Marketing these days is a lot like dating. In dating, it’s important to get to know each other but it can be easy to scare quickly. There’s a fine line between the two. Consumers feel similarly about how they want to be marketed towards.
Think of your fairytale date—it includes a list of things exactly catered to your interests and hobbies. It was planned through getting to know you, not by obvious surveillance. There were no needy text messages nor any faint resemblance to Netflix’s dating thriller You…
Brands need to understand their customers to provide a catered experience but too many messages, irrelevant content, or over personalization will scare them off. Brands need to act as the perfect date by offering perfectly relevant marketing that’s specifically curated to the consumer’s preference without going over the top.
Think of it as a corporate version of The Bachelor—brands are dating all their consumers and to win their rose, you need to get to know them.
According to Gartner’s recent The Essential Guide to Marketing Personalization, “78 percent of consumers want personalized marketing communications.” And almost half of consumers will unsubscribe from a company’s content due to irrelevant or annoying messages. Your date brings you to a bagel shop because they know you like bagels, sounds like a good date, right?
On the other end of the spectrum, personalization sees a four percent decline in commercial benefits when companies showcase their knowledge of customers without offering any sort of catered help as a result. Imagine you’re with your date and they say “so I know you like bagels” without much follow up, you won’t be so flattered this time around.
Now there’s a way to perfect your personalized mobile marketing: mobile data. Mobile data offers the best way to get to know your customers and how they interact with you, without going overboard.
1. Uncover and aggregate profile data through your mobile app
Profile data includes any quantitative data accessible through your mobile app. Think data that is initially provided through account set up. Age, gender, location, and other typically user provided data is made accessible and analyzable. The first step to personalization is getting to know the basic defining characteristics of your audience.
2. Qualitative behavioral data made quantifiable
Profile data can only go so far—not all 30-year-old women in Boston are the same. We aren’t defined by our demographics; we find our identity with our hobbies and interests. These characteristics can be quantified through behavioral data. It’s much easier to personalize marketing toward a group of athletes than it is target young women.
Let’s say Adidas utilizes both profile and behavioral data, they can group together the young women who consistently interact with their app or notifications relevant to running. Now they can craft personalized messaging. Don’t waste time with basketball gear, focus on women’s running shoes.
3. Consistent data
Consumers are on their mobile devices far more frequently than other gadgets at their disposal. Take a look at what prompts your users to open your app and how they are interacting within it. Mobile insights provide some of the most consistent venues for a consumer given that mobile devices make up 70 percent of average screen time. These days, consumers are engaging with brands through their phone and it’s imperative for brands to know how they do so.
4. Tracking your own data
One of the strongest components of mobile data is that all the data is your own and now you’re just processing it. It’s just like dating: you ask questions and they answer. It’s not surveilling their Google search history or recent tweets to get to know them—you get to know them through their interactions with you. Mobile insights are one of the best ways to not come off as “creepy” to your consumers.
5. Mobile A/B testing and dynamic content
Dynamic content is live-changing content that caters to your consumers’ personalizations. It can input their names and behaviors into the messaging to provide catered content based on their past interactions.
Dynamic content, used alongside A/B testing, can individualize the type and frequency of the content. Together, it clarifies the perfect balance between too personalized and under personalized, and too frequent and neglect.
Personalized mobile marketing can be made easy with the correct data streams. Mobile app data is the easy, efficient way to avoid being remembered as the creepy date who stalked your Twitter, and instead woo your consumers from your first date and onward.