The ultimate combo of automation and personalisation

Do you feel like throwing up when you hear terms like ‘auto-responder’, ‘scheduled posts’ or ‘call routing’? If so, it’s because they get hurled at you on a regular basis (pun totally intended).

Now think about the messages you send to your prospects and customers. Do you use the same old tired phrases and buzz words? If so, your audience is probably throwing up, too. If they’re even bothering to read what you’re sending.

Here’s the thing. The more a word is repeated, the less it seems to mean. Yet if you look at the 122,500,453,020 marketing emails being sent every hour (MarketingProfs 2014), you’ll find that 80% of them are probably bland, cookie-cutter messages being shot out in a very robotic fashion.

This doesn’t mean you should stop automating your marketing. It means you should stop making yourself sound like a robot, and stop treating everyone the same.

The fact is, everybody – yourself included – is different. They have a different background, different education, and a different set of fears & frustrations. Factor into this that we live in the 21st century, and we have very little time to spare… and robotic automation just doesn’t cut it any more. Your prospects can sniff it out a mile off, and you won’t get very far.

You could be sending false signals

If you act like a robot, then your audience won’t trust what you have to say. Imagine having a really exciting launch, or a really important announcement to make… but then having nobody click on your email because, frankly, they don’t think that anything you say has any substance.

You want your prospects to pay attention to your brand, and robotic messaging is forcing them to skip over it.

If you’re “just another company” in a person’s newsfeed, eventually you will lose followers and subscribers, until you’re nothing more than a handful of bytes floating around a deserted part of cyber space.

Change how you automate with personalisation

Personalisation takes the robotic element away from your messaging without removing the automation. At Databowl, we have long been fascinated with the prospect of personalization, and how it can help you scale your automation without losing the human touch.

The combination of personalisation and automation is often seen as an elusive dream, like the promise of fusion energy. But it is a reality, and you can have it.

The emergence (and mergence) of exponential data technology gives you a real shot at combining the two. Let’s look at a few of the components that make up this dream combo.

The data management platform

It all starts within your data management platform (DMP).

DMP’s are where you can pull in the personalisation data to cleverly craft a response to the things that you know your customers care about. By using a series of API’s to bring in behavioural, transactional, historical and social data, you can set up categorical sequences to create a more personal feel at scale.

Responses based on real-time behaviour

Using your DMP data is a good starting point, but nothing beats the here and now. Did you know you can respond based on current behaviours in real-time? There is no better way to generate results than by capitalising on what prospects are doing right at this very moment.

For example, if you’re selling a particular brand of car, then real-time click attribution can help you determine a prospect’s current preferences, from engine size and horsepower, to colour and interior trim. This kind of personalisation data is fickle, and can change from one week to the next. Seize the opportunity while it is hot!

Online-offline-online collaboration

Tailored responses based on key information doesn’t just exist online. In fact, the offline world is disproportionately under-valued right now. As much as online is all the rage, the stats for offline sales are huge.

Online still only accounts for 10% of retail sales. Getting outside of our advertising echo chamber, we can see that offline is hugely important to consumers. That’s why you want to cover all bases.

Being able to take the conversation offline, re-appending data to the online marketing communications, and even throwing it back online again, is a clever cycle to master. It will help you close more sales, and respond better to your customer’s needs (without them feeling misunderstood)..

Moment-based personalisation

We talked already about what your customers want right now. But moment-based personalisation is the next step on, and it is why Google search is so successful. This is all about displaying the exact product or information that meets the precise emotions or feelings of a customer or prospect at a specific moment in time. Exactly when they want it. Not two weeks before they want it or two weeks after they want it (although, display network may be operating under different rules ;) ).

In 2013, Jeff Bezos said this to Charlie Rose: “I would define Amazon by our big ideas, which are customer centricity, putting the customer at the centre of everything we do.”

This is what you have to do. And when you operate in a moment-based manner, you are putting the customer slap bang in the very center of everything you are doing with your marketing.

The one thing that consumers want the most, is to be understood. That’s why personal brands are better than corporate ones when battling for territory in marketing cyber space.

If you want the fastest way to layer these into your business, then I recommend reserving a spot for a system demo with Databowl. We will show you the exact steps you need to take to get your lead generation, automation and personalisation engines up and running.

Click here now to reserve your spot and get a front row seat to discover what successful marketers are doing to stay ahead of the curve in 2017.