One of the marketing challenges of today is producing a message that resonates with your customers or prospects. They are inundated with advertisement, sales messages and phone calls both at home and at work, which makes it difficult for them to listen to and focus on your message. Would you like to be able to better adapt your message to your customers? Would you like to have the attention of your prospects? If your answer to both of these questions is yes, behavioural marketing is the solution for you.
Behavioural marketing consists in adapting your message, its communication method and moment according to each individual. This will render the communication much more relevant and effective. This is the key to success. For our message to stand out from the mass, we need to increase our relevance.
How to increase the relevance of your marketing
If you have read some of my columns in the Grenier aux nouvelles or on the Publipage blog, you are already aware of my opinion regarding non-personalized mass communication: it doesn’t work! And if by some chance mass send-outs work for your business, imagine what the results would be if the message was personalized!
That being said, how do we make our Internet marketing more relevant? The first step is accepting the fact that as marketing managers, we have to allow our customers and prospects to tell us what they find relevant or not. Thus, an increase in relevance comes through your customers and not through the marketing department.
Here is a concrete situation to better illustrate my point. You work for a retail business which sells various products for men and women. You own an internet website on which your products are categorized and you send a monthly newsletter. A pretty standard situation for a retailer today. Here are a few steps you can take to make your Internet marketing more relevant.
First and foremost, make sure your newsletter is addressed to at least one individual by their name. You can also add other relevant information for your customer. Retailers with stores located in various regions could modify the newsletter so that it originates from the store closest to the recipient. In the case of a pharmacy, there could be information on its location and on the owners… All of this would serve to make your email more relevant and more personal for the customer receiving it.
Second, change your newsletter template and add a dynamic zone in which you can add offers, promotions or content based on your customers’ demographic information. For example, a retail business could insert promotions on products according to gender: a man would receive the promotions for the men and the women, the promotions for the women. The same logic could be used for age or any other criteria or combination of criteria (age + gender). Once more, our newsletter communication has become much more relevant. The right content needs to be sent to the right person.
Third, use your customers’ interactions and actions to better target their interests. Take the above mentioned example: if I was one of your customers, I would have received an email for men in my age group that was addressed to me personally. A good start, but it would be even more relevant to offer me promotions or content based on my interests. For example, if I visited the sports section on your website, it would be relevant to send along with the newsletter current promotions or content having to do with sports. Another idea would be to use the information from my interactions with the newsletter (the articles read, the promotions consulted) to target my interests even further.
The fourth step would be to put an emphasis on the timing of the communications. For example, a marketing campaign to invite me to revisit the website when I haven’t visited in a long time could be put in place. A campaign to wish me a happy birthday, or one to offer me related products two weeks following a purchase, etc. Relevant messages sent at the right time are very effective.
And last but not least, you could close the loop by creating communication sequences – a series of send-outs adapted to my profile (demographic information, interactions and timing). I receive the newsletter, I visit your website, I use your fidelity card and I make purchases. All those criteria and actions can trigger micro marketing campaigns that are highly-targeted and highly-relevant.
By putting this type of behavioural marketing in place, your campaigns become extremely relevant both on the message level and the timing. All these changes contribute to helping you stand out from the competition and escape the stream of useless and irrelevant communication. These changes are not all easy to apply, but the important thing is to start changing your practices today. Relevance is the future.
