Tag Archives: behavior

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Don’t Get Too Personal

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Personalized marketing defines the future of marketing. Personalized marketing has not delivered on its promise. Got it.

Personalized marketing was supposed to revolutionize how you communicate with prospects, build and strengthen relationships with customers and promote your services and products to target market segments. Its purpose is to tailor your marketing messages, customer experiences and other communication with individual customers based on their unique attributes, purchasing history and preferences. Higher customer retention rates, increased sales revenue, increased customer lifetime value and decreased customer churn are among the most valuable benefits associated with personalized marketing.

Marketers were highly enthusiastic. But then came trouble in paradise, as consumers signaled concern about the privacy of their personal information and browsing behavior, which caused some turbulence in the digital sector. A reset occurred, as certain leading internet browsers instituted a ban, or allowed users to restrict, the use of third-party cookies, the mechanism that enables tracking of online behavior. As a result, marketing leaders (and that includes Freelancers and small business owners) have had to rethink their marketing personalization strategies, just when they were wrapping their heads around Customer Relations Management software and how Artificial Intelligence capabilities refined and optimized the effectiveness of personalized marketing strategies. Sigh.

So, it was necessary for brands to go back to square one marketing and shore up collection of first-party data that customers were willing to share. That information is more valuable than ever now—-and isn’t it better that you own and control your customer data, that customers and prospects know what you know about them; and they also know that you won’t sell their personal data? There’s a lot of upside that results from expanding your collection of first-party customer info—the process helps you strengthen relationships, because you’ll have more opportunities to better understand customers and you’ll be better prepared to improve their experiences with your brand.  You can apply personalization on any digital channel if you have access to customer data — often unified through a customer data platform put into place by your CRM service, which will use AI and algorithms to tailor customer experiences based on his/her data and behavior.

Realize that your customers expect and appreciate a personalized experience from the brands they regularly engage or do business with regularly. A McKinsey research study found that 76% of customers are more likely to purchase from brands that personalize. Customers want to know that the brand understands who they are and their needs and does not bombard them with unwanted sales offers.

The benefits of successful marketing personalization

  • More consistent and relevant customer experiences. Personalizing customers’ experiences shows that you understand their preferences and interests. This makes them more likely to engage and remain loyal to your brand, since they know you won’t pummel them with unwanted info.
  • Increased sales conversion rates. The more relevant your offers, the more likely that prospects and customers will value and accept the call-to-action you’re prompting them to, whether that’s purchasing a service or product, signing up for a subscription, or scheduling a consultation. Personalization enables you to entice customers with offers based on their past purchases, interests and real-time behaviors, since you’ll know what matters to them.
  • Higher customer loyalty, retention and lifetime value (LTV). Personalization sets you up to deliver relevant marketing messages and content, as well as the context in which to make recommendations for services or products, add-ons or upgrades, that are likely to resonate. When your organization demonstrates to customers that you are paying attention to their priorities, customers are more likely to give you repeat business and extend the customer lifecycle, which is vital for retaining customers in the long term.
  • Maximized marketing efforts and budget. Personalization ensures you’re always targeting customers with highly relevant offers. This means you’re not wasting your (and your customers’) time and resources. Coupled with the increase in conversion rates and revenue, this makes personalization an incredibly powerful tool for maximizing marketing spend and return on investment (ROI). It can even apply to your broader branding efforts, such as choosing the best name for your YouTube channel in order to engage a specific niche audience and earn more returns from your multimedia content.

 Types of personalization

Marketing personalization can be expressed in different ways, depending on what you want to achieve. For example, some personalization is one-to-one, meaning it’s directly related to the customer’s specific information — a technique increasingly powered by AI personalization. Think email marketing, from blogs or newsletter to special offers or events. Other times, personalization is applied using a targeted approach through customer segmentation, where you choose specific characteristics or customer attributes for a customer group based on their buying history or other interaction with your brand puts them into the segment receive a certain personalized experience.

Personalization can be as simple as having a person’s name in an email rather than an all-purpose general greeting, or as detailed as including the details of a customer’s recent purchase or web browsing in that email. It could also include showing particular product promotions on a website based on a person’s past purchases, or sending special promotions via SMS or a mobile application. Customers expect personalization on every channel, a continuity across website, mobile, SMS (text) and email communications.

