One to one marketing: how to get started
One to one marketing is a strategy no e-commerce business can afford to not consider anymore. The goal of one2one marketing is all about creating personalized experiences for your customers. In a world today, where a customer can get any product with just one click, they want something more.
They want experiences when they shop online. And a great experiences is separated by a good one by personalization. E-commerce brands need to activate this personalized experience, not only in their marketing, but across the whole customer journey. The reason why? It drives loyalty, new customers, and profit.
In fact, 90% of consumers find personalized marketing content appealing. And it makes sense. You cut through the noise, and you are providing them with what they find relevant, every single time. It makes marketing feel like it is not marketing, but value for them. And that is a winning formula for bringing in customers today.
What is one to one marketing?
Imagine having a personal shopper, who can bring in the right products for you every time. We are talking the right size, the right color, the right price and brand. And now imagine they hold and remind you of those products for when you are most likely to buy.
This can be done everywhere, to any customer at any platform or device today, at least if you work with a Customer Data Platform. This is the very essence of one to one marketing. Personalized experiences with each customer, on a deep level, but at scale.
One to one marketing is focused on a single customer. The idea is to provide a personalized experience by using data and technology to understand your customers and deliver relevant messages that speak directly to them. This can help you build stronger relationships with your customers. Improve the experience they have with your brand and increase sales and profits.
One-to-one marketing has become increasingly important in recent years, as consumers demand more personalized experiences from all e-commerce business. To stand out from competitors in an increasingly crowded marketplace, it’s important that businesses use this type of strategy when communicating with customers on any channel you interact with them.
Who benefits from one to one marketing?
One to one marketing is for all kinds of e-commerce businesses. If you want to grow your small business, or if you’re a large store looking to increase revenue, one-to-one marketing can help. In fact, the best thing about one to one marketing is that it works for everyone—no matter what stage your company is in right now.
You might be thinking that this sounds like something only big companies could afford—but it doesn’t have to be expensive at all! With the right strategy, even startups can create personalized content and make sure their customers know they care about them. It just requires that you have set up a proper data infrastructure with a data warehouse and a CDP.
4 steps towards working with one to one marketing
In order to become a killer at one to one marketing, it requires you nail the 4 steps below. It is the easiest way to execute on it and convert mediocre customers into profitable, valuable customers. And if you are really good, you use that to bring in more top quality customers for your business.
- Data collection
- Segmentation
- Engagement
- Adaptation
1. Data collection
The first step is data collection. You need to be able to collect data on your customers, products, and marketing in order to understand your customers. The data will be key in identifying their behavior, preferences, and needs. Your customer data serves as the foundation of your knowledge.
If you are able to collect, consolidate, and analyze all your data in one platform like a Customer Data Platform, you can build a single customer view of each customer.
This means, unifying all the information you have on one customer, across platforms, channels, devices, and all other touchpoints. With all that data, your CDP can create a profile on each and every customer you have.
A profile you can use to create personalized experiences, from delivering tailormade messaging on the website, emails, apps, push notifications, or wherever you interact with your customers.
This way you can create unique, personalized experiences for all your customers, at scale.
2. Segmentation
Segmentation allows you to group different people and customers based on their preferences, behavior, and demographics. This makes it possible to build campaigns and target specific groups that are ideal for your messaging. One to one marketing requires advanced segmentation and information.
Customer Data Platforms have unique advantages in creating customer audiences and segmenting them based on your customer data. With the best quality of data in first-party data, CDPs can make it easier to activate your audiences.
It will be able to ensure you communicate with the right people, on the right channel, with the right message, at the right time. Every single time, at scale.
Marketing teams often work with outdated segments, overspend on advertising, and send non-personal, irrelevant messages.
If you truly want to connect with your customers, you need to personalize your messaging. It starts with having a CDP being able to synthesize raw data into traits, behaviors, and actions of every single customer.
3. Engagement
Once you have collected your customer data, and segmented them into the different relevant groups, it is time to fulfill the promise above. To use the data to connect with your customers and create better engagement.
