Personalisation is the key to customer engagement. It’s how you build trust, deliver value, and ultimately convince customers to spend their money with you. Without personalisation, marketing is frustrating for both sides. Customers are tired of receiving generic communications from the companies they choose to engage with. Whether it’s from a department store or professional services, generic communications guarantee that only a small proportion of the email that individual receives will be relevant to them.
Meanwhile, businesses achieve minimal returns on marketing campaigns and customer relationships fail to get off the ground.
Fundamentally, without personalisation, messages can only ever be generic which makes them either irrelevant or annoying. Let’s not forget, that while a 25% open rate for an email may seem good, 75% chose to ignore you.
The absence of reliable data makes it next to impossible for a marketing function to improve its odds of success. For prospects and customers, generic messaging makes them feel ignored or unseen, which undermines trust and harms the working relationship.
The absence of reliable data makes it next to impossible for a marketing function to improve its odds of success. A CRM that houses a single source of truth for each prospect and customer enables you to create personalised experiences. What’s more, you can personalise communications at scale.
How personalisation transforms customer experience
Personalisation cuts to the heart of what’s important to the customer. In that sense, it’s an extension of customer-centric marketing – where you focus not on your offer, but on the customer’s need. Take, for example, a customer who has been browsing wallpaper designs on a DIY superstore’s website. With that data to hand, the store could email them offers on relevant products. The wallpaper. The paste. The tools. They could send ‘how to’ guides or direct them to relevant social media content. In short, they can make the journey from decision-making to buying to enjoying much simpler for them. Compare this to the DIY superstore that highlights whichever products are the flavour of the month – a lawnmower, perhaps, or taps. Generic, impersonal marketing doesn’t help the customer progress their purchase. And if you can’t help them, they will go to a seller that can.
Personalisation doesn’t need to be complicated to be effective. For example, event planners might target return customers – particularly if they’ve conducted feedback surveys and received positive results. Those customers will appreciate the opportunity to return. Gyms might note which classes members usually attend and reach out if they haven’t been in a while. Done well, this signals to members that their gym cares about them and wants them to succeed. Overcoming the generic barrier is transformative. Consider the effect an email with generic summer lines would perform compared to one that features products that match a customer’s purchase history, right down to size and colour choices. Not every product will be right but the relevance of that email is powerful.
When personalisation makes a customer feel valued, the result is a strengthening of the relationship between buyer and seller. A stronger relationship leads to shorter sales cycles, repeat business and a greater likelihood that your customer crosses the line to a loyal customer. Then, in time, an advocate.
How to personalise communications
The key to a personalised CRM approach is collecting and storing relevant information about every customer. Some of this data can be gathered during discovery, while some will only come out through interactions with the customer. However, without a CRM within which to centralise your data, aggregating this information can be tricky.
Customers can range from industrial scale or enterprise size to SMEs. While the products they purchase might be the same, the size of the order and their requirements will be fundamentally different. For example, delivery times, frequency of orders and payment terms may all change. Understanding the basic needs of each customer and categorising them accordingly will enable you to present each customer with the most relevant information. Relevance keeps customers engaged and reduces churn.
Every data point can be used to create a personalised and engaging customer experience. Something as simple as market segmentation allows you to focus on the kind of content you share. Another critical area of understanding is your customers’ pain points. Understanding and codifying specific issues allows you to provide solutions – a far more effective approach than the hit-and-hope hard sell.
The more data you have at your disposal and the deeper the segmentation, the easier it is to become a relied-upon and trusted supplier to your customers.
Personalised emails are a mainstay of most CRM tools; however, this goes beyond just using the customer’s name. Anyone with a database and free email tool can achieve this. Personalisation requires a deeper level of understanding and the processes to capture that crucial data.
With a good CRM, your options for recording relevant information are vast and no information should be considered extraneous. The focus is on building a long-lasting, trusting relationship.
Use the data you have to engage with your audiences in the way that matters most to them. If a company has a big sports culture, tailor your communications to ‘speak their language’. There’s nothing to stop you from creating a fun fact campaign to drop every day of a tournament if you think it will get you the outcomes you want.
Strategies for effective CRM personalisation
Building out this data can be challenging, especially if your organisation has data scattered across disparate systems. Data consolidation is key to both successful CRM deployment and personalised customer engagement. You also need robust processes in place, so your account managers or salespeople know what information to collect and how to record it.
