Your marketing efforts and business relationships need better nurturing and constant follow ups to ensure reduced churn rates. One of the best ways to achieve this is by personalizing every outreach and campaign based on the buying stage or lifecycle stage of your prospect and target audience. 

Today’s digital marketers are engulfed with the task of constantly running multichannel campaigns and then ensuring they optimize internal processes to be able to assess the ROI of each channel and campaign while also breaking down their customer data to understand more about their customer’s journey and how they are interacting with the brand. 

Not only do marketers need a thorough understanding of what kind of campaigns to run and through which online channel, they have to pre-empt future needs and be prepared for sudden changes in terms of marketing norms, changes in algorithms that affect campaign performance while also keeping a fair idea of what channel to focus on now to help yield more returns in future. 

While doing all of this, not only is it important to ensure that every communication is personalized, it is crucial to ensure that every channel sports an omnichannel and similar theme and core messaging. 

As marketers head into 2022 with newer ambitions and bigger marketing goals, what are some of the key pointers to keep in mind when it comes to campaign performance and personalization?

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The Traditional Customer Lifecycle of Yesteryear is Very Different from The Digital Customer Lifecycle of Today

In the traditional customer journey of years ago, things were simpler for marketers and prospects, the typical buying journey involved fewer stages and lesser channels.

In a digital format, there is a lot more marketers need to assess and execute on, before they can segment audiences and breakdown ways to deepen buying impact from a target audience or particular prospect subset. 

Furthermore, today’s digital customer journey is not restricted to one kind of journey or pathway.

For some prospects, viewing a banner ad, clicking on a landing page, downloading an asset, interacting with a social media post, viewing the pricing page of a website might be common, for others, the journey could involve attending a webinar, viewing customer reviews, contacting sales reps through a chatbot or contact us form… 

The only thing that is usually commonplace in a long winded digital journey is that customers and prospects will never buy immediately, they will always ascertain whether the product is a good fit for them before they reach out to a brand, they will also always compare products and pricing, go through reviews, ask questions and lots more before making a final buying decision. 

When marketers know what a typical digital journey for their audience could look like, personalizing certain elements of their messaging, social posts, as well personalizing content on those pages can lead to better results. Dynamic tools that can personalize welcome pages for instant or recommendation engines that can pull up content that matches that customer’s or reader’s interest can help drive better ROI in the long run. 

A Unified View of the Customer and Prospect that Includes Data from Sales/Customer Service and Other Online Interactions

The digital journey can be complicated and long winded but if you put in place the right martech tools and tracking systems, it is easy to pick up signals and buying intent and use it to drive stronger personalization tactics. Marketers who take this forward by aligning the data of the target customers based on their interactions with other departments like the customer support team and sales team can use this unified view of their audience to drive better output through future campaigns, because they will have a thorough understanding of where those customers are in their buying journey and what their future buying behavior might entail. 

Customer journey analytics software can be a useful choice here to let marketers collect real-time data across multiple channels and touch points, these kind of tools can allow them to gain better insights into the overall customer journey over a period of time. 

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Responding to Customers in Real-time with better Personalization Elements

One of the basic marketing lags in a complex digital environment involves lack of personalization in real-time messaging and replies. 

Once marketers know how to assess the digital journey and interaction of every customer (read point one above!), they have to optimize how they respond to real-time interactions and messages (via chatbots, social media, email, others) with better personalization. 

This is where unified marketing systems or CRMs and CDPs can come handy, when the customer data is unified and gives a fair view of the customer interaction with sales, and through other pages on the site, including what that customer last spoke about via the chatbot for instance, it is easy to respond to a customer in real-time drawing from those insights and ensuring that key elements in the responses are retained to boost personalization. 

When a customer feels like the brand is taking the effort to know them and nurture them for the long-term, it helps boost retention rates while preventing churn, a crucial aspect in a highly competitive and choice-ridden marketplace.

This is where marketers can add value and drive real-time communications with the aim of boosting buying intent for the long-term.