This document discusses how to personalize marketing messages without crossing into creepy or intrusive behavior. It recommends using "digital body language" like website interactions, downloads, and social media activity to understand prospects' interests and engagement levels. Building a 360-degree view of prospects allows targeting them with relevant content while avoiding annoyance. The key is personalizing the experience through engagement and reading signals about when prospects become disengaged. Marketers must understand prospects' goals to provide value without getting too personal and crossing boundaries of control over personal information.
1. How to Drive Conversions
Using Digital Body
Language
Emma Knox, Senior Manager, Demand Generation
Tweet me @emmajessicaknox
THE PERSONALIZATION ‘CREEPY’
SCALE:
11. A lot of marketers bombard prospects with
irrelevant, untargeted messages.
99.94%
of online ads are ignored
source: google display bench mark tool
0.62%
response rate from digital channels
Source: DMA response rate report 2015
3.57%
email click through rate
Source: getrespourse
17. Having knowledge of
the prospect is the only
durable competitive
advantage for marketers.
Bruce Kasanoff, Smart Customer, Stupid Companies
Monetate Study
19. Blog Subscribers, Followers on
Medium/YouTube/LinkedIn
Downloads, Leads, Social
Shares, Campaign Reach
Customers,
Average Sale
Price
LTV:CAC
Followers & Fans,
Likes & Retweets, Website Visitors
Marketing and Sales
qualified leads
Sales opps,
Opp value,
and we have a lot of
GOALS
31. At what point do we
damage the customer
experience by trying to
improve it?
32. 67% of customers
find it intrusive
when companies
that they have never
purchased with use
their personal
information to tailor
their marketing.Experian, Personalization in Retail Marketing, Feb 2016
39. 91% of adults ‘agree’ or ‘strongly
agree’ that consumers have lost
control over how personal
information is collected and
used by companies
Pew Research Privacy Panel Survey, January 2014
55. Form Submissions
Name
Email & Phone
Role & Department
Company & Industry
Employees / Team
Challenges / Goals
Geographic location
Digital Body Language
56. Interactions
Blog articles read
Forms completed
Content downloaded
Website visits
Emails opened
Social media actions
Videos watched
Form Submissions
Name
Email & Phone
Role & Department
Company & Industry
Employees / Team
Challenges / Goals
Geographic location
Digital Body Language
57. Build a 360° view of every contact
Form Submissions
Name
Email & Phone
Role & Department
Company & Industry
Employees / Team
Challenges / Goals
Geographic location
Digital Body Language
Interactions
Blog articles read
Forms completed
Content downloaded
Website visits
Emails opened
Social media actions
Videos watched
58. Build a 360° view of every contact
Who they are
Interactions
Blog articles read
Forms completed
Content downloaded
Website visits
Emails opened
Social media actions
Videos watched
Form Submissions
Name
Email & Phone
Role & Department
Company & Industry
Employees / Team
Challenges / Goals
Geographic location
Digital Body Language
59. Build a 360° view of every contact
Who they are
Their engagement levels
Interactions
Blog articles read
Forms completed
Content downloaded
Website visits
Emails opened
Social media actions
Videos watched
Form Submissions
Name
Email & Phone
Role & Department
Company & Industry
Employees / Team
Challenges / Goals
Geographic location
Digital Body Language
72. 64% say ads today
are annoying or
intrusive.Source: Hubspot Ad Blocker Research, Q2 2016
73. 91% of people believe that
ads are more intrusive
than they were 2-3 years
ago.Source: Hubspot Ad Blocker Research, Q2 2016
74. When asked about the best way to
support websites (to cover costs),
the majority (68%) of respondents
say they don't mind seeing ads --
as long as they're not annoying.Source: Hubspot Ad Blocker Research, Q2 2016
So we’re here today to talk about the personalization creepy scale.
Do you think about having your name on a coke bottle?
I loved this campaign when it came out. I’m also a huge diet coke addict, but there’s was something about finding your name on a bottle or a can that just gave me that nice warm feeling inside.
The "Share a Coke'' campaign has been such a hit that, for at least a few months, it reversed a decadelong decline in U.S. Coke consumption. That has provided a welcome lift for the beverage giant, which is trying to combat concerns over obesity and artificial sweeteners by hiking its global advertising budget by $1 billion over the next three years, up from $3.3 billion in 2013.
Okay let’s look at another example.
this is one of Hubspot’s lovely emails from a couple of years ago. Is this personlisaed?
Well that depends, If I had just been demoing the landing page tool, if I had been looking at similar content and I received this email, then yes this email is personalized.
This however, is not personlisation.
Now let’s look at what some commerce retailers are doing. This is a cart abandonment email by asos. Who here know’s what cart abandonment is?
