The Personalized Marketing Journey

~The Journey from Data Acquisition to Tailored Marketing Communication

Today I’ll talk about the journey your data takes from the moment a company gets its hands on it to when you receive a personalized and irresistible email that makes you click “buy”. As a customer this process is a black box that often makes one wonder “How did they know?”, but today our aim is to decrypt it. Out of all the various marketing strategies companies use to acquire customers and increase sales, digital marketing is the most popular given how much time we spend online. So for today’s discussion, we’ll stick to this, however, the principles are the same for all.

Let’s start by thinking about what data is needed for personalized marketing. Ideally? everything! Because the more we know about someone, the more “personalized” the message can be. But even we don’t know everything about ourselves, so to get started companies are interested in acquiring data that enables them to both uniquely identify and communicate with you. The perfect entity that does this is email! It’s the one thing we have in common through different apps that can be used to contact us.

Now that we know these companies are out to get our email, let’s talk about how they get it. The major source of email acquisition is through customer interactions. This can be through through account sign-ups, promotional offers, social media promos, referrals, and more. I encourage you to open any retailer’s website and within a minute you’ll see a prompt to provide your email to get 10–15% off your first order.

Once they have your email this kick starts a chain of events. Not much personalization can be done with just an email, like how are you going to make me feel special if you don’t even know my name? But if you go check your email right now you’ll see that companies know way more than just your email. So what happened here? This is where “data onboarding” occurs, in this process, your email is sent to an external “identity provider” service like LiveRamp. These services then match your email against their own database to get other attributes like demographic information.

But how does the identity provider have your data in the first place? They aggregate data from high-quality sources like government(post office) and financial(banks) institutions that people interact with where giving incorrect information is a crime. So if you think you were being smart by giving a fake name, this won’t go a long way. Finally, when this data gets back to the company, at this point, they’ve got you, you’re a customer record in their database waiting to be marketed to. 

However, there is one more piece to the puzzle to induce that “I need this!” feeling in you. And this is behavioral data about your interests. One way to get this data is to outsource it, similar to before. Most companies turn to social media platforms for this given the amount of time we spend on them, and the amount of data they collect about our preferences. 

The other way to get this data is to collect it, granted this needs some data infrastructure but is cheaper. It involves matching your customer record to events like search and purchase. This enables the company to do more sophisticated analysis like the one mentioned here to determine what you’re most likely to buy next and then target you specifically for it.

Finally, we’re at a point where not only do they know a lot about you but also know what you’re looking for. This arms them with enough information to target you with a crisp marketing email that’s made to make you click “buy”, this completes the cycle of personalized marketing.

If you’re looking for an example to better understand this concept, see below.