So if you’re to thrive in an environment where customer demands are high and new, innovative offerings are always looking to persuade consumers to switch providers, you need to stand out from the crowd.
To do this, an effective personalization strategy is a must-have. This plays a key role in customer engagement, boosting retention and customer loyalty. It also enables you to develop much more focused and relevant marketing campaigns that offer a better return on investment.
However, while every telco will have some form of personalization elements in its marketing strategy, it’s often the case that these aren’t living up to expectations. In fact, less than a quarter of consumers (22 percent) say they’re happy with the level of personalization they receive from their brands.
This dissatisfaction presents a great opportunity for telcos to gain a march by doing personalization better. The fact is that many brands’ personalization efforts fall far short of what’s required, as these initiatives are only implemented in a very basic way.
A large part of this is a failure to understand what true personalization involves. It’s much more than simply using the customer’s name in communications and remembering their preferences. True personalization is about being able to observe consumer behavior and interests, then respond to these activities in the most relevant way.
In other words, it’s about delivering the right message, at the right time, to the right customer, in the right format for them. By doing this, it helps telcos create a genuine connection with their customers. This not only helps ensure individuals feel valued by their telco operator, but also means that you’ll know exactly what products, services or other offers they’ll be most likely to respond to, helping determine your future customer strategy.
Moving beyond superficial personalization to a true hyper-personalization approach is essential in making sure your brand stands out and resonates with customers. In today’s digital-first environment, consumers are constantly being bombarded with marketing materials and other communications – with some estimates suggesting individuals may see up to 10,000 brand messages every day.
Therefore, you’ve usually only got a matter of seconds to make an impact, and simply knowing the customer’s name won’t cut it. But if you do true personalization right, you can enjoy proven benefits in areas such as return on investment (ROI) and overall revenue. In fact, effective personalized marketing efforts can result in improvements of up to 15 percent in revenue and ten to 30 percent increases in marketing-spend efficiency.
However, this is difficult to achieve in practice. In order for true personalization to succeed where more basic efforts fail, telcos need to be able to use their customer data to ask the right questions and receive fast, accurate answers that anyone in the business can use to guide their marketing and communications strategy.
This is about much more than just using big data analytics to derive insight from their customer data. It’s about delving deeper into this to build a genuine understanding of who your customers are and what they will respond to.
So what does this mean? Say, for example, you have a new service you want to offer to your customers. It won’t be of interest to everyone, so how do you personalize your campaign to target only those individuals who are most likely to sign up? You look into your data to find the patterns that will be relevant to the offer.
Making use of your valuable user-generated data such as weblogs allows you to discover users’ brand affinities, interests and typical user journeys and spot connections that would otherwise be invisible. By understanding the websites they visit, the hobbies they have, and the causes they care about, you can be sure you’re tailoring your messaging to exactly the right audience, whether it’s to promote offers, cross or upsells, or new experiences.
The fact that more than four out of five consumers will happily share their data in exchange for a more personalized experience highlights how highly people rate a strong connection with their brands. By effectively tapping into these desires, telcos can enjoy a range of results, from more cost-effective marketing campaigns to improved loyalty.
This means higher revenue, improved ROI and reduced churn – all made possible through the power of true personalization.
Find out more about how the SafeSignal Engine provides the insight you need to deliver true personalization
Image credit: iStock/Cameron Prins
Personalization needs to be a part of any communication service provider’s (CSP’s) marketing strategy today. Genericized, mass-market campaigns have become ineffective as customers, who have become used to being swamped with thousands of materials on a daily basis, have learned to tune out anything that doesn’t speak directly to them. But despite the benefits of […]
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