Account Based Marketing or ABM is still an evolving concept being adopted in B2B companies. Earlier B2B companies used to send same messages to all target group and hoping to create interest. Now many of them adopting ABM. Each customer is than treated as a market in itself. Each stakeholder in the account relevant to your service becomes a segment. All messages are than personalized for the market and the segment in it. A dedicated team from technical, marketing and sales department works to ensure they have proper understanding of needs and challenges of the account.

Imagine the CTO of a large prospective tech organization sharing his vision about creating driverless car with latest technology. He will then receive only customized messages about how the company's services will help him achieve his vision. This creates interest as it is customized to the need of the stakeholder.

For many years and with the influence of fast food players like McDonalds - the focus was on efficiency of production to keep a value price for customers. The efficiency would mean faster service while maintaining ROI. So many cost effective restaurants suffered as they could not compete with speed of service and price and never achieved incredible personalized white tablecloth type service. With the low rate of success in the restaurant business - this balance is pivotal.

One family owned restaurant in New Hampshire figured out their secret weapon for personalized service with ROI. Polly's Pancake Parlor has been serving up breakfast and lunch for 81 years and through 4 generations of their family management. Double digit growth and expansion continues. There are multiple reasons for their success - but one is taking personalized service to the next level in a family style restaurant. They serve breakfast all day and specialize in personalized pancakes. You choose from a menu of 8 different blends ie. gingerbread, cornmeal, oatmeal buckwheat etc. The server takes your order and then goes into the kitchen and prepares it! The grills are open concept so you can see it all happen before your eyes. The idea that your server makes your breakfast ensures the ultimate in personalized/customized service (just like Mom used to do), as well as it minimizes communication mistakes from server to kitchen staff. They have virtually no turnover of wait staff because they are treated like family and take pride in the food they prepare and serve. The service is fast - order, prepare, serve....next table....order, prepare, serve....
Now - this may not be possible everywhere due to sanitary regulations - but in New Hampshire, it works.

While using consumers' names is a standard attempt at personalization - going beyond the "Dear Laureen" communications is now necessary.

One great example of this idea comes from the Ritz Carlton in Florida. Of course, hotels are all about service and the experience - but how does the Ritz take personalization to the next level. We had just driven up to the hotel and as we got out of our car to unload and check in - the doorman said - welcome Dr Echols and Ms Schroeder. We were surprised he knew our names as we hadn't checked in and there was no obvious way that he would know our names. Given that my husband and I use different last names - it was more impressive. So, as a marketer, I asked. The doorman said they have a partnership with the local rental car companies and they text him with the names and make of car, knowing that we were staying at the Ritz. Very clever and made a huge impression on us.

About 15% of Google search queries everyday are ones never searched before. Hence, it is practically impossible to think of headlines of text ads that can cater to this.

When I was working at Google a few years ago, we had introduced a simple soution for personalizing the search result to the query, which is very much still very effective today. It is called “Dynamic Search Ads”, in which the system dynamically crawls your website content to match it to the search queries and display relevant results. These are also called keywordless ads, as you do not need to put any keywords, rather only category pages that you want to include or negate.

These are particulary useful for the likes of online publications and parge ecommerce sites, where the content keeps changing dynamically and this is a good way of personalizing the experience on Google search and keeping it really relevant.

1) From a technology perspective many algorithms have been developed to create personalization from demographics to various affinity groups to personal data provided willingly or by other means. The key to ROI is relevance and then relevance at a specific time and situation. E.g. a family restaurant discount is far more relevant when you are on vacation near the restaurant than if you are visiting that city and location when on business.
2) Social media provides a dual function: 1) their databases are just some of the references not only used to determine relevance but also 2) as a media vehicle.
3) Secret weapons, well it is more of understanding the target audience and buyer behavior. There is a logical progression. a) create awareness; b) generate interest; c) stimulate participation to buy at any level (remember we are trying to build a sales pipeline); d) foster immediate participation to buy by those who are ready and willing. This is the path that will lead to loyalty with other variables. Without clear relevance an impulse buy is the path.

There are many examples in the beauty industry, whereby consumers are seeking a personalized recommendation and products for their hair or skin but cannot, or do not want to talk to a live person. It also may not be possible to scale for the company. Many companies have diagnostic tools and relatively simple questionnaires for consumers to take to deliver this personalized result.

For example, one DTC hair care company, Function of Beauty, uses proprietary algorithms developed by MIT engineers to produce personalized hair care products tailored to the consumer's unique hair profile and hair goals.

The point of difference of this brand is all about personalization.
https://www.functionofbeauty.com

What used to be a platform for communicating with friends, is now considered a place for personalized business communication - texting. Millennials prefer texting over email, phone and social media to communicate with businesses, according to a survey by Open Market. What starts with Millennials will certainly expand over time to other age groups.

