How to implement personalization programs. Step 2

For ease of explanation, let’s associate this step with the “acquisition” stage of a customer journey where the primary business objectives are the growth of subscriber and follower base. From a personalization point of view — it’s about collecting unique cross-device ids and applying simple segmentation to increase engagement rates and decrease the costs per acquisition. What do you need to do to bring your costs down? It’s the article about that.

Your knowledge

At this stage, business should acquire and test hypotheses about their customer segments. Would they be Small business owners of convenience stores/spa salons/coffeeshops? Or Enterprises of financial services/SaaS/Hotel chains? Different segments would require some personalized approach in communicating your Reasons to Buy, if you are considering pursuing a fast growth path, of course.

Your Tools

In order to support the best high-level segmented approach to personalization at this stage, you would need a new layer of tools implemented across all aspects of your digital tactics. Your to do list:

Analytics

Analytics tools play a vital role at this stage as it helps to collect data about your segments to test and prove hypotheses and collect data to move to the other stage.

• Implement a proper URL tagging system. Have unified taxonomy for URL tagging, so it would be adopted across different marketing channels properly.
• Start collecting cross-device visitors' ids (email, phone etc) to match them with the unique visitor device id, so, next time when a user comes back to your website you would be able to recognize them. What is it going to be: Email subscription box? Contact us form? Website registration? Trial subscription? Maybe all at once? Make sure those cross-device ids are stored in your analytics solution.
• Implement basic web behavioral tracking: all links, all forms, all cards, all exits, all pages. Then move to specific goal-oriented tracking: evergreen and campaign-specific goals
• Start collecting attributes for the “ided” and “not-ided” visitors like their firmographics, preferences, demographics traits and split them into cohorts based on the left traits.
• Implement a Business intelligence tool that would help you to pull and analyze records about the “ided” and “not-ided” visitors coming through your digital channels.

A subset of analytics tool:

• Implement a basic optimization tool that would help you to run a/b testing and performs message synchronization activities to work towards conversion rate optimization.
• Run simple a/b tests based on the referring channel, campaign, or device. Set up simple message synchronization b/n channel, campaign, or creative and landing page. See the first improvements in your CR/CT/ ER.

Website

At this stage, it’s important to update your website capabilities to meet the growing personalization program needs. Such as:

• Adopt a solution allowing you to quickly and easily roll out and edit the campaign landing pages. Roll out velocity and design flexibility are very important attributes of the tool you are about to choose. The landing page tool should have lead capturing capacity and be compatible with a/b and personalization tool of your choice or have this capability at its core.
• Having a unified design system also would be a huge bonus. As it would help to speed up content production and works as a check-point for content staying on-brand regarding a team.
• The website should have as many cross-device id capturing components implemented as logically possible: contact us form, email subscription box, webinar registration, gated content etc.
• Elements that help to catch personal preferences and personal traits: star ratings, likes/dislikes, profile center, email preference center, etc.
• Run website according to SEO-compliant practices: speed, mobile-friendliness, architecture, sitemaps, etc

Email System

Basic requirements to the email system at this stage: collect emails into the subscriber folder, segment contacts and launch email campaigns.

• Adopt and set up an email deploying system. Interlink the system with a web analytics solution, your CRM, social channels, website, paid ads, data lake, and anything else which does not require a humongous amount of work.
• Place the email subscription boxes: website, landing pages, social media pages and set up “welcome” camping drip.
• Feed CRM contacts to the email list
• Segment list based on your adopted or hypothesized segmentation
• Set up a weekly newsletter to stay in touch with your subscribers. It’s a good opportunity to leverage an email channel to test your hypothesis about message matching for segments as well.

Social

Requirements for social tools at this stage are to have a tool that allows you to manage postings across all of your social accounts from the same place and analyze the results of your paid activities.

• Set up your SMM plan focused on subscriber base growth (a good opportunity to test your segment/message matching hypothesis) and engagement/retention activities.
• Set up activities driving the email subscribers.
• If driving SM activities to your website, update your pixel settings to match the campaign goals.
• Interlink social channels and CRM/Email deployment system where it’s possible.

Webinar platforms

If using webinar strategy as subscriber base strategy, it’s time to properly look into your tool:

• Interlink your webinar platform with an email /CRM platform, so all new contacts are fed into the contact base.
• Set up a templated and UX-approved webinar registration, watch on-demand, and log-in pages.
• Interlink your webinar registration pages with internal analytics and optimization tool.

Paid Ads

• Set up awareness-driven campaigns. That should not be awareness-driven tactics for awareness-sake only. Leverage this opportunity to learn about the channel and segment compatibility (proper segmentation, tracking, and analytics are your BFFs), message, and segment compatibility. Please, do not do it to build a retargeting pool, though, with the death of 3rd party cookies, it’s no longer valued.
• Set up contacts capturing (lead gen) campaigns with an active re-targeting strategy.
• Set up a campaign monitoring dashboard that would allow you to quickly make a decision about the campaign and channel budget allocation.
• Actively leverage analytics and optimization tools to increase conversion rates.

Your People

At this stage of personalization program development, your team could look like that:

1. Digital marketing people who would curate your SMM (paid content, lead generation, work with influencers, content plan), paid activities, SEO, email and messenger marketing, and other digital outreach activities.
2. SMM managers: overseeing entire social media strategies. Objective — subscriber base growth, engagement rate, segments learning
3. Performance managers: overseeing the entire paid program. Objective: email subscription base growth, cost per acquisition decrease.
4. Email managers: entire email strategy program. Objectives: Open rate, unsubscribe rate, click-through rate, email subscription rate.
5. SEO manager: oversees website SEO compliance. Objective: organic traffic growth.
6. Creative team: copy, images, video. Objective: deliver components on time, match with branding and segments
7. Sales managers: are working separately yet and not a part of the entire system. But they play a significant role in building and validating the segmentation hypothesis.
8. Marketing Technology manager: oversees the entire mar-tech stack, tagging taxonomy, analytics, and tools interlinking. Objective: working tools, data collection projects closed.
9. Marketing operations manager: oversees processes b/n marketing, sales, and customer support. Objective: a roadmap of project delivery for the next stage.
10. Customer support manager: oversee incoming requests from customers and customer care. Works in a silo at this stage. Objective: tickets closing velocity.
11. Web developers: support marketing needs from the website needs perspective: building landing page, design system library, web analytics data layer development, contact collection forms implementation. Objectives: tickets closing velocity, projects delivery velocity
12. Research people: oversee customer segmentation and market reaction to the campaigns, working on customer journeys. Objectives: segments flashing out, products positioning strategy per segment, competition tackling strategy
13. Data people: oversee data infrastructure and advanced data analytics. At this stage are working in a silo. Objectives: data infrastructure, digital data incorporation project plan.

If you want to learn more about personalization and/or have a great project in mind you need a consultation on and/or just want to host a fire chat ping me at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marinazub/