The Personal Touch Strategy: Making Mass Marketing Feel Individual

Mass marketing and personalization seem to be on opposite ends of the business model. One is for thousands or millions of people and the other is designed by understanding needs for the individual. Yet the most effective organizations have found ways to connect these seemingly disjointed approaches, giving a feel of personal touches through mass marketing delivered at levels once thought to be unnecessary.

Thus, the challenge lies not just technologically, but psychologically. Customers can tell when mass marketing is used against them. They know a canned response from a personalized message. Yet today's customers are conditioned to believe that organizations should know who they are, what they want, how they want to hear it, and when.

Those organizations that learn to master the personalized yet mass marketed realm find themselves with customers who feel appreciated, respond better to marketing, and remain loyal longer than those who do not. However, this requires careful balancing and implemented strategy.

The Data Behind Data Collection

It all begins with data collection. Not invasive data collection—where customers feel their privacy is compromised—but data collection that accumulates over time through voluntary responses, reliable purchases and finite variables.

For example, organizations learn about customers through purchase history, web page visits, customer support inquiries and post-experience surveys. Organizations learn not only what customers do, but why they did them based on the information gleaned from reliable sources.

It's not enough to collect all data—it's important only to collect relevant data. Many organizations make the mistake of trying to track everything about everyone that they can. Realistically, this only leads to vast amounts of clutter without valuable insight. Relevant values include things that impact how a customer wants to be communicated with.

This segmentation gives an impression of personalization without having to become too complicated. Setting up small groups makes more sense than trying to apply different marketing approaches to each individual customer.

Technology that Provides Scaled Solutions

With today's marketing automation software, the ability to personalize at scale has become, ironically, personal. Sophisticated systems allow businesses to operationalize decisions made about customers based on the data we've just discussed.

For example, push ads become one of the best ways to implement personalization at scale. Whether it's an email or notification, if people are already alert on their devices, it makes sense to share timely information that's relevant as opposed to a mass canned response.

Timing is everything in this regard. While some push notifications feel intrusive and unwanted, they shouldn't—it should be that these notifications are timed with customer action or proximity to make them helpful.

Of course, there's a component of automation that removes the personal touch which is where many businesses fail. The best push notifications sound like they were written by a person who really cared about their brand's customer experience.

Timing and Context

It's not only about what someone hears, but when they hear it (or see it) and where. The same offer at one time feels useful and in another time frame, obnoxious and irrelevant. Therefore, personal mass marketing hinges on personal awareness.

At this time, it's not important to create separate approaches—different customers have different timing needs but segments exist within our different groups. For instance, businesspeople might get messages during a morning commute or at lunchtime; parents during an evening wind-down session with their children; students towards or away from finals week.

It's also about context. The offer for a winter coat sells better when it's freezing outside as opposed to taking its chances in December because the business thought that was the right time. Birthday offers go more appreciated when sent around someone's actual birthday instead of three weeks before or after.

The Conversational Approach

The best personal mass marketing doesn't even feel like marketing; it feels like a conversation. It's not promotional; it's helpful—even if it contains promotional value, that value becomes secondary to its usefulness.

This conversational approach requires a level of thoughtfulness around a businesses' marketing content that rarely drives this aspect of communication. Instead of an emphasis on features and benefits per se, these personalized communications advocate for situations that apply relevant need/response ratios. For example, a motivation app might send different motivational messages based on intensity of use. A financial service might send different savings tips based on spending patterns.

Furthermore, the tone of voice must match a personality in addition to segment expectations. Meaning, it's one thing to address new customers without a link to their historical patterns; it's another to give value where it exists.

Measuring Personal Connections

Not everything can be measured in numbers when it comes to effectiveness—while click-through rates and conversion rates are relevant as they are tied to revenue opportunities, many personal touches can feel helpful even if they're not revenue generating.

Customer feedback becomes critical in assessing whether these personal connections are appreciated or felt intrusive at any point. Customer support interactions reveal when personalization efforts fall flat and vague, which are often unseen without this extra measurement.

The best measurement becomes customer lifetime value. When personalization works, customers remain longer, purchase more and share with others along the way. Quality over quantity comes into play at this point—short term campaigns don't necessarily matter as much as sustained relationships.

Authenticity at Scale

Ultimately, one of the biggest challenges of personal mass marketing concerns authenticity at scale. People can typically see through disingenuous efforts.

Personalized suggested marketing efforts come from a place where businesses truly should appreciate what's being offered for customer value—or else it'll fall flat even from the start.

Therefore, businesses must grasp who their buyers are and what will genuinely provide value through their efforts; otherwise, it'll fall flat. As long as businesses assess patterns of behavior and respond accordingly with real feedback then actual seamless suggestions will make sense.

When it's worth it both personally and for business value appeal, customers do welcome them instead of merely tolerating them. They help customers stumble upon products they actually need, remind them about services relevant in their current situation or provide information that makes navigating the business easier.