Is Batch and Blast Holding You Back?
What’s standing between you and your brand promise of serving an audience of one? We spoke to Sarah Cascone, VP of Marketing at Bluecore, about tackling some common challenges marketers face when executing their personalisation strategy
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WHAT’S THIS STORY ABOUT?
Personalisation is a top marketing priority but executing the strategy can be a challenge. We asked an expert about how to overcome the barriers to personalisation.
- ‘We don’t have the right data’
- ‘Which are the right metrics to show success?’
- ‘Managing inconsistent channel experiences’
- ‘How can we maximise ROI on marketing technology investments?’
Ask any marketer, and personalisation will be one of their top priorities for 2023. But are they able to deliver on this promise?
In fact, according to an Adobe report, 94 per cent of brands want to deliver personalised experiences at scale. Yet, the same cohort admitted they’re only personalising between 25 and 50 per cent of marketing content versus a target of 50 to 75 per cent.
Where does the gap lie, and how can marketers overcome barriers preventing them from offering true value to consumers? We asked Sarah Cascone, VP of Marketing at Bluecore, a retail marketing technology firm, about the best way to navigate the sticky bits;
‘We don’t have the right data’
Sarah: The data challenge that marketers are faced with isn’t as much that they don’t have the right data – it’s that they don’t have access to it. In every industry, businesses and brands are sitting on mountains of data, such as consumer behavioural and product data, but it is all siloed in different places. This forces marketers to pull it together from these separate sources for every campaign, resulting in the dreaded batch and blast method – creating a single email with a single message and sending it to as many people as possible.
Doing this manually restricts brands to slow and static campaigns. In order to release dynamic campaigns that reach consumers wherever they are, marketers need a tech platform that has the ability to pull the company’s relevant vertical-specific data directly into the campaign workflows and templates, so marketers can easily create one-to-one communications.
‘Which are the right metrics to show success?’
Many digital-specific marketers make the mistake of trying to measure success through metrics such as click and open rates. However, click and open rates can be high while conversion is still low. Marketers need to emphasise tracking how often consumers are buying and if they are increasing their Average Order Value (AOV). Those are the metrics to put weight behind since that will result in revenue gain and growth for the company.
‘Managing inconsistent channel experiences’
Most of the time, different channels are managed on different platforms, so it can be hard to view their efficacy holistically. The best technology solution marketers can implement is a platform that allows them to consolidate the different channels for more visibility.
It’s also good for marketers to track which channels are performing best with their customers and budget more spend towards that channel. Going in, a lot of the time, marketers aren’t sure which channel will generate the most revenue, so it helps to implement a solution with a flexible pricing model. Instead of being locked in to the amount of money being spent on each channel, marketers should be able to move around their dollars to ensure that their budget is being placed in the most beneficial area.
‘How can we maximise ROI on marketing technology investments?’
Any technology solution a marketer buys needs to have clear and provable outcomes. There should be analytics and test-and-learn systems built into the platform so that marketers can clearly see incremental revenue gains. Most marketers are spending money on technology in an effort to convert more shoppers.
However, marketers need to ensure that the technology they are putting their money into isn’t just converting shoppers that already would have converted. Efforts and money should be going towards converting shoppers that would not have otherwise, or more importantly, retaining the customers the company already has.
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