Still, most businesses aren’t regularly integrating text into their marketing plans; 60% of the 500 millennials polled said they receive five or less texts from businesses each week. Part of text messaging’s appeal to the millennial audience is largely based on convenience, speed and flexibility. Text messages such as fraud alerts and payment reminders from their financial institutions are a great example of this. Almost half of the millennials surveyed—48%—said they’d prefer to receive these types of reminders through the small screen of their smartphone over any other channel.

Appointment reminders and delivery notifications are also popular, with over half of respondents saying they would like to receive these via text over other options. Millennials also want to be able to text businesses on their existing toll-free customer support numbers instead of having to call them for assistance. Unfortunately too many brands are missing the mark. When looking at the demand versus today’s availability of texting by businesses, there’s a wide gap. A fifth of millennials—20%—currently don’t receive any text messages from businesses at all.

Since the millennial age group is notorious for ignoring phone calls and opting out of e-mails, text messaging is an obvious solution that meets their communications preferences. Eighty percent of millennials polled are waiting for the day when they can text to a brand’s 1-800 number, versus calling.This would not only make customer happy, but save the business money in terms of support costs.

Chat bots are an aspect of text messaging that play a huge part in its future, if millennials have anything to do about it. The OpenMarket survey revealed that millennials are looking for the capability to do more than just reply to preferred businesses with one-word responses, they desire a combination of both one-word answers (such as yes, no, help) and natural and personalized language feedback at the level of two-way communication with businesses. The majority of millennials, 60% to be exact, prefer two-way text engagement—citing that it’s easy to use, along with being fast and convenient.

Additionally, I often wonder how well the marketing tech stack is understood - the better Marketing Management understands their process and how the disparate tech stack tools fit in, the higher the ROI will be. AI is/will make value-adding personalization easier both to attract and convert customers -- but, I think many marketers understanding is in the burgeoning stage.

To supplement my previous post, I wanted to highlight some of the features that Sitecore and Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) can offer.
Firstly, as a business, you need to come up with your personas - types of people that visit your site or are types of clients.
Secondly, you'll want to define how your site will be different based on these personas. For instance, will they see more relevant products, blog posts, or things like the information hierarchy (IA), site flow, or even the look and feel of the site could change depending on the user. in this way, the user doesn't know that the experience is being personalized.
Thirdly, you'll need to define how a persona will be assigned. With Sitecore and AEM, you can assign points to a user based on their behaviour, with points working towards a persona. So if a user clicks on something, or visited a page, you can assign points towards that persona. Alternatively, you can personalize based on IP address.

These are just some of the ways to deliver a highly personalized, but not creepy experience to a user on the web.

The key things are to personalize the program elements which are necessary to attract the prospect (getting the “R”), but only personalize what is necessary to keep your costs in line (managing the “I”). Some marketing elements – such as creative treatment are likely too expensive to personalize for a particular B2C prospect but may make economic sense for a larger client.

However, some communication elements can be tailored with less expense. Also, promotional pricing is a ripe tactic to use electronically via dynamic or algorithmic pricing, coupons or discounts. Many of today's platforms support program customization with relative efficiency. Adobe, VWO, Optimizely are platforms that work -- just don't think you can personalize every element of the marketing mix and be efficient -- but you can do some real testing here. You also may find you can create your own 'propensity to buy' models to help you on the front end.

One item I worry about is maintaining the brand concept and the brand positioning as we tailor programs more and more.

Use of social is more of an awareness builder and consideration builder and can be tailored, given the caveats above.. In today’s market, social is a very relevant tool to support any program, personalized or not.

Personalization strategy should not be limited to social media. It can supplement your strategy, but should not be the centre point. It's all about creating a personalized end-to-end experience. Social media you can get targeted ads, but you are actually fairly limited on social media as to the extent of personalization options compared to many Digital Experience Platforms can offer. Platforms like SItecore can deliver an entirely custom web experience to website users. Similarly, Adobe Target, along with AEM can also deliver highly personalized marketing experiences to users. There is really no trade-off with ROI, and in fact, encourages a strong ROI as you know what you are showing your users, or what products you are referring them to are more relevant.
You can do all of this without making it seem creepy because if you do it properly, the user won't even know you have personalized it for them.
When it comes to personalization, marketers need to stop thinking it just means social media ads, recommended posts on a site, or recommended products. Those are just the low hanging fruit.

One interesting way of personalizing the communication and aligning resources accordingly is predictive lead scoring. This helps assign a score to the lead through attributes and signals, and you can personalize your offers and also align your CRM resources accordingly.
Though more popular for B2B, B2C businesses are also using this concept to optimize media spends. For example, if you know that a cerain journey on your website is more likely to result in a purchase, you can spend more money on these users and also show messages customized to the journey they have been through.

