A personalized marketing campaign is a game-changer for a number of reasons. Personalized marketing delivers customized content to recipients, powered by customer data, its analysis, and the use of marketing automation tools or even old-school mechanisms. Consumers demand more personalization throughout the buying journey now more than ever. In fact, 48 percent of marketers know personalization leads to better brand engagement and more sales.
Organizations launch personalized marketing campaigns because they want to connect or engage with leads and customers in a way that is relevant to each one of them. That’s the power of one-to-one marketing. Thanks to the use of marketing technologies, marketing teams from organizations of any size can create scalable customer engagement processes that help them communicate with their customer base delivering customized messages based on their preferences, data, and channel.
Even when new-era laws like Europe’s GDPR became a nightmare for many marketers, customers are comfortable providing personal information when they perceive value from the exchange. This is when a personalized marketing campaign can become an ROI-machine, especially when the organization doesn’t concentrate the efforts in one channel but leverages an omnichannel approach.
This 360-degrees approach helps brands connect with individuals consistently, even through face-to-face interactions. If your personalized marketing campaign isn’t properly tailored to each and every person, you will totally miss the point. Before you continue reading, make sure to download this free checklist to help you with your next personalized video marketing strategy.
Take a look at the following mistakes you should avoid to create a successful personalized marketing campaign:
Personalized Marketing Campaign Common Mistakes
Time and resources
Creating a personalized marketing campaign that makes sense takes time. However, on many occasions, companies make a decision late in the process and manage times that are not realistic with respect to their campaign objectives. Therefore, the execution times are very short, forcing the sacrifice of vital aspects for a successful implementation.
Depending on your approach, you should take into account the communication channel, the production of all the creative assets (including texts, images, videos, audios, landing pages and more), the type of information available about your target audience, the technology, and marketing tools you can afford and with this comes your overall budget.
These aspects, among others, will determine your implementation.
For example, in my experience, with regard to marketing with personalized videos, the area that consumes the most resources and time once a company has decided to implement a personalized marketing campaign is the creative one. Generally, this is due to the lack of experience in this area. Commonly, you’ll need an average of 3 weeks for a custom personalized video template, although we are bringing this time down to hours or days with our upcoming platform and personalized video template editor.
Another area that can be of vital importance and that can also consume many resources, is the technical implementation depending on the type of tools and integrations needed.
In many cases, integrations are necessary to move data securely from one site to another and to create integrated marketing automations based on triggers.
For example, in Pirsonal we have several options to facilitate this process. From around 1700 integrations with third-party tools like Salesforces or Hubspot to a powerful API that any developer can use. This reduces the time considerably.
If there are several parties participating in the technical implementation when needed, make sure they are all aligned. We’ve seen projects taking months or even more than a year because one of the parties had their hands busy with other priorities or simply because of the lack of responsive feedback from clients.
We are bringing these times down by training and working with Pirsonal Certified Partners. These are marketing, creative, advertising and production agencies with a good eye for strategy, technical execution, and creativity that are experts in the video personalization field and with whom we work closely.
Not creating a buyer personas first
It is tempting to just keep the [First Name] field and say “Voilà!”.
I’m sure you can do a lot better.
Let’s start with a buyer persona or even an ideal customer profile.
The first one, the buyer persona, is a key part of any personalized marketing campaign when targeting prospects and leads. A buyer persona is a fictional character created to represent a user type that might use your product or service but also is the person that will consume your marketing messages.
Most personalization campaigns are focused on leads and clients, though, because that’s the target audience you usually know more about.
There is a lot more behind that [First Name] dynamic tag. There is, actually, a person.
The best personalization campaigns use customer data as a pillar to enrich every message and content. DemandGen reported that Thomson Reuter saw a 175% increase in revenue attributed to the use of marketing buyer personas and a 72% reduction in lead conversion time. Here you have an article where I explain why defining your buyer personas is a vital part of any personalized video strategy. Whenever it is possible, base your personalized marketing campaign on what you know about real people to achieve a higher grade of effectiveness.
Use the power of context to create robust anchor messages.
This takes us to the next level…
Creating Irrelevant Personalized Messages
Trust me on this.
