Personalization is Great, but Relevant Content is Key

I think we all agree that personalized messaging is the must-have tool in your marketing arsenal. However, nowadays, to achieve effective customer engagement, you need to ensure all digital communications include relevant content. Other than confirming that the email was intended for me and that the sender knows something about me, basic personalization, such as my name in the subject line and salutation doesn’t really add value.

Your customers want to know that you understand their individual needs, wants and lifestyle and expect the digital communications you send them to substantiate this with targeted and relevant content.

Grab attention and break through the proverbial noise and clutter through relevancy

Now don’t get me wrong, you should not throw out personalized salutations or other simple personalization elements that you have worked so hard to collect. These are expected and necessary in today’s digital world.

Achieving relevance, however, enables us to add value to our customers and to create one-to-one messages that go beyond simple personalizations. Relevant content provides an opportunity to influence behavior.

4 Steps to achieving true content relevance

1. Collect data

Customers change! To send relevant content you need to know your customer and collect data (legally) on an ongoing basis. By continually collecting customer data, your messaging can remain relevant to their changing wants, needs and lifestyle.

2. Consider hyper-personalization

It’s time to start segmenting our segments. Underpinned by real time data and supported by artificial intelligence, hyper-personalization drills down into the individual needs of the single customer, even before the customer has realized that need.

3. Use dynamic content

With the launch of Google’s dynamic emails for Gmail users – email marketers can present up-to-the-minute information directly from within the original email, removing the need for customers to click out of the email to a web page for updated information, forms or even comment threads.

4. Implement automated messaging

Customer lifecycle communications enable you to communicate effectively with customers at each stage of their journey with your brand. Automated messaging can form the backbone of your communication strategy, with marketing and operational messages pre-prepared and scheduled to maintain consistent touchpoints with a customer.

We know that personalized, segmented content can boost open rates and engagement rates by as much as 30% in some cases. Imagine what truly relevant content will do for your campaign performance?