Personalized Campaigns Are More Important Than Ever

Mass Emails Won’t Cut It

Even with all of the contact options out there, reports still show the vast majority of consumers prefer emails from the companies they do business with over apps or social media. But marketers beware: due to COVID-19, our inboxes have been flooded with emails from every organization we’ve ever worked with and it’s easier to just hit “delete” than to attempt to read most of them.

During a time like this, your typical marketing go-tos may need another look. COVID-19 has changed life as we know it, including how we work and respond to businesses trying to keep their heads above the water.

As a marketer, you still need to reach your customers and prospects, but you don’t want your messaging to get buried with the rest of the emails they’re getting. On a non-COVID-19 day, nearly 300 billion emails are sent and received each day and that figure has only increased in the past couple of months. So, how do you make sure your team’s messaging stands out in a time like this? How do you reach your total addressable market? You’ve got to make it personal.

Related: Do You Know Your Total Addressable Market?

Personalization Is Hard with Your Large Total Addressable Market 

Back in the “good ol’ days,” businesses knew their customers by name. They knew their families, their struggles, and their needs. It was relatively easy to make things personal. Flash forward to today, and the globalization of commercialism has made it nearly impossible to convey that personal touch to your total addressable market without using sophisticated technology. 

Companies can have thousands of people in their customer base and hundreds of thousands more in their total addressable market. Reaching each one at the right time with the right messaging on the right channel is daunting. Many organizations just send out mass emails that hardly inspire people to click. That’s where software comes into play and it’s up to you to get it into the hands of your team.

Data-Driven Campaigns Rule

Scaling personalized campaigns takes data. Fortunately, you have all kinds of data in your organization, but it isn’t typically integrated, making it challenging to leverage. Forbes says, “Integrating all of this data means less time spent on checking which system contains particular data, how it can be extracted and who has access to what.” Even more, untapped data is useless – a tragedy of sorts because it has so much potential to make a difference.

The power of your data lies in your ability to connect your content with your data attributes and channels. This is how you transform a marketing campaign from what you think is a good idea into one that drives measurable results. Leading CMOs understand this, with 65 percent of them saying being a more data-driven organization is a top goal and 60 percent saying they take action based on insights and recommendations from analytics.

You likely already know that data-driven campaigns are always a better idea than simply trying something to see if it works. There’s a lot of risk in a wait-and-see strategy. Things become infinitely clearer and more predictable when you tap into all of the data dispersed across your company’s systems. 

When you and your team have integrated data pulled from various marketing and sales tools, it’s easier to operationalize that data to drive smarter marketing decisions. You have the data you need from the sources you already have to develop highly-relevant, highly-personal campaigns.

The key to any marketing campaign is to balance what matters: messaging, timing, audience, and channel. Marketers can have the greatest messaging in the world, but if it’s delivered to the wrong audience at the wrong time or on a channel they don’t use, it’s a waste of resources and can miss opportunities your competitors may be all to quick to exploit. You can pull out any of these key factors and come up with the same result. Each one of these elements must be carefully considered for a campaign to truly work.

Manually trying to gather needed data to choreograph the ideal campaign targeting your total addressable market is risky. With timing being a key consideration, the longer it takes to pull the data your team thinks they need, the more opportunities are lost. This is why so many companies are using technology to integrate their systems and do the heavy lifting for them. 

Using the right software, like Sureshot, you can connect all of your data sources, such as your CRMs, MAPs, and data warehouses, to give your marketing leaders the ability to see the opportunities per audience and automatically create the right content for them – content your data shows they care about on the channels they prefer. That’s how messaging hits its mark.

Centralized Templates Speed Outbound Marketing

When your team is working on an outbound campaign, you can save them massive amounts of time if they use automated templates that can be utilized across campaigns. These enable your marketing team to scale personalization without consuming so much time and the many resources manual content creation requires. 

What Channel Is Right?

Then, there are the channels. What’s in vogue seems to constantly change and your audience likely uses multiple platforms. If you want a campaign to succeed, you need to make sure your team is where your target audience is, and that may be in multiple places. The same software that integrates your systems also enables your team to connect with customers and prospects on any channel, even new ones, in minutes. Some customer segments may prefer SMS texts, while others need to be reached through their favorite messaging apps. 

Related: Channeling Success with SMS: A Webinar Synopsis

When your team has insight into customer data that reveals what your customers prefer, and then they have access to multi-channel messaging templates, it’s easy and fast to ensure your content gets to the right audience on the right channels. Without software to pull all of this information together, they’re just spinning their wheels.

Content Isn’t All The Same

Marketing is all about getting quality, relevant content into the hands of the right people – the decision-makers and their influencers. How do you know if your content is resonating if your salespeople are unsure of what marketing content is available and how they can optimize it? 

It’s common for marketers to generate ample content but fall victim to common mistakes. They generate and push out content but don’t centralize it, categorize it, or train salespeople on how to leverage it. What ends up happening is salespeople use non-approved content, perhaps outdated content, or send customers and prospects content they don’t care about. 

Salespeople do need content, but they need some guidance. Once again, software like Sureshot integrates your existing but dispersed data with templates to make it much easier to get the right content into the hands of salespeople. By connecting to your content sources and templates with your company’s sales enablement tools, you can supply sales with a quick way to deliver highly-relevant content to their customers and prospects with a click.

There are added benefits in managing content this way. It’s much easier to see which content is useful so content managers can streamline their efforts to focus on higher-value content to save time and money. Marketers can also work with sales to develop and deliver content they are more certain will drive results.