All marketers have one thing in common: We’re curious about people. We want to know what makes people tick, what they want, why they want it, and how they get it (or don’t get it). At the end of the day, marketing—even in seemingly technical spaces like B2B2C software marketing—is about establishing, building, and nurturing relationships with people. Knowing your audience and personalizing your offerings accordingly has always been a powerful tool in the marketer’s arsenal, but what personalization actually means, and the tools we use to accomplish it, have evolved drastically over the years. That said, even all with the advances in tech and strategy, personalization is still ultimately about person-to-person connection.

The Olden Days

It may sound obvious, but in today’s high-tech world, it can be easy to forget that personalization can be as basic as remembering someone’s name. And before the Internet era, that’s exactly what B2B2C marketers did. Selling to a business requires more than putting an ad in a magazine, and B2B2C marketers of yore relied heavily on direct, face-to-face communication. Personalization strategies were as important as they are today, but they involved (analog) pages of notes about a prospect and personalized correspondence.

As the world crept ever closer to the digital age, tools evolved to collect and organize those pages of notes—what we now call data. CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software enabled B2B2C marketers to track interactions and experiences, which allowed their colleagues to learn from that history and tailor future interactions with existing and prospective customers for optimal impact.

Early Digital Marketing

As the Internet became a more and more embedded part of daily life, B2B2C marketers took advantage of increased connectivity to scale up their personalization strategies. Innovations in software advanced segmentation, allowing marketing departments to carve up their customer bases into different segments, including by size, sector or industry, communication preferences, and so on. This segmentation made customer differences and overlaps easier to grasp visually, which made personalization not only easy, but more impactful. Groups with intersecting interests could be reached based on their particular constellation of differentiators. This in turn built credibility and loyalty among existing customers.

Personalization grew more sophisticated with early automation tools, which empowered mass automated messaging, be it email or web-based content, informed by data around customer preferences and historic successes. This led to Account-Based Marketing (ABM) whereby B2B2C marketers could identify customers and prospective customers with the highest potential value, and specially customize their experiences. By targeting high-value accounts rather than segments, B2B2C marketers could ensure the highest possible return on the investment of their efforts.

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Today

Artificial intelligence (AI) has made unprecedented strides in enhancing B2B2C marketing strategies, especially personalization. To say AI’s capacity for data collection and analysis is vast is a massive understatement—and not just in terms of the enormous amount of data or near-instantaneous speed. Leveraging AI has allowed B2B2C marketers to enter a new world of predictive analysis, thanks to its powers of historical analysis, pattern recognition, and trend forecasting.

AI has enabled B2B2C marketing teams to be proactive in ways marketers of the olden days couldn’t even imagine. IP address recognition can help businesses identify prospective customers that have navigated to their website, and can alert customer experience teams if and when customers are researching competitors. These create invaluable opportunities for marketing and customer success teams customize course-correction and ensure their customer’s satisfaction. Through machine learning, we can find ways to surprise and delight our customers, like by offering them customized access to new products. Just as important: We can avoid overloading customers with excessive communication that isn’t effective in converting to the sales pipeline. AI powers truly multichannel personalization, helping us ensure messaging is consistent, reliable, and effective across channels, from emails to web content to social media—even offline interactions.

Why it Matters

It may seem like by adding layers of advanced technology, artificial intelligence, machine learning tools, and so on, we’re moving farther away from the basics of marketing: the person-to-person interaction.

But that’s not true. Research has shown that customers prefer interactions when they feel tailored to their wants and needs. What’s more, increasingly customers expect and even demand these interactions. Personalization efforts have been shown to lead to increased conversion rates and drive performance and better customer outcomes. One study found that 80% of B2B customers are more likely to engage with businesses that prioritize personalization. In fact, one survey found that 52% of B2B customers are likely to switch to a competitor if they feel that communication isn’t customized to their wants and needs.

These trends translate into real numbers for B2B2C businesses, some of which report returns of nearly $20 for every dollar spent on personalization strategies. But they also make for more meaningful and satisfying work for B2B2C marketers—those of us who are curious about people, about what makes them tick, what they want, why they want it, and how they get it. Or don’t.

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Also catch, Episode 198: MarTech and AI with Jeff Samuels, COO of Iterable