Has personalisation passed its sell by date?
Let's play a game.
Count the number of emails from brands who have updated you on their new COVID-19 protocol, or better yet, offered you their...
Has personalisation passed its sell by date?
Is marketing personalisation soon to be a thing of the past? We weigh up the facts.
Let's play a game.
Count the number of emails from brands who have updated you on their new COVID-19 protocol, or better yet, offered you their support throughout ‘these difficult and unprecedented times’.
Next, subtract the number of emails that have come from brands you regularly interact with, or have subscribed to, or have very recently purchased something from.
What do you get? That’s right, a complete sense
of bewilderment.
With the virus outbreak opening the floodgates to generic
and outdated comms (and potentially a large uptick in GDPR-related enquiries), the overhanging question of marketing personalisation’s relevance and effectiveness has veered into view once again.
Some of you may remember towards the end of last year when Gartner – one of the most widely trusted voices in the worlds of tech, communications and beyond – painted a bleak picture of the future for many marketing managers.
A lot of marketing managers who, before then, felt confident in the knowledge that they had things sussed.
Smearing the lens of many a “2020 vision” statement, their research found that four out of five marketers planned to completely stop investing in personalisation by 2025.
Many of those polled felt that the returns gained were simply not a sufficient counterweight to the time, effort, talent and skill needed to manage customer data and properly use it as part of a detailed personalisation strategy.
AND THAT'S JUST THE WAY THE COOKIE CRUMBLES
And that’s the way the cookie crumbles
Fast-forward to mid-January this year, and we have the (not altogether surprising) news that Google Chrome will be phasing out the use of third-party cookies by 2022, in the interests of protecting the data and privacy of its users, and generally helping to establish a more pleasant web experience for all.
In a very short space of time, the combination of these developments quickly led to many prominent voices at the fore of the marketing industry crying that personalisation will soon perish.
Google Chrome will be phasing out the use of third-party cookies by 2022, in the interests of protecting the data and privacy of its users.
Even those that didn’t believe it would die a couple of months ago are probably a bit less confident following the widespread trend of email marketing faux pas, with everyone from non-subscribers to complete strangers receiving unwarranted COVID-19 statements ‘from the CEO’.
IT'S JUST BUSINESS, NOTHING PERSONAL
It’s just business, nothing personal
From our perspective though, things still aren’t as bleak as the overhanging question of this document may have suggested.
A number of less panicked and therefore less publicised sources still present the practices of personalisation to be in good stead.
- EmailMonks have cited personalised trigger emails based on customer behaviours to be 3x more effective than generic ‘batch and blast’ attempts
- Boston Consulting Group has found that brands offering personalised products, services and experiences achieve up to 3x as much growth as those that don’t
- McKinsey, another global management consulting group, claimed personalisation can improve efficiency by 10-20% while delivering a 10-30% uplift in both revenue and retention.
What’s more, big names such as Starbucks, Cadbury’s and EasyJet have all experienced meteoric gains in their engagement metrics following personalisation-driven campaigns in recent years. And for all the naysayers, yes, these were still meteoric gains relative to their size and budget.
Big names such as Starbucks, Cadbury’s and EasyJet have all experienced meteoric gains
in their engagement metrics following personalisation-driven campaigns in recent years
So, this isn’t the end of personalisation?
For the most part: no, it definitely isn’t. But the answer to the overhanging question of this post is certainly one that bears nuance.
There still appears to be an ongoing sea change in attitudes to personalisation from marketers, customers, and the internet’s main gatekeepers.
Some marketers may have to completely transform their strategy based on these revelations, while some may need to assess whether what they’re doing is worth what they’re investing in it. Others may just need to take a step back and remember that any equipment in a marketer’s arsenal is only as effective as the principles that drive it. For those that believe sending an email blast with the subject line "How we’re supporting our customers during COVID-19" to their entire subscriber list – irrespective of how engaged they are or when they last interacted with your business – is an effective use of personalisation, maybe personalisation is in fact dead in the water.
Any equipment in a marketer’s arsenal is only as effective as the principles that drive it.
Know your cookies
Those that use third-party cookies and rely on the cross-selling of users’ behavioural data will be hit the hardest, and will have to rethink their strategy.
Everyone else can breathe a light sigh of relief, as first-party cookies are here to stay. To quickly clarify: first-party cookies are what allow you to track visitor data that is directly affiliated with your domain.
What you won’t be able to see in a couple of years time is data related to your visitor's behavior on other websites that aren't affiliated with your domain.
A first party cookie is a code that gets generated and stored on your website visitor's computer by default when they visit your site. This is the cookie responsible for remembering passwords, preferences and other basic visitor data.
This means you can still gather a wealth of data allowing you to see what a user did while visiting your website, analyse frequency and patterns around when and why they visit your website, and then construct a tailored marketing strategy around that.
What you won’t be able to see in a couple of years time is data related to your visitor's behaviour on other websites that aren't affiliated with your domain.
Marketing and natural selection
Just because you don’t use third-party cookies doesn’t absolve you from reflecting upon your current game plan.
While personalisation itself will not die, it will have to evolve. And in true Darwinian fashion, its weaker characteristics will have to be left behind in order for the worthy ones to survive.
AI and machine learning will likely continue to lead the way in terms of results. For everyone else, personalisation may become more of a tool for retention, and for closing the gap when customers are a stone's throw from the end of their purchase journey.
What marketers really need to reflect on is firstly whether or not they have the baseline resources required to do it in an impactful way – one that is worth the pounds put in.
BAD PERSONALISATION IS STILL GENERIC
Bad personalisation is still generic
You need in-house talent that can intuitively read someone’s intentions just by looking at their visitor data, and then craft something that resonates with people more as a result of their situational context.
Inserting a custom first name merge field into your subject line is not enough.
In much the same way that inbound marketing was a response to an age of more informed and digitally savvy customers, personalisation must respond to the growing public concern of information security, and the long-standing rejection of marketing that interrupts for interruption's sake.
Marketers need to focus on relevance, and avoid being interruptive at all costs. We must try and understand our customers, rather than simply target them.
A brand that ‘gets’ its customers and presents them with the right information at the right time will always win.
A brand that ‘gets’ its customers and presents them with the right information at the right time will always win.
Personalisation that is carried out as nothing but an elaborate way for a company to pat its own tech progress on the back is doomed to fail.
Personalisation can still be very effective. But it must be done in the right way and for the right reasons to remain so.