It is key to cut through the noise and with the knowledge from the single customer view, you will be able to track their journey and understand what they need in the different stages with you
Based on that you can build marketing strategies to hit with what is most effective for each customer. Remember, the goal is to tailor a personalized experience for each customer, so you can make them feel understood. If you do that, and do it at scale, you are going to beat anyone when it comes to not only retention, but also conversion of new customers.
4. Adaptation
The best thing about data, is the ability to learn from it and adapt. This is the natural next step after engagement. Use the data insights to understand what is working well with the different segments and use that to optimize your marketing and e-commerce efforts. You will need to test things out to figure out how you get the most out of your customers and your marketing, so don’t be afraid to rethink what you did earlier.
The great part about data, is that when working with a Customer Data Platform you will have single source of truth. This means you have one platform where you can collect and learn from all your insights, in a platform where you know you can trust the data. This cuts learning cycles immensely and allows you to beat competition, simply because you will learn what works best faster than others.
What are the benefits of one to one marketing
There are naturally many different benefits to one to one marketing, one of them being the better customer retention and conversion with personalization. But there are many more, so let us take a look at the most important ones.
Valuable insights
One to one marketing is incredibly personal. Therefore, what might work with one segment or customer might not work with another one. The same matter for industries and brands. A one to one marketing strategy gives you unique knowledge based on your first-party data that no one else has access to. That is a competitive advantage worth speaking about! Use it empower your e-commerce and learn from the valuable insights only you have access to. They will be instrumentally important when you want to grow your e-commerce to the next level.
Cost efficiency
One to one marketing is incredibly effective in many ways. Not only will you save money simply by doing more precise, targeted marketing. You will also cut costs in time spend on building campaigns. Or resources invested in analyzing multiple campaigns. Any tool that can help you optimize and cut costs is worth its cost times many. If that tool has machine learning and predictive analytics, you’ve struck gold.
Loyal customers
Customers love personalized experiences, so when you nail the personalization aspect of your e-commerce, you are already far. Personalized experiences leads to better engagement, less churn, less abandoned carts. If you create a personal experience for every customer, they are more likely to become repeat customers and this loyalty is gold today. Not only is the retention cost 5-7 lower than bringing in new customers, you are also able to improve profits on existing customers easier.
Word-of-mouth from loyal customers
Customers are more likely to consider a brand if their network has recommended it to them. Every e-commerce relies on their current customers to act as brand ambassadors and spread the word about the awesome experiences that made them so happy. So nail that personalized one to one marketing strategy, and you will bring in customers who are already excited for what you can give them.
What are the challenges with one to one marketing
It’s not easy to get started. One to one marketing can be costly and time-consuming, because it requires a lot of up-front work. You need to have an extensive data set and the right infrastructure in place. This can take a long time if you’re just starting out.
Filling the gaps with a data warehouse
One to one marketing is more effective when you have a lot of data on hand: The more information about your customers and their preferences you have access to, the better off your one-to-one marketing strategy will be when targeting them individually with specific campaigns or messages; this is why some companies are hesitant about investing heavily into their customer databases until they know how valuable those databases will be for future use cases going forward (like targeted advertisements).
One-to-one marketing has many nuances and can be time consuming. So, working with a customer data platform can help you fill the gaps in your current marketing strategy to reach several important business goals.
One-to-one marketing can help you build stronger relationships with your customers.
One-to-one marketing is a way to communicate with customers on a more personal level. It’s about delivering highly relevant content based on what they’re interested in and doing it in ways that are most convenient for them.
For example, if you’re an ecommerce retailer, you could send customers emails about new products or promotions. You could also send them push notifications when their favorite items go on sale or create personalized ads for them when they visit your site.
In addition to being more effective than mass messaging methods like email newsletters, one-to-one marketing can help you build stronger relationships with your customers by showing them that they matter to you. You’ll be able to see who responds best to certain offers and learn more about their preferences so that over time you can deliver even better experiences based on what works best for each individual person or group of people.
Data is the essential aspect to understanding your customers on a deep enough level to provide one to one marketing. And to get high-quality data in e-commerce, you need a Customer Data Platform like the one from Custimy, who have built a platform specifically for e-commerce.
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