How to do Personalized Communication is the most sought after on Internet regarding Personalized Communication. I think I can answer that.
It depends.
Who are you targeting? And what do you want to communicate to them?
First. It all starts with segmenting your target list. You can do this in many ways. Most companies have some kind of CRM system to keep track of their customers, prospects, contact information, sales pipe and more. Hopefully you can do your segmentation in your CRM. Keep your CRM updated and label your contacts with the tags you need.
- Start with the basics, like industry, title, zip code, country, language and so on.
- Purchasing history is valuable. Products or services they are using, if they have support agreement or not, no of support cases, and so on.
- Add education, shoe size, NPS, whatever is relevant, it depends.
What is relevant naturally all depends on what kind of business you are running.
It might be easier do a data dump to excel so you get the information you need for easier overview, and you can see what information you got, and what information is lacking. Data quality is key. Nobody has perfect data, you start with what you got and then you build on that.
Now you can start sorting your target list and identify relevant clusters. Twist, turn and put your analytical thinking on. This might take a while.
Or
You let Solarplexus do the segmentation for you.
You can either connect with your CRM (connectors to Salesforce, Dynamics, HubSpot and Mailchimp available) and import the fields relevant for your segmentation. Or you upload the fields you want to use from excel. Solarplexus does the heavy lifting and showcase your segmentation, you can take it from there and edit it.
With good arguments on how personalization drives performance, you can convince whoever is responsible to keep the records updated to put in the work. It is usually sales responsibility since they are closest to customers and prospects, but this is far from their first priority, they want to close deals. And when it is a joint responsibility, it ends up being nobody’s responsibility. I know so many marketing professionals that sit up burning the midnight oil sweating to clean up their target list before a big send out, because they know it will affect the numbers.
Second. When you have your segmented target list you need to
- Write your content piece and create modifications for each segment. Let’s say you decided to segment on industry, and you are targeting 4 industries, Food & Beverage, Paper & Pulp, Mining and Defence on 4 markets, Germany, Uk, Spain and France. You then have 16 segments. You add three titles, CEO, CFO and CIO, now you have 48 segments.
- Change the header, choose pictures that appeals to your different industries, and roles, place your products in the pictures for 12 segments (based on industries and titles).
- You send it for translation. You’ll get it back a few days later.
- Send it to the local Marketing Managers for proof reading, make some changes.
- Ready to send.
This process takes days and weeks. I have even met a company that said that they stopped doing newsletters and send outs because it is too much of a hassle.
Or
You let Solarplexus create Personalized Content for you.
- You write your content piece (one version) and pull out a picture of your product.
- Upload it to Solarplexus that makes unique versions for all 48 segments. All in local languages. And in line with your brand guidelines.
- You proofread it and make some interactions with the application to change the text to be i.e. funnier, or you make the changes needed yourself.
- Send it to local Marketing Mangers for proof reading.
- You are ready to send.
The whole process to create a project in Solarplexus takes in average 30 minutes.
Since you have personalized your send out, your opening rate and conversion improves. The information you send is relevant and interesting for your audience. You build a stronger relation with your customers that are happier, they increase their spend with you and stay longer.
If you do it the Solarplexus way you have also decreased your workload, are less stressed and can spend time on other quality improving activities.
Your Manager is happier since all numbers are improving.
Win-win for everyone.