Other examples of personalization include:

  • Product recommendations based on past purchases or online browsing
  • Product promotion info based on the website pages visited
  • Email offers to a segment of customers who own a particular product or receive a certain service
  • Communicating with a customer post-purchase to ensure they are happy and have no difficulty using the product or service and accessing its benefits

Boundaries matter

While there is no doubt that customers and prospects expect and appreciate personalization, they want to ensure their privacy. When, where and how much your brand personalizes the customer experience deserves consideration. It is imperative that you avoid making those who’d like to engage with your brand feel that you’re getting too personal, that they’re being closely watched. The feeling that business owners and marketers want to communicate is “I matter to this brand.” Build your personalization strategies around that thought and avoid activities that may feel like a violation.

When inviting those who engage with your brand to share certain info, you can take an important step in relationship-building by demonstrating that transparency is a policy you live by. Customers worry about brands collecting too much data, using information in unexpected ways, or creating experiences that feel too close for comfort. How data is used, confirming that it will not be shared with third parties and demonstrating that cybersecurity measures have been installed to discourage data security breaches will go a long way toward earning the trust of your customers and prospects. Clearly stated privacy policies, explicit consent mechanisms, giving customers control over their data and only personalizing in ways that genuinely add value to the customer experience you provide are must-dos.

Tools for effective marketing personalization

To effectively personalize your marketing efforts, implementing data analytics tools is necessary. Analytics tools track customer behavior that reveals website interactions and email responses, for example, so you can accurately tailor your strategies in response. Utilizing a marketing Customer Relations Management platform will optimize those capabilities by centralizing customer data to facilitate targeted, personalized communication. N.B.–maintain the quality of your customer data by taking steps to ensure that it is updated and accurate.

CRM analytics serve as the foundation for both customer journey mapping and sales forecasting by providing the behavioral data needed to understand how prospects move through your sales funnel. Every touchpoint, interaction and transaction recorded in your CRM becomes a valuable data point that reveals patterns in customer behavior and purchasing decisions.

Customer journey mapping relies heavily on CRM data to identify which channels, types of content and engagement lead to conversions. This info helps you understand which activities are most likely to indicate a purchase, or make the prospect more likely to make a purchase. You’ll also learn where in the buyer’s journey prospects are prone to abandon—or accelerate— their buying decisions.

Finally, your marketing CRM platform will greatly improve sales forecasting and ensure the data will be accurate when you analyze historical CRM data to predict future performance based on current sales funnel activity and even seasonal trends. CRM reporting tools enable you to track every interaction across the customer lifecycle, providing the comprehensive data needed to create reliable revenue projections and identify which touchpoints contribute most to creating sales.

Thanks for reading,

Kim

Image: © The Everett Collection. Jean Porter and Jimmy Lydon in the film Sweet Genevieve (1947)

Professional Development , , Leave a comment

Emotional Intelligence: The Foundation of Leadership Ability

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Emotional Intelligence is the capacity to recognize and respect not only how you feel, but also how those with whom you interact feel. Emotional Intelligence also helps you to manage your emotions effectively, both in your inner life and in your relationships. Alternately known as EQ and often portrayed as a qualitative, subjective yin (female) counterpart to the data-driven, measurable and objective yang (masculine) IQ, EI entails more than displaying empathy and being kind, or “sensitive.”

Ongoing research has presented credible evidence that supports EI as a different, but nevertheless valid and beneficial, form of human intelligence. Psychologists, organizational development specialists and leadership development coaches recognize EI as a core life skill that promotes one’s ability to deliver excellent performances, particularly in the domain of leadership. There is no absolutist blueprint, or model, that codifies EI, but there are variations on a standard theme that have been developed primarily by psychologists and organizational behavior specialists. I recently discovered the work of Emotional Intelligence researchers Daniel Goleman and Richard Boyatzis.

Goleman has written extensively on the topic of EI. He is co-director of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations at Rutgers University in Newark, NJ and he is the author of Building Blocks of Emotional Intelligence (2017) a 12-primer set on each of the EI competencies that he co-discovered. He also offers training on those competencies through an online learning platform. Boyatzis is a professor in the departments of Organizational Behavior, Psychology and Cognitive Science at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, OH and he’s been recognized as a Distinguished University Professor there. He is a co-founder of the Coaching Research Lab and co-author of Helping People Change (2019). According to Goleman and Boyatzis those who aspire to become exceptional leaders will need to develop a balance of strengths across the suite of EI competencies. When that is achieved, outstanding business results will follow.

Goleman and Boyatzis see as EI consisting of four domains—Self-Awareness, Self-Management, Social Awareness and Relationship Management—and connected to each domain are 12 EI competencies. When you’ve mastered the domains and the competencies associated with each category, you will possess capabilities that allow you to be an adept at team player or a practitioner of inspirational leadership, as the situation requires. Below is a capsule view of the domains and the related competencies.

