In a past article called 4 steps to create relevant messages in Email Marketing I defined relevance, detailed its importance and outlined 4 steps to create relevant messages.
Now it's time to look at where relevance is going thanks to three major factors: more and better technologies to achieve relevance, data to feed these technologies, and strategies to most effectively direct efforts toward full relevance.
An interesting article by David Daniels of The Revancy Group describes this new future for marketing relevance.
We are rapidly moving into a new phase when it comes to relevance, where the future goes from a CRM to a contextual tactic to deliver a true one-to-one experience known as "people-based marketing" (People-BasedMarketing).
This approach involves blending CRM data with unknown data to recognize the customer as a person. This notion of people-based marketing allows marketers to target people individually, but massively, for the first time.
Digital marketers must begin to recognize customers as individuals, mimicking offline experiences. Many offline businesses (physical stores) recognize their regular customers and have diverse conversations, and receive different offers than new customers visiting the company for the first time.
This approach requires knowing the person's identity and then using behaviors, attitudes, demographics and locations as targeting attributes.
Today's marketers have the ability to target customers through their email address, yet we find that email marketers are not using all the data available to them.
The future of relevance has begun
Consumers demand relevance. In the recent Relevance Group Consumer Survey, 55% of consumers say they ignore or reject messages that are not relevant to them.
The journey of relevance
- Segment: This has been the foundation of direct and digital marketing for decades. In this approach, marketers leverage Customer Relationship Marketing (CRM), frequency and monetary (RFM) data, which provides a legacy historical view of the customer relationship.
- Context: This is the era we are in today. Context utilizes the best aspects of Precision Marketing, including leveraging real-time data to use event-based information to trigger communications or to use as data inputs in predictive models. If past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior, contextual data works in part because past behavior can be as recent as minutes, hours or days. This is a necessary step to increase marketing accuracy.
- People: People-Based Marketing (PBM) is a nascent aspect of marketing that we are currently in. It ensures the blending of CRM data with unknown data, to recognize the customer as a person.
This notion of "people-based marketing" allows marketers to target people individually, but massively, for the first time. This approach allows marketers to implement persistent identity-based lifecycles or one-off campaigns.
The future of relevance is composed of 4 main pillars:
- Identity Management - The technology and methodology to match known customers from a CRM with unknown customer information is a key requirement for future relevance.
- Data management The ability to manage a massive amount of unstructured data, customer information and massive advertising data. This requires additional data tactics such as hygiene and enrichment.
- Machine Learning - Machine Learning The ability to provide marketers with artificial intelligence to develop predictive recommendations and new tactics for targeting and focus of action
- Execution of channels The ability to drive relevance across all channels and most importantly, measure engagement across channels and devices.
The future of relevance demands accurate, real-time data for segmentation and analytics
The future of relevance demands accurate real-time data for targeting and analysis. Marketers are increasingly using real-time data to make their campaigns more accurate.
Real-time data, such as location, web event data, even weather, dramatically improves the accuracy of relevance. The ability to act on behavioral elements in real time will advance campaign context and results.
Data hygiene and data enrichment are also essential elements of the future of relevance. It is imperative that marketers are working with clean data before they begin to fully combine known and unknown customer data, i.e. Identity Management.
Machine learning and artificial intelligence are necessary and growing rapidly
For years marketers have been experimenting with predictive recommendation technologies, most of which have manifested themselves in website personalization. Thus, new learning technologies that rely on sophisticated artificial intelligence have come to market.
Recommendation algorithms learn from past behavior and become more accurate over time.
While this technology is changing rapidly, marketers should look for those who have core predictive capabilities through complex modeling and also those who plug into some of the latest web personalization offerings. Marketers who "embrace" the machines have an advantage over those who don't.
