Better informed marketing campaigns can be watershed events for many businesses, but keep it simple and stick to modest goals if you want to see them through.
Like a box full of puppies, a blue sky on the weekend, or world peace, one-to-one marketing is intrinsically great. Who wouldn't want a marketing strategy that tries to make each customer's brand interaction uniquely informed by what you know about that individual, like all the SKUs a customer previously purchased, or color preferences for shoes, interest in golf, or predilection for buying on Wednesdays? I certainly would, if it worked.
Knowledgeable marketers will rightly object to my simplified definition of one-to-one marketing. But having worked with many marketers, there is widespread misunderstanding about this strategy. At iPost, we are repeatedly asked for one-to-one marketing programs to send a unique message to an individual person, like that customer who viewed the size-6 red pumps on the website last Friday. While technically feasible, like world peace, there are so many variables involved that trying to implement a true one-to-one campaign will slow you down more than it will help you succeed. (To clarify, world peace would be great for everyone!)
The matrix of customer data, SKUs, product specifications, purchase histories, and engagement metrics (email clicks and views for example), is complicated and fluid, and it is more than most companies can diagram, much less create a marketing strategy from. While it is easy to imagine outcomes, it's much harder to devise the processes to achieve those outcomes, and even harder to implement them in a repeatable, sustainable fashion.
Unfortunately, the outdated practice of "batching and blasting" one message for all doesn't work any better. OK, you say, but my organization is already way behind in customer engagement and now we're feeling the pinch of the economy. What can I do?
Instead of one-to-one or blast email marketing approaches, what most companies need is an effective, data-driven marketing program that is sustainable and actionable. While it's easy -- and fun -- to criticize, the below guidelines for implementing data-driven marketing will help make your online marketing efforts successful.
Three keys to unlock a winning data-driven marketing strategy:
- Understand the true barriers to implementing your marketing strategy and choose the strategies with the best benefit-to-barrier ratios.
- Pursue strategies that use objective data for all of your customers rather than subjective (self-reported) or incomplete information.
- Implement the strategy in a graduated approach (simple to complex, broader to narrower, general to specific).
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