Today’s world is increasingly being inhabited with Connected
Consumers. These consumers use multiple channels, touch-points and devices to
communicate with brands and with each other at warp speed, 24/7. The number of
marketing messages that consumers see is often quoted in the thousands.
Whatever the number, it’s a lot!
For brands, providing communications that quickly create
engagement with these consumers requires that message to resonate and so personalisation
is a key plank of any organisation’s eCRM Strategy.
I often have a quote in my presentations about lazy
marketers creating email newsletters. Now of course, having offended a large
proportion of the audience, I explain later on by actually talking about lazy
marketers creating one size fits all email newsletters. This is based on the
principle that if I put enough ‘stuff’ in front of you, something will take
your fancy. Today’s consumer doesn’t have the time or patience to trawl through
a mass of content to find something they need
Now of course we mustn’t mistake personalisation for
salutation. ‘Dear Gianfranco’ doesn’t really cut the mustard in terms of
personalisation these days. Even Cicero, the Roman philosopher, a few thousand
years ago talked about remembering and using someone’s name to have a
successful conversation with them. We need more than that if we are to persuade
our audience to takes us along with them on their journey
My old Greek friend Aristotle ( don’t worry, there are no
more philosophers in this piece) talks about Pathos, Ethos and Logos in the art of persuasion. In plain
English that roughly equates to Emotion, Credibility and Logic.
The emotion (Pathos) of a brand
can open up an email inbox for example but only positive and relevant
experiences will keep it open. And I believe that Credibility and Logic have the use of data at the heart.
In today’s data rich marketing world, logic in the form of personalisation
in eCRM can be based on 3 key information areas
Profile – What I’ve told a brand about myself in terms of
age, sex and interests
Behaviour – What a brand can infer are my likes, interests from
my interaction with them
Transactional – What do my purchases both on and offline
tell you about my current and future needs?
Used correctly, combining these starts to create relevance
and context to our messages in particular if we can overlay location as part of
all this as well an understanding of what device and or app they are reading
the message on. As a result, the messages and the brand gain credibility
But of course this new eCRM only works when the context and
relevance that you are engaging with me with has my Permission. But it also
stops working if you abuse my Privacy by ignoring the Permission I have given you.
That permission is about engaging me on particular topics, at certain times
using my preferred media. Nothing more.
Of course before you can
convince an audience, using Aristotle’s Ethos, they have to accept you as being
credible. And credibility also has Trust as a cornerstone.
As a consumer I want the
recommendations and relevancy that personalisation brings, but don’t want you
to abuse that trust.
And if you do, as a connected
consumer in today’s world using connected networks, your lack of ethos will be quickly
shared.