Sometimes using customer data is not enough.
You can create personalized messages and still be totally irrelevant to your lead’s needs, context and concerns.
Nowadays almost any company can create a personalized message, which is great and part of our goal at Pirsonal. Creating a buyer persona is only one of the steps to create a personalized marketing campaign focused on the individual. Don’t focus on the tool. Focus on the people.
There are times when using a buyer persona falls short. Remember one of the common mistakes? Yes, the [First Name] one. Creating a personalized marketing campaign requires more than just dynamic tags in your content. Sometimes, using marketing variables will make your personalized emails and even personalized videos more special. But we are not here to be “special” only (trust me, Mike already knows his name) but to see specific business KPIs that require serious attention (but Mike didn’t know that now that he is a new dad his pension plan can get a lot better if he just adds a few more dollars every month).
To understand when and why a buyer persona falls short, we need to go back to the buyer persona definition. Buyer personas are a fictionalized characterization of your best customers based on information about them.
This means that a buyer persona is required to design the general marketing collateral, assets, and more, and the augmented buyer persona is used to create specific messages and media assets depending on the specific characteristics of a person thanks to all the interrelated and gathered information about that individual. It can also be used to redefine other areas like the distribution channel, campaign schedules or product offers (upselling, cross-selling, etc.).
The more contextualized your marketing messages are to the individual, the better. It’s that simple. Take a look at this example about how to create a personalized email for your personalized marketing campaign to know more about this:
Choosing the wrong channel
Most organizations use email to communicate with their leads and customers. Here is the bad news: If your opening rates are horrible, chances are that a campaign with personalized multimedia content won’t do that much. First, you would have to build some trust and engagement.
Choosing the wrong communication channel can cost you a lot of money. Sending personalized emails it’s really cost-effective, but creating personalized videos cost a bit more on average if you compare it to the cost of sending emails. You don’t want to send emails or any other type of message to people that won’t actually read it. Right?
This means that you really need to think twice about what medium you’ll use. Some organizations will have the option to choose a different channel. For example, SMS marketing seems to be back, WhatsApp marketing it’s huge nowadays. In the end, it’s a numbers game. Use what works better for you. In most of the cases, you won’t really have the option to choose, so you’ll need to focus on optimization.
When sending this type of personalized marketing campaign, make sure to know your numbers first. If possible, use channels you can easily track.
To keep it simple, focus on the email open rates and click rates. If the numbers are below the industry average, you better warm up the database first. If your rates are good or decent, consider targeting those that usually open your emails and then those that never do if you still have to communicate with them.
Not double-checking that all the data and creative assets are OK
This one cost me a huge headache and a big “I am really sorry”, and some money.
We have “the power” to create hundreds of thousands of personalized videos, landing pages, calls to action and more automatically. But this power equals the power of making mistakes at scale.
Before hitting “publish”, make sure all the data is 100% OK. Double-check that all the creative assets are the right ones. From dynamic texts to personalized images. Everything.
Let me give you a simple example.
Did you know that there are different ways to write “one thousand” with numbers? In the United States, they would write it as follows: 1,000. However, in Spain they would do it as follows: 1.000. In short, what for some people is a dollar, for others it is a thousand dollars. The legal consequences of such an error can be devastating.
It is extremely important to double-check absolutely everything, especially when creating batch campaigns.
Not re-engaging
Without a doubt, this is the winner.
So you created this absolutely amazing campaign. You double-checked everything. It’s perfect. The audience, hand-crafted. The message, moves hearts, minds, and pockets.
You hit “send”.
That’s it. Campaign sent. Mission accomplished.
Remember the angry man from above? Well, here is his boss…
Always, always, always make sure to create follow-up stages or campaigns based on user behavior. Simply put, if the user hasn’t opened the email, send him another email. If the user hasn’t seen the video or clicked in the call to action, send him another message, and so on. Remember, as marketers, we should be more focused on getting people’s reactions rather than sending attractive campaigns.
Creating a successful personalized marketing campaign takes some time. Marketing automation tools can make the operations really smooth, fast and easy but don’t forget that once we hit “send” it’s quite hard to go back and make corrections, especially if you are targeting hundreds of thousands of individuals.
