal team FIRST to identify any hiccups in your presentation. It’s a fast and easy way to cover your bases and goes a long way to protecting the size and sanctity of your mailing list. 

  1. Faulty Retargeting Efforts

Here’s an all-too-familiar scenario to mull over: on multiple occasions, you’ve visited the product page of an item you’re interested in, sadly noticed that it was out of stock, and moved on without thinking too much about it – until ads for the item started following you around for weeks or months after. Every time you have clicked on the ad in hopes that the item in question is finally available for purchase, you see that it is still out of stock.

As consumers, this situation is frustrating enough, but as a business, it’s even more disturbing. Not only does it show your personalization efforts are failing at closing the sales funnel, it also means you’re either spending money on retargeting ads that are pointless.

This is just one of several all-too-familiar issues when it comes to retargeting. Most of us have had the experience of seeing the same ad repeatedly. Something that starts as a convenient reminder can quickly become a creepy annoyance. But you can avoid overwhelming your audience by strategically using time-delayed retargeting, so they get reminders of your product, just not all the time.

The fix for this CX issue is simple IF you have a dynamic CRM in place like Group FIO’s Insight Marketing Platform. To avoid re-targeting on unavailable items, connect a dynamic inventory feed to your marketing campaigns with rules indicating that you do not want products out of stock to show.

Conversely, seeing the same ad follow you around the web is that much more annoying when it’s for a product you already bought. This is yet another personalization problem that can be easily fixed with a tool like FIOs Insight Marketing Platform in place, as it lets you set up different campaigns for people based on the specific actions they’ve taken, such as when they’ve viewed an item, put it in their shopping cart without buying, or already purchased.

If you effectively use these tools, most remarketing errors can be avoided. Be thoughtful about which ads you serve up when so you don’t spend money to annoy or disappoint your audience. Know more about how to Customize Your Marketing without Annoying please visit our blog here: https://www.groupfio.com/4-ways-to-customize-your-marketing-without-annoying/

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