The pandemic has resulted in ups and downs aplenty for Australian businesses, as well as considerable uncertainty about what the future holds. As the country’s economic recovery gathers pace, relevant, personalised marketing can help organisations reconnect with customers and boost sales and profitability.
Here are five ways to supercharge your marketing efforts in 2021.
Make customer retention a priority
Historically, marketers have concentrated their efforts on winning new business – turning prospects into customers. As a result, the focus has been on understanding where those customers are coming from and the activation events that trigger them to open their wallets. That’s still important but so is hanging onto buyers for the long haul, not letting them slip away after a single sale. Doing so requires extending your view of the customer journey – analysing buyers’ online behaviour, getting a feel for what other products and services they’re interested in, and creating personalised email and ad campaigns to encourage them to buy from you, again and again.
Provide real-time offers
A recent Accenture report found companies that invest in machine learning and personalisation technologies are set to increase their revenue by a whopping 30 per cent within the next four years. What’s even more powerful than personalised marketing is a personalised offer delivered in the moment. Whether it’s an immediate email or a pop-up on your web site or app, using the customer data at your disposal to create a targeted buying opportunity at that critical instant you have someone’s attention is a great way to turn browsers into buyers.
Test and tweak your campaigns on the fly
The beauty of personalised digital marketing is the fact that nothing is set in stone. Equipped with tools that allow you to evaluate the success of your offers in real or near real-time, it’s possible – and easy – to run two or more campaigns simultaneously. Quickly tweaking or trashing the ones that are doing poorly and amplifying those that are going off like a rocket will help you maximise the return on your marketing investment.
Get on top of privacy management
Personalised marketing is data-dependent and the onus is on businesses to store that data responsibly and only use it with owners’ permission. The penalties for not doing so can be significant. The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation regime, which covers Australian companies that handle the data of EU citizens, can issue fines of up to 20 million Euro or two per cent of global turnover. The Australian government, meanwhile, is preparing to increase the fines our national privacy watchdog can impose, from $2.1 million to $10 million. It makes sense to ensure you have robust controls in place to govern the way in which data is used to create and distribute marketing messages.
Invest in tools that maximise the power of data
Creating marketing campaigns that reach customers in the right place at the right time is challenging, without the right tools. Many businesses are making do with yesterday’s technology – their CRM solution or a homegrown data program – and it’s holding them back. Upgrading to a customer data platform (CDP) that can collect and process data at speed, and is easy to use, will enable your marketing team to extract the insights they need to develop relevant and timely campaigns that really resonate.
Conclusion
Tough economic conditions and a climate of significant uncertainty mean the next year is likely to be a challenging one for Australian businesses of all stripes and sizes. Investing time and resources in personalised marketing will help your enterprise maintain mind and market share and position itself for expansion and growth when better times arrive.
This blog is inspired by our friends from Inside Small Business.
