Making It Personal for Every Customer
Second, just because a company is able to personalize something doesn’t mean that it should. In other words, although personalization can be done in many ways, not all personalization efforts will have the same impact. To keep personalization focused as they scale, companies need to consider how many customers they will reach through any given interaction and how essential it is to have personalization available at each of those particular touch points.
Third, limited creative resources are one of the biggest obstacles in personalization efforts, Niemiec notes. She suggests that companies use tools such as structured email templates that can be populated by dynamic content to reduce the amount of effort that personalization at scale takes.
“You need to find the right balance between effort to personalize and the results of that personalization. It’s essential for personalization to deliver ROI; otherwise, it will die,” says Manny Medina, cofounder and CEO of Outreach, a sales enablement platform provider. “Once you have that, you’re ready to scale your program. At this point, you need to be at peace with computers performing personalization on your behalf. Fighting this is like fighting gravity—there’s no other way to scale. Break it into steps and figure out which pieces can be automated and which pieces require a human touch.”
Tyler Lessard, vice president of marketing at Vidyard, providers of an online video platform for businesses, agrees, saying, “Personalization is a journey, not a destination. The opportunities for personalization are countless, so it’s all about prioritizing where to start and building as you go.”
A NOTE ON B2B VS B2C
Experts maintain that although the fundamental principles of personalization do not differ between B2B and B2C companies, channels and customer expectations do. “The concepts are similar but the approaches to personalization tend to differ quite a bit,” Lessard says. “B2C companies will often focus on delivering personalized advertisements to consumers via social media channels and digital advertisements. These are often personalized based on past browsing history and social media behavior. B2B companies tend to focus on personalizing their web content and direct email marketing as their audiences are much more niche and difficult to identify at scale.”
For Medina, the main difference is determined by contract values. “B2C [companies have] much smaller contract values, so the ROI of deep one-to-one personalization just isn’t there. B2C companies have no choice but to extensively automate personalization,” he says. “For B2B companies with high contract values, manual personalization might still be ROI-positive.”
Medina does note, however, that “we will soon reach a point where automation is proven trustworthy and reliable to the masses, and at that point, B2B personalization strategies will look a lot more like B2C.”
The change, he adds, is already afoot. “We’re starting to see this [as] reps who’ve cracked the code on where and when to apply automation are driving better results, closing more business, and making more money,” he says.
Burns notes that different audience types require different strategies, something that “any successful marketing plan” should take into account. He goes on to say that for B2B and B2C companies alike, “it’s about understanding your audience—their needs, expectations, buying habits, and the content that’s right for them—and building out a personalization strategy from there.”
Assistant Editor Sam Del Rowe can be reached at sdelrowe@infotoday.com.