Self-Awareness

This domain refers to the ability to read and understand your emotions as well as recognize their impact on others. In short, self-awareness is a basic understanding of how we feel and why we feel that way. The more we are aware of our feelings, the easier it becomes to manage our feelings and control how we might respond to others.

Those who have nurtured their EI capabilities achieve objectivity through the self-awareness that this form of intelligence develops. Leaders who have developed a high level of EI promote productive and motivated workplaces that give all workers equal opportunities to shine.

  • Emotional self-awareness: I know what I am doing and why
  • Accurate self-assessment: I am cognizant of my beliefs and mental models
  • Self-confidence: I am aware of my abilities, including strengths and weaknesses. I trust my judgment and have a sense of control in my life. I set realistic expectations and goals, communicate assertively and can handle criticism.

Self-management

Also known as self-regulation, this domain can be defined as the ability to manage one’s actions, thoughts and feelings in flexible way, in order to produce the desired results. Optimal self-management contributes to a sense of well-being, a sense of self-efficacy or confidence and a sense of connection to others. You are able to control impulsive feelings and behaviors, express your emotions in healthy ways, take initiative, follow through on commitments and adapt to changing circumstances.

  • Emotional Self-Control: You are able to keep potentially disruptive emotions and impulses in check and maintain your effectiveness under stressful or hostile conditions.
  • Achievement Orientation: You intend to meet or exceed a standard of excellence. You seek ways to do things better and improve outcome. You reasonably challenging goals and take calculated risks.
  • Positive Outlook: You are able to see the positive qualities and characteristics in people, situations, and events. You persist in pursuing goals, despite obstacles and setbacks.
  • Adaptability: You have the flexibility to handle change and juggle multiple demands, as you adapt your ideas or approaches to new and unexpected circumstances.

Social Awareness

Social Awareness is the ability to accurately notice the emotions of others and “read” situations appropriately. It is about sensing what other people are thinking and feeling, to be able to take their perspective using your capacity for empathy. Those adept in the qualities of this domain are able to read another person’s face, voice, body language and other verbal or nonverbal cues that communicate emotion and help direct us as to how we should speak and otherwise interact with that individual.

  • Empathy: The ability to sense others’ feelings and perspectives, take an active interest in their concerns and recognize cues about what others may feel and think. Goleman further describes empathy as the cognitive and emotional processes that bind people together in various kinds of relationships that permit sharing experiences as well as understanding of others.
  • Organizational Awareness: The ability to read a group’s emotional currents and power relationships, identifying influencers, networks, and organizational dynamics.

Relationship Management

This domain pulls together and integrates the other three domains and creates the final product, relationship management. Relationship management can be used to influence those around us and guide or encourage them to make good decisions. You can sense other’s reactions to situations and then fine-tune a response to move the interaction in a positive direction.

Relationship management proficiency also addresses teamwork and other collaborations.
You’ve learned to use the skills acquired in the other domains to steer the group toward
the goal. Furthermore, proficiency in relationship management promotes the ability to effectively manage conflict. Those who become particularly adept in this area can see that conflict is forming and take steps to move others away from this and toward more positive interactions. Effective Listening skills and empathy are essential to deal with these difficult conversations.

  • Influence: The ability to have a positive impact on others, to persuade and convince others in order to gain their support.
  • Coach and Mentor: The ability to foster the long-term learning or development of others by giving feedback, guidance, and support.
  • Conflict Management: The ability to help others through emotional or tense situations, tactfully bringing disagreements into the open and finding solutions all can endorse.
  • Inspirational Leadership: The ability to inspire and guide individuals and groups towards a meaningful vision of excellence, and to bring out the best in others.
  • Teamwork: The ability to work with others towards a shared goal; participating actively, sharing responsibility and rewards, and contributing to the capability of the team.

You can evaluate and improve your EI skills. Goleman and Boyatzkis recommend a 360-degree assessment, to receive systematic, objective observations of your behavior by people who work with you. Incidentally, EI has been found to not correlate well with IQ or personality traits, but the two values are the best predictors of a leader’s effectiveness, actual business performance, engagement, professional and personal satisfaction. A 360-degree assessment tool that uses ratings generated by you and those who know you well can reveal your EI current strengths and suggest where your EI needs improvement. To best improve your weak spots, find a leadership development expert to coach you.

Thanks for reading,

Kim

Image: Philadelphia Flyers coach John Tortorella