These systems rely on your people having those key discovery conversations and building the rapport so that information can be gathered. This in turn relies on a business-wide approach to sales that is highly customer-centric and detail oriented.
Collect and analyse customer data
When you’re adding a new customer to your CRM, do your due diligence. You need the basics: the right name, contact details, industry segment, etc. All of this is foundation-level personalisation. Once you start having conversations with that customer, you can assign categories according to their needs and pain points. Capture data where you can, including how your audience interacts with your emails. You need to know how often they opened the email, what they clicked on and whether they converted off the back of that click.
Segment customers to tailor communications
The more data you have the deeper you can segment your audiences. Remember, your customers can sit in multiple buckets, which means they can be in multiple campaigns. And when it comes to data segmentation almost nothing is off limits. Record everything, you never know when it might come in handy. Once you know what your customer is interested in, you can – and should – tailor your communications.
But segmentation is only part of the process; you need to adopt a customer-centric mindset to go with it. That means sending them the content, offers and products they’re interested in. Not the ones you want to sell.
Automate communications based on customer actions or milestones
If you’re able to track a customer’s engagement with specific resources from across your digital estate, you could follow up with a personalised message. This could be a straightforward ‘I see you’re interested in X, would you like to know more?’ or you could look at ways to add value by anticipating their needs. ‘As you read XYZ, you might also be interested in ABC’. Remember to keep these automated messages personal – no one wants to feel like a cog in a machine.
Measure and refine
Customers, businesses, challenges – none of these are static. Circumstances change, and your personalised approach needs to keep up or you risk once again making that customer feel unseen. Use the analytics at your disposal to evaluate whether customer behaviours align with the data you have. Simple things like average order value, products purchased and order frequency. This is in addition to channel performance like email open and click-through rates. Analysing these behaviours can show where interests have shifted or if the customer is at risk of churning. We’d also suggest that you use the time freed up by business process automation to connect with customers one-to-one. Give them a call and have a conversation about their business, their needs, etc. Think of it as rediscovery. The effort you put in around your personalised communications allows you to move the relationship away from purely transactional.
CRM tools for personalisation
There are many ways that an advanced CRM like Microsoft Dynamics 365 can enable you to personalise your relationship with your customers. Here are just a few:
Name check – You can automate emails from your CRM to include things like your contact’s name, their business name, a reference to your last communication or their last purchase. All of these details can be completed automatically, and you can also select customers by market segment, region, past purchases, etc.
Power Automate Flow – This Microsoft tool can be integrated with Dynamics 365 to automate a customer journey based on conditional logic. For example, if a customer clicks on a resource on your website, automations can be triggered, such as a popup or a customer email, or an email to a salesperson suggesting they call the customer to follow up. Each action has a pre-programmed reaction, reducing missed opportunities and increasing sales and marketing efficiency.
Copilot – Another Microsoft tool, Copilot is an AI assistant that sits within the Microsoft ecosystem and can draw on your CRM, emails, documents, etc. to provide insights that help you develop a highly personalised approach to every interaction.
Integration – One of the best ways to maximise personalisation within a CRM (and increase user adoption) is to ensure it integrates with your existing platforms. That way, it’s easier to copy information from one place to another – sometimes as simple as one or two clicks – and requires far less effort on the user’s part to reap maximum reward.
When choosing a CRM, these are the kinds of capabilities you should be looking for. Add to this, the potential to add more as they are developed. If you’re already using an advanced CRM and don’t have all these tools, talk to your CRM partner. You should be able to enhance your system to create more potential for personalisation.
Don’t get left behind
Personalisation is a way to differentiate yourself from the competition and provide a superior customer experience. Significantly, it’s what your customers expect. From a sales perspective, it’s the difference between a trial-and-error approach and a data-driven, customer-centric strategy. You’re specifically targeting customers with information that is relevant to them. The result will be more sales, happier customers, and fewer missed opportunities.
Strategies like these are only possible now because of advances in digital technologies and AI-driven tools. The more these take off, the more customers will expect a personalised approach, and the more your business will suffer if you’re not personalising the customer experience.
If you feel like you’re barely scratching the surface of your CRM strategy, we can help. Speak to a member of the team to assess your current CRM usage and develop strategies to improve personalisation.
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