In today’s market, customers are looking for more than just a good product at the right price. Effective strategies are all about building personal relationships.
The future of marketing is less about drawing attention to your brand and more about demonstrating how well your brand fits into your customers’ lives and everyday needs.
Personalized marketing means seeing your customers as individuals, and directly targeting services or products in a way that uniquely benefits their wishes and motivators. It’s a one-to-one relationship between a brand and a consumer, with tailor-made offers based on customer data.
The difference is about how you approach communication. Imagine a cafe chain using a traditional brand-led marketing strategy to boost overall sales. They might send every customer in their loyalty program a one-time discount on iced coffee. A random proportion of those customers then might stop in and make a purchase because they saw the offer.
If the cafe chain used a personalized marketing strategy, however, they would only send a discount on iced coffee to customers who have bought a cold drink before, or perhaps only to customers in the area of the country going through a heat wave. A customer who always orders a hot matcha latte, however, would get a personalized note about their newly released green tea cookies, which would naturally be more suited to their taste.
Using customer data, the cafe can tap into specific customer’s preferences to create personalized campaigns with effective content.
Why does personalized marketing work?
Technology is helping brands connect on a deeper level with their customers. Personalized marketing and targeted offers show a customer that they’re valued, and that their purchasing choices will lead to better deals.
For customers, customized offers are more useful and relevant. Technology makes this possible through AI personalization and Machine Learning (ML). These tools use large data management platforms to identify customer preferences and pinpoint behavioral patterns.
This allows brands to implement personalized marketing campaigns across all channels – from emails to app notifications to social media plugs. Using a one-to-one tactic, rather than generic advertising, brands can target customers more efficiently and build stronger loyalty over time.
Everything You Need To Know About Personalized Customer Engagement
Here’s what you need to know right now about personalization and building better relationships with future customers.
What a successful personalized marketing strategy can achieve
It’s about more than just boosting sales. Personalized marketing is also about improving the customer experience and finding ways to grow your business without sacrificing the heart of good hospitality service.
John Laporte, North America TASK President emphasizes the importance of experience when it comes to technology innovation. “As with any big change in your service or business, investing in a digital stack should start from the place of understanding your customers’ needs and how you can better support them.”
Personalization is the bridge between brands and individual customer journeys. If done well, it allows businesses of all sizes to effectively tap into each customer’s specific experience and make it even better.
Better alignment with customer preferences
Marketing personalization uses a data management platform to produce individual messaging based on comprehensive insights into customer behavior or purchase history. This all starts with collecting, storing, and accurately analyzing customer data and transaction data to build a foundation of knowledge about who your customers are, and what they really want to see from your brand and service.
Using smart technology, the system becomes more accurate over time. As more customers come to your brand, and more customers offer their feedback through your loyalty program or other digital channels, your size and breadth of your data will grow. With more information, you can make better, more accurate decisions and improve your personalization strategy.
Better value-for-money offerings
By matching product features with customer preferences, one-to-one marketing is a more effective approach than general promotional campaigns.
Imagine seeing a poster while walking into the office one morning on the side of the road advertising ice cream. While it may catch your eye, that single interaction is unlikely to entice you to purchase ice cream from that vendor immediately. Now imagine if you received a direct offer with a discount on your favorite flavor, right after you finished dinner around the corner. That’s a much harder offer to refuse, and fills a much more relevant and personal need.
Making more offers that directly acknowledge and support the preferences and routines of individual customers is far more likely to prove effective for increasing sales. Research has shown that brands who pursue personalized marketing efforts see a 40% boost in revenue compared to average growth margins.
Enhanced brand reputation
One-to-one marketing is about curating more personalized experiences for customers and keeping them coming back to your brand again and again.
Effective personalization is all about sending the most relevant message to each customer based on quality behavioral data. Developing individual relationships through customized offers helps build stronger brand awareness and long-term loyalty from more customers.
Having a higher customer retention rate and better engagement with your loyalty program will ultimately help your brand develop a better reputation. No marketing is more effective than word of mouth and personal referrals, which is why it’s so essential to continuously keep up and improve the experience for your current customers.
Faster lead generation for prospective customers
Enhanced personalized content is designed to captivate potential customers at a quicker rate. If there’s one thing that marketers agree on, it’s that making an experience more personal helps keep new customers interested. In fact, according to Forbes, nearly 98 percent of marketing professionals say personalization advances brand-to-customer relationships.
Building a loyal customer base is pivotal for brands, and using a successful personalized marketing strategy can be a more efficient route to reaching conversion targets.
Better customer relationship management
Building a reputation as a relationship-oriented brand doesn’t happen overnight. Generating interest leads to engagement, which then builds awareness and general consumer interest. From personalized emails with targeted subject lines to social media marketing based on customer information, this style of marketing helps generate relevant content with minimal effort required from brands.
Once a customer is interested in your brand, the focus should turn to showing them that you understand their needs. Customer relationship management is about being a reliable source of comfort and familiarity and becoming part of a customer’s routine.
Keep up with cultural market trends
In today’s highly competitive market, QSRs can’t afford not to invest in one-to-one marketing strategies. Personalization is now so common among hospitality businesses that 71 percent of customers say that they expect brands to make customized service efforts.
In an era flooded with choice, and with companies using the same script to promote irrelevant content, it’s essential to show patrons that your business wants to provide a phenomenal experience.
What will continue to push your brand forward, beyond the competition, is taking personalization to the next level. Going above and beyond customer expectations, and finding ways to make their experience even more convenient and enjoyable will keep your brand at the forefront of customers’ minds.
Engage Your Guest Using Omnichannel Integration and Personalization
Restaurant guests expect a personalized digital experience. Innovating brands must connect with guests to introduce changes that drive both sales and profit.
The challenges of personalized marketing
While one-to-one marketing can demonstrate significant benefits for companies, there are some challenges to consider.
These are the biggest hurdles to overcome when considering an investment in personalized marketing strategies:
- Having enough data to produce effective personalization
- Accurately mapping the customer journey suited best to your brand and goals
- Striking a balance between helpful customer communication and pushy up-selling
- Employing an effective tool for data collection without mismanaging sensitive information
Tackling these areas is crucial to a successful digital transformation towards personalized offerings. The first step is investing in top-of-the-line technology and working with industry experts to carefully transition your particular brand into the digital future.
The other essential part of digital transformation is unpacking how new changes in your marketing strategy will affect the customer experience. As TASK’s President of North America John Laporte explains, “Let experience lead the way. Whatever your initiative is in business or technology, it must also improve the customer experience for it to be effective.”
Conceptualizing a Personalized Marketing Strategy
An effective strategy starts with a clear path towards your vision of success. You should have the answers to the who, where, why and how of what personalized marketing should achieve for your business.
The next step is putting together the people, processes, and technology to work towards a superior customer journey and an efficient marketing strategy. That’s where TASK can help.
The team at TASK are experts in helping businesses navigate and implement new technology. Using a centralized POS system, TASK software is designed for seamless digital integration that helps businesses grow and improve their customer journey. And with a digital stack to support extensive data analysis and performance benchmarking, TASK can support your brand to build meaningful marketing outcomes at the same time.
As Laporte explains, “TASK enables an omnichannel solution for personalization and data-driven insight, allowing brands to maximize their relationship with customers.”
Talk to the expert team at TASK and discover what personalized marketing can do for your brand.
