Personalise your marketing automation

Do you feel like throwing up when you hear terms like ‘auto-responder’, ‘scheduled posts’ or ‘call routing’? If so, it’s because they get hurled at you on a regular basis.

Now think about the messages you send to your prospects and customers. Do you use the same old tired phrases and buzz words? If so, your audience is probably throwing up, too. If they’re even bothering to read what you’re sending.

Here’s the thing. The more a word is repeated, the less it seems to mean. Yet if you look at the 269 billion emails that are being sent every day, you’ll find that most of them are probably bland, cookie-cutter communications, being shot out in a very robotic fashion.

This doesn’t mean you should stop automating your marketing. It means you should stop making yourself sound like a robot, and treating everyone in exactly the same way.

The fact is, everybody – yourself included – is different. We all have a different background, different education, and a different set of fears and frustrations. Factor into this that we live in the 21st century, with very little time to spare… and robotic automation just doesn’t cut it any more. Your prospects can sniff it out a mile off, and you won’t get very far.

Let 2018 be the year that your content, emails and communications actually have some soul.

You could be sending false signals

If you act like a robot, then your audience won’t trust what you have to say. Imagine having a really exciting launch, or an incredibly important announcement to make… but then nobody clicks on your email, because frankly, they don’t think that anything you say has any substance.

You want your prospects to pay attention to your brand, but robotic messaging is forcing them to skip over it.

If you’re “just another company” in a person’s newsfeed, eventually you will lose followers and subscribers, until you’re nothing more than a handful of bytes floating around a deserted part of cyber space.

Change how you automate with personalisation

Personalisation takes the robotic element away from your messaging without removing the automation. At Databowl, we have long been fascinated with the prospect of personalisation, and how it can help you scale your automation - without losing the human touch.

The combination of personalisation and automation is often seen as an elusive dream, like the promise of fusion energy. But it is a reality, and you can have it.

The emergence (and mergence) of exponential data technology gives you a real shot at combining the two. Let’s look at a few of the components that make up this dream combo.

The marketing automation platform

It all starts within your marketing automation platform. Therein lies all the tools you need to deliver personalised and relevant campaigns. Continually.

Making up the foundation of Databowl’s all-in-one marketing automation software, you can utilise our fully integrated data management system to pull in heaps of personalisation data, and cleverly craft a response to the things that you know your customers care about. Through using a series of API’s to bring in behavioural, transactional, historical and social data, you can set up categorical sequences to create a more personal feel at scale.

Responses based on real-time behaviour

Using your data is a good starting point, but nothing beats the here and now. Did you know you can respond based on current behaviours in real-time? There is no better way to generate results than by capitalising on what prospects are doing right at this very moment.

For example, if you’re selling a particular brand of car, then real-time click attribution can help you determine a prospect’s current preferences, from engine size and horsepower, to colour and interior trim. This kind of personalisation data is fickle, and can change from one week to the next. Seize the opportunity while it is hot!

Moment-based personalisation

We talked already about what your customers want right now. But moment-based personalisation is the next step on, and it is why Google search is so successful. This is all about displaying the exact product or information that meets the precise emotions or feelings of a customer or prospect at a specific moment in time. Exactly when they want it. Not two weeks before they want it or two weeks after they want it (although, display network may be operating under different rules ;) ).

Once upon a time, Jeff Bezos said this to Charlie Rose: “I would define Amazon by our big ideas, which are customer centricity, putting the customer at the centre of everything we do.”

This is what you have to do. And when you operate in a moment-based manner, you are putting the customer slap bang in the very centre of everything you are doing with your marketing.

The one thing that consumers want the most, is to be understood. That’s why personal brands are better than corporate ones when battling for territory in marketing cyber space.

If you want the fastest way to layer these into your business, then I recommend reserving a spot for a system demo with Databowl. We will show you the exact steps you need to take to get your lead generation, automation and personalisation engines up and running.

So why don’t you get a front row seat to discover what successful marketers are doing to stay ahead of the curve in 2018?