Consumers now demand personalized brand experiences. They are sophisticated consumers of content and EXPECT real time solutions, meaningful messaging, and brand content that is authentic and relevant to them. Many consumers are easily turned off by generic messages. Yet - we still see many companies doing it.

So how do you do it. There are tools that provide end to end solutions ie Adobe. They can help with personalization to:

1. Deliver relevant content through an authentic brand experience
2. Use internal and external data to fully understand consumer
3. Connect the right channels in the customer journey at the right time

As a marketer, you will need to:

1. Know your consumer and build a unified profile of them
2. Develop a personalization strategy in your marketing plan
3. Deliver highly personalized content, offers, and recommendations at the right time in their buying decision making process.

While personalization is a great thing to do, overdoing it can sometimes feel creepy or even affect user experience.
We had an interesting experience when we revamped our website using Adobe Experience Manager. On our homepage, we built the ability for it to change the images on the carousel and the first scroll components to change when the person comes back to the homepage, after visiting a page from within the website. We thought this would make the experience more relevant and personalized.
However, in our usability study, we found that the users found it irritating when the tiles on the homepage had changed, because they felt confused and wanted consistency of look and feel.

This was an important lesson learnt : any touchpoint should not behave like it knows it all, or i-know-you-more-than-you-are-comfortable-with, and leave room for the user to explore and decide their options.

Most targeting options on digital are either deterministic in nature or based on clusters, but if you want to talk to an individual, the good old email comes to the rescue.
With advancement in technology, you can slice and dice the database really well for it to well customize the communication and offerings. Right from cart abandonment to loyalty programs, emails can help hyper personalize the messaging.
According to a report by Experian, emails with a personalized messaging had open rates of 18.8% v/s non personalized email open rates of 13%.
For our content portal, the average time spent of people visiting via emailers was 50% more than people visiting through other paid promotions.

When partnering with an Influencer - I research the psychographics of the target audience by social listening. There are tools out there to help facilitate this - but as a marketer - it is helpful to spend the time to directly listen. Generally speaking, the influencer has a style of communication or voice that their listeners relate to and that is why they keep coming back. This is the ultimate in engagement. I have seen these audiences feel very comfortable sharing personal information and asking the influencer for personal recommendations. A good influencer wants to educate and help their audience in whatever their expertise is - so personalized responses are happening and certainly expected!
So the secret weapon is a great influencer who is personable and responsive to their target audience.

Each company spends considerable amount of money to get the target consumer persona and needs define to create an acceptable product outline. This product would then be mapped for a similar cluster of users/consumers in various geographies. This is a relatively less automated field that is now using Social media to gather initial inputs for product definition. You would have received various surveys asking for your likes and dislikes and promising early access to product for participation.

All your communication should be anchored to the definition of product and the relevant target group. Social media is just one channel in the communication plan. It is easier and available 24/7 compared to traditional mediums of print and TV. Social media communication still needs to be relevant for the consumer in context of their needs identified and how your product and service resolves that. Metrics such as customer repeat orders from the target group, referral rates (in case of social media - Sharing of posts) , complaints received about any particular features that can improve future product, etc. than gives you ROI against investments.

Facebook, Google, Apple etc. all does this process very rigorously. That's why google glass went out of production for general consumer but is focusing more on enterprise business. https://isys6621.com/2018/03/13/what-happened-to-google-glass/

At the same time many features from google glass are finding a place in other google offerings.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/8/17332480/google-maps-augmented-reality-directions-walking-ar-street-view-personalized-recommendations-voting

Personalization activities need to build relevance in order for it to be efficient. The data points used to personalize has to bring about the triggers for conversion or action. Connecting the data points in line with the consumer journey is what we should do when personalizing activities.

Personalization is not unique in terms of contributing costs to a campaign. Like any other element, it has to justify itself by generating incremental ROI. Discovering what works for a given company in a given industry is usually a process of testing and learning, piloting and then launching.

Good rules of thumb are that personalization must be value-additive to the customer, either in creating a feeling of genuine connection or in making product/solution offerings more relevant. Personalization for its own sake - particularly in low-touch, commoditized businesses - may not bear fruit, and over-personalization can be creepy and counter-productive.

We're evaluating every touch point for the potential to add value. Example for lending. In direct mail , show how much their home is worth, the equity in it they could tap, and rate they could qualify for. For retargeting, focus on the product/need they have. For email, share specifics on their want/need. These take time to set up, but once live, the cost is a relatively small part of the campaign and delivers a meaningful boost to revenue.

A lot of CRM data becomes available through retail stores, events, forms filled through online promotions and other initiatives. Facebook, Google and a few other ad networks have the option of creating an audience set by uploading the email id’s /phone numbers and if they are registered on these platforms using any of these, this cluster can specifically be targeted with a customized messaging.
Also, using this cluster, a lookalike or a similar audience can be created, which can be used for customer acquisition.

This process of building custom audiences through available data points has resulted in high conversion rates.