It’s Your Business To Get Personal

You know the old saying, “It’s not personal, it’s business.” That certainly doesn’t apply to digital marketers today. It is your business to get personal. Without personalization, a company and brand will simply be left behind.

One of the biggest hurdles is how to do personalization really well. Here are three ways to start changing how your organization operates in order to help you get personal in the best ways possible.

1. Tests, Tests, and More Tests

Marketing isn’t adverse to testing: Think about market research, focus groups, and more. But, for some reason, testing for digital marketing got pushed aside for quite awhile. Luckily this is changing as more and more marketing organizations embrace A/B testing for campaigns. This is crucial to determine where you are flying high or falling flat with a particular message. What’s more it can be tweaked for increasingly minute segments of your audience, which is of the utmost importance to reach your personalization goals. The combination of testing and personalizing to that audience (and rinse and repeat) is the first step toward success.

2. Take Your Time

We all know the drill—must get the campaign out the door! But not taking the time to do the testing, as we just discussed, and getting your proverbial marketing ducks in a row will cost you in the long run. Keep iterating on each test and improving it for personalization. Most importantly, involve more teams in the process. Marketing can’t be siloed any longer. Setting up and working in a cross-functional capacity will help you further optimize both your testing and ultimate messaging for personalization.

3. Use Your Data Wisely

Of course, you can test, iterate, and segment to your heart’s content, but it’s all for naught if you don’t use your data wisely. Data is everywhere and it holds the power to make or break your personalization goals. While some marketers have traditionally looked at data with dread, it’s actually a pretty exciting thing. Gone are the days of having to wait around for analysis or recommendations. Any marketer can go directly to the data and segment within mere seconds. And, after that, start testing and iterating those emails for true personalization success.