There is a huge gap between brand and consumer expectations regarding relevance. Recent research shows that brands think consumers find 19% of their messages irrelevant to them. The same question to consumers found that they think 84% of brand messages are irrelevant. In this case, I’m inclined to trust the consumer.
Unfortunately for brands, this truly is a cause for concern. In fact, it can really damage your bottom line: Accenture reports that 61% of instances of consumers switching brands are due to a lack of relevance.
And so it is time for more businesses to wake up and take advantage of the huge opportunity that personally relevant consumer messaging presents for brand strategy. If you don’t, you risk losing customers; if you do, you stand to improve key metrics across the board significantly. For instance, increasing retention by only 5% can drive profits from anywhere between 25%-95%.
4 Ways to Adjust Your Marketing Strategy to Be Personally Relevant
At Swrve, we believe there are four fundamental aspects that can help boost your relevance:
- Who to Target: Sending the same message to your entire database is rarely, if ever, a good marketing strategy. But communicating with consumers in a way that feels personally relevant and actually influences them is no mean feat. It requires knowledge of your audience beyond the simplistic. This involves harnessing the huge amount of behavioral data across your systems to build audiences that are so much richer and more meaningful than you’ve ever been able to before. Think carefully about what you want to achieve, and then consider who you need to communicate with in order to achieve it.
- When to Initiate an Interaction: If you don’t get the timing right, then you’re not being relevant. The ‘right’ time can take many forms: a message triggered by a consumer’s action (or lack of) within the app, such as an abandoned flight search; or triggered by entering a certain physical location, like a rival supermarket store. Triggers take away the feeling of being randomly targeted or spammed, and consumers are twice as likely to engage as a result. But being relevant is often as simple as catching your customer at a convenient time of day. Use behavioral data to deliver a message at the optimal time for each user.
- What Content You Can Personalize: Personalization can take many forms, from simple user attributes such as a user’s first name, to localizing the message for a user’s default language, and even incorporating contextual data from previous interactions (e.g. “Hi Ellen, your usual window seat for your flight to Nashville is available for $19.99”). It’s this level of personalization that really makes the difference in your brand strategy, making a customer feel like they belong to the hallowed segment-of-one.
- Where the Customer Will be Most Receptive: New and emerging channels mean you need to expand your reach to suit your consumers’ device habits. Is it best to send an email on their desktop, an in-app message through their OTT provider, or a push notification on their mobile phone during their commute home? Behavioral data will enable you to figure this out. 40% of marketing budgets today are being spent in channels that didn’t even exist a decade ago. Knowing which channel each customer uses – and what time of day – gives you a huge relevance advantage.
Considering the above questions – who, when, what, and where – will give your brand the best chance of being relevant and maximizing your reach. It’s worth it: Gartner recently claimed that companies that invest in full personalization and relevance across channels will outsell their competitors by 30%. Sounds pretty good, right?
Looking for more information on how to boost the relevancy of your messaging, hop on over to the Swrve website, or reach out to Shaw + Scott at +1.520.762.4842 and press option 1. You can also send us a message through our simple contact form.