There’s something refreshing about receiving a personalized marketing message – especially if you find value in it.
Like receiving an email reminding you that there’s still time to buy your valentine a gift for Valentine’s Day, and where the closest store was to your current location. It helped take that anxiety away. It was helpful. It provided you with value.
But not all messages are like this. Based on our research, two-thirds of retailers don’t personalize their emails.
That’s exactly why customer personas are so important. They give marketers a base to build from that will ultimately provide value to their customers. Marketers are able to use the personas to craft messages that are personalized and will resonate with the specific segment they are intended for. The following are four reasons why marketers need to build and implement personas into their CRM strategy.
The marketing world is abuzz with driving positive customer experiences. No better way for a brand to do that than through a structured persona strategy. Customers have preferences and as marketers, we need to consider them. By developing personas, you can provide a personalized customer experience and develop the messaging scenarios across channel.
Take for example, the below image, which depicts four separate personas, each that define a different way of crafting the customer experience for the recipient.
Personas aren’t just about copywriting and what graphics to use. Your customers also interact with certain types of messages in different ways. It’s important that you use personas to inform how you will deliver your message to the recipient.
Personas can help refine your messaging. They help keep your organization keyed into your customers’ needs so that messaging is consistent. This can be reflected by showing the customer that you understand them, that you can provide great things for them, and most importantly, that you as a business are great.
Take this email to the right for example. The marketer, See’s Candies, used what they knew about the persona (that they responded well to urgent messaging) and provided them with an easy way to complete their Valentine’s Day shopping for their partner. This gave the customer value and showed them that See’s Candies understands them and are a great resource.
Customers and marketers can interact with each other in a variety of channels – online and offline. Personas can identify which channels the brand needs to be present in, and how to properly allocate budget and investment into each one.
This includes not just messaging, but whether or not you need to invest in additional technologies or other capital expenditures. This knowledge will help marketers make better informed decisions that can help reduce wasted spend and improve ROI.
As an example, a client of ours, a multichannel online retailer, found that after building their personas one of them was more likely to interact with email as opposed to the direct mail they were sending. Using this new information, they were able to move that segment of 100,000 customers into a digitally-focused campaign. This reduced their costs associated with their direct mail efforts while simultaneously improving purchase rates in this segment by 10%.
Personas make marketers more efficient and can provide a more actionable strategy than going without. Being able to fluidly tailor content and channel strategy based on segments of like-minded individuals will improve your speed to market and inch you closer to reaching the goals you set for your department.
A vast majority of our clients when implementing personas have seen increases in direct mail response rates, email open rates, decreases in customer attrition and increases in purchase rates.
So there you have it. Four great reasons why implementing personas are imperative to your success in marketing. Not only will they help save you time by improving your efficiencies in creating and targeting content, but they’ll also allow you to make smarter decisions with your budget as you look to invest in new channels and technology.
Anthony manages different marketing activities which include content marketing, lead generation, go-to-market strategies, partner marketing strategies, and a host of other responsibilities. Prior to joining Data Axle, he worked in business development and marketing for Experian Marketing Services. His expertise being around data, data processing, and database marketing technologies in both B2C and B2B applications, Anthony brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the marketing group and is looking forward to establishing Data Axle as a leader in the market place.
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