A few tips for personalized outbound messages in the era of full automation
Introduction: The Why and What
If you still think that the role of marketing personalization is overestimated, then you have to know that, according to a survey from Salesforce, 52% of the end consumers expect personalized offers from brands that target them.
No worries, personalization — if implemented correctly! — does not mean more cost and less revenue. Quite the opposite, a study by Kibo Commerce confirmed that companies can expect up to a 300% ROI increase.
What are the main ways to personalize your automated marketing?
The topic is huge. In this article, we focus on selected outbound marketing channels, such as email, SMS, and social media. They all share one technical similarity: The messages are delivered to customers based on their personal contact data.
Tip 1: Personalize Automated Message Templates
Sending marketing messages en masse usually suggests that you use a message template. Such templates need to be personalized, enriched with the personal data that you have about your customers.
The first candidate for such personalization is the customer’s name.
Don’t be sceptical: even if your customer can guess that you are not typing every message manually, their own names are always an eye-catcher.
If you are lucky, and your customers shared with you their birthdays, make sure to use the chance and send out special offers on these days or a few days in advance.
If you do not possess this information, try to think of any anniversaries that have to do with their experience with your brand, such as a year after the first purchase or subscription anniversary.
Their previous purchases can be mentioned in the message even without any forthcoming round date. Simply refer to a similar purchase when you send a special offer.
Tip 2: Invite Your Customers to Reply
A name and a birthday date in the message would make a lot of millennials think that you are just good at keeping and re-using your customer data but not that you are addressing them personally.
None needs your digital monologue.
Invite your recipients to reply. An easy way is to specify some keywords in your message that they can use to respond. This is quite essential for SMS marketing, by the way.
A more complex technique — and more suitable for email marketing — is to invite them to write a free-text message. This will need some additional processing effort on your side. We will get back to it later.
The third way is to add links or buttons into your message that spare your recipients some manual typing and help to increase the response rate.
This flexibility allows you to keep track of dependencies between issues easily.
Tip 3: Send Messages from a Humanly Looking Account
Indeed, this is only possible for email marketing, but still: do not send your personalized message from any generic [email protected] address. This will make your other personalization effort less efficient, as it becomes obvious that you are sending emails in bulk.
The person in your corporate email address must actually exist. This is important for the next best practice for personalizing your automated marketing.
Tip 4: Interact With Customers’ Replies
Keeping the conversation going is the best way to make the communication personal. Surely, dealing with customers’ replies is much more difficult than just sending out messages. How you should address the challenge, depends highly on your general marketing strategy.
For account-based marketing (ABM), we can recommend switching back to manual steering. If you have customers with solid budgets and very specific needs, it would be too risky to outsource the negotiations even to the most sophisticated automation tool.
If you have at least a few accounts that have a lot in common and build a self-sufficient customer segment, you can introduce more message templates at this stage. Templates also make sense if you suggested keywords in your initial message (see one of the previous sections).
For general SMS, email, and social media marketing, if your customers’ replies arrive as free text, you can try to automate the next round by applying AI algorithms. An AI will mine your customers’ replies and compose a new message based on a broader database.
Tip 5: Enhance Your Messages With Video
Marketing personalization is not only about incorporating the recipient’s — the customer’s — personality into the message. It is also about marketers and sales representatives showing up to make the message personal: composed and sent by a living person.
How to add your personality into your marketing and sales message?
Video messages help your customer to understand who is behind the communication and who they are actually talking to. It helps to create trust.
How to Create a Marketing or Sales Video Message With Dadan?
You can shoot your camera or record your screen and add your talking head on the edge of it. Screen captures are particularly interesting for those who work in SaaS marketing or virtual selling in general.
While you are shooting your video, you can write or draw on the recording. It is also possible to add notes to it afterwards.
Every video is automatically saved in an unlimited secure cloud with a few flexible options for restricting access and sharing the video.
You can add your video in the message using the native dadan cloud link, or you can first embed it on your website using dadan SDK and then share the link to the page on your website.
Make marketing human again!
