What it means to be meaningful in marketing
The future of email marketing is evolving to be hyper-personalised, and AI is accelerating new methods for marketers to tailor their communications for better engagement and impact. However, it’s important for marketers to explore ways to balance personalisation while maintaining user privacy for safe, long-lasting success. Intuit Mailchimp's global head of ecosystem, Ken Chestnut, explores.
In marketing, personalisation is paramount. We know that 73% of customers feel more valued receiving personalised emails, with 70% appreciating non-sales emails as compassionate and sincere. Being meaningful entails more than simply promoting products or services. It involves creating experiences that hold value for individuals. When audiences feel understood by a brand, they are more likely to remain loyal to and advocate for it.
Brands have recognised the importance of tailoring their communications to individual preferences for some time. Addressing customers by name, recommending products based on their past purchases, and providing relevant content is now table stakes.
The evolving best practice is now hyper-personalised marketing. Using AI to leverage behavioural data can allow marketers to anticipate customers’ needs more accurately and deliver more relevant experiences across various touch points.
However, companies must remember to balance the benefits of personalisation with data protection and privacy rights.
The benefits of hyper-personalisation
To build stronger customer connections, drive engagement and achieve better outcomes, businesses must clearly understand how hyper-personalisation can help. Let’s unpack some of its benefits:
- Higher click-through rates. Mailchimp’s report uncovered that marketers who segmented their email audiences saw 45% higher average click-through rates. Segmentation is a critical part of hyper-personalised marketing.
- Deeper connections. Customers value authentic, unique experiences. Personalisation fosters stronger relationships.
- Optimised strategies. Personalisation tools help businesses continuously adjust their content based on audience behaviour, improving the effectiveness of their campaigns with every new data point.
- Improved customer retention. With targeted content, companies can keep customers engaged with their brand while gathering valuable data that can inform future marketing strategies.
Without effective segmentation, marketers risk creating “clustomers”, a group of undifferentiated customers receiving generic messages. Therefore, hyper-personalisation is fundamental for more effective email marketing — an already powerful tool.
Connecting the data dots
The integration and connection of various data sources plays a pivotal role in ensuring the effectiveness of hyper-personalising marketing strategies. Many businesses today face the challenge of data silos, which makes data extremely time-consuming and cumbersome to process, leading to potential inaccuracies and delayed decision-making.
Imagine a library where books are scattered randomly across multiple rooms, each hidden behind its own door. In this scenario, finding specific books or gathering comprehensive knowledge requires going through each door individually and digging through the books you don’t need to find the information you do. This leads to inefficiencies, delays, and the risk of incomplete insights.
Now, picture another library where all books are organised in a single, easily accessible space. Each book is categorised and labelled, readily available for those seeking them. This makes finding relevant information more seamless, leading to comprehensive insights and swifter decision-making.
This is the difference between a siloed and an unified data environment.
By using integrations that connect multiple data points, marketers can gain a 360-degree view of customers, enabling them to create seamless experiences across channels. One example is using browsing behaviour data collected at the ecommerce platform to reach out to customers with a personalised message at the right time to convert.
A unified data environment also facilitates more effective use of AI. By providing the algorithm with centralised, clean data, marketers are training the tool with a broader range of inputs, leading to improved accuracy and more impactful outputs.
Applying AI as a strategic tool
AI enhances the benefits of hyper-personalisation, allowing marketers to stay ahead of competitors by unlocking new opportunities for growth. The real-time analysis and interpretation of consumer data by AI enables the creation of more connected customer experiences.
Forrester Consulting’s recent study highlights key challenges small and midsize businesses (SMBs) face, such as consistently generating fresh content. It found that 88% of marketers acknowledge the imperative to enhance their use of automation and AI to meet evolving customer expectations and remain competitive.
By integrating AI tools, marketers gain an advantage in understanding customer behaviour and trends. AI can process vast amounts of data quickly and effectively, identifying patterns that might go unnoticed with manual analysis or traditional methods. Consider how much more specific your content calendar could be if you deployed a predictive analytics algorithm to anticipate seasonal spikes in search terms on your website. When we harness AI to speed up or automate time-consuming tasks, it frees up time for teams to focus on strategy, creativity, and building meaningful relationships.
Influencing with purpose: great strategies for meaningful impacts
Email marketing has long been an effective tool for approaching customers. It’s remarkable to consider that despite all the technological advancements, it still remains one of the most potent tools in a marketer’s arsenal today.
But you can’t attract a customer with just any email. If a marketer fails to craft compelling storytelling, they can lose their audience’s interest and their loyalty. Implementing hyper-personalised campaigns is imperative, particularly as trust in tailored content grows. To make a meaningful impact, a business must consider audience segmentation and leverage the proper tools whilst ensuring customer data is secure.
Kenneth Chestnut is the global head of ecosystem at Intuit Mailchimp.
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