Abandoned cart emails are sent to customers who have added products to their cart but failed to check out.
It’s remarkably effective as a sales recovery tactic.
So we’ve established different type of personalization but why do we use it?
That cart abandonment email i showed you a few slides back, nearly half of all abandoned cart emails are opened and over a third of clicks lead to purchases back on site. It’s a remarkable way to generate sales and profit and it’s been a long time coming.
We are the ones being tasked with growth. Just listen to who we are, what we call ourselves these days compared to what people on our team used to be called: Demand generation managers, content creation specialists, data scientists, community growth managers, …quite a difference from 1965, heck even a few years ago when we were simply “marketers" or had a PR or product title.
THERE HAS NEVER BEEN A BETTER TIME TO BE A MARKETER. I mean sure there are things like the Kardashians selling brand placement on instagram posts for 500k that can bum you out, but there is so much to be excited about. We have more powerful tools, collaboration is easier across team, experimentation is simple, and as a result, we’re being asked to ,...
Marketers today are spoilt for data and metrics.
We monitor everything from social media following all the way down the funnel to the quality and quantity of the leads we generate.
Ultimately all of these metrics come down to…
driving more traffic to our website, our blog our social accounts
driving more leads for our sales teams
….and growing our company by signing up more customers.
We always want more of these. We can never grow these metrics fast enough or big enough.
But the downside of this mindset is we tend to speak to our audience with a single broad message.
We think of one marketing experience for our entire audience.
but those metrics are what matter to us. Our prospects don’t know about, and don’t care about these metrics.
The prospect or buyer is just interested in finding the good quality content from a reputable source
They are searching for answers to questions. Trying to solve their pain…
…trying to find solutions to their problems
The lure of data-led tactics for web re-targeting and advanced customer experience applications is intoxicating for marketers, particularly when customers demand relevance and reward personalization with increased frequency and volume of purchase.
But while this age of data-led marketing has opened up a world of possibility for engagement, personalization and real-time, one-to-one experiences, it has also prompted customers to grab indelible paint to draw the “creepy line”—that point at which knowing the customer turns from creating a relevant experience to exhibiting stalker-like behavior.
This is the creepy scale. Now please do not take this as gospel. This is a hypothetical creation by myself and my colleagues when we discussed the value vs the perceived value of marketing offers and new marketing technology. One of the biggest issues with staying on the right side of the creepy scale is that everyone’s personal boundaries are different, and this can differ from industry to industry, yet there is a fine line between what advertisers are capable of doing and what is right to do based on the consumer reaction and consumer expectation”
Now, let’s take a closer look. On the horizontal axis the scale runs from 0-10 of perceived creepiness. On the Vertical axis, 0-10 of perceived creepiness. “
As you can see I’ve split this into 3 categories on how they performed based on this creepy scale.
Let’s start with ad retargeting: As we all know by now, retargeting has given itself a bit of a reputation, and not the good kind. Retargeting is really what brought consumer web behavior tracking to the public eye a few years ago. Because I work in marketing I remember everyone asking me, what is this? I was looking at shoes on ASOS a few days ago and now they’re everywhere I look. They’re on my facebook, they’re on my blog, they’re even on my pharmacy website….and the worst thing is, I already bought them…
Ad retargeting, can be useful but the most important thing to remember is consumers and prospects are only going to tolerate this type of stalking, let’s say, if it provides value. Showing someone a dress they looked at last but is now 50% off, that’s valubale, repeatedly showing them shoes that they’ve already bought and they’re now starting to hate because they’ve had to look at them for so long…..not so much.
At its simplest, Behavioural Targeting is segmentation based on customer behaviours. This can allow publishers to present articles that are tailored to the individual, but it can go very, very wrong.. as I will take you through shortly.
Push beacons: walking into a shop and having a notification popping up in your phone that the dress you were looking at online is in store and in your size, useful? Yes, but on the creepy side.
Now what consumers in general really find valuable is personalized offers and loyalty points that are unique to them.
Most people have some tolerance for “being watched.” After all, we’re social creatures, and we understand that, at some level, others will observe what we do and try to gain advantages. But there’s a point at which data collection can make consumers feel like they’re trapped in a kind of Orwellian nightmare.
For example, if a data collection practice is both broad (i.e., relating to behavior in multiple contexts, like emailing, texting, web browsing, and voice calling) and granular (i.e., capturing details of the behavior, as in keystroke-logging), expect a sharp rise in the sale of tin-foil hats, because prospects will do anything to avoid this kind of practice. Just ask companies like Phorm and NebuAd, who partnered with Internet Service Providers a couple of years ago to use deep-packet inspection technology to deliver targeted ads to users. If you want to know how that story ends, you can read all about it in the transcripts of the congressional hearing.
Which helps us get to know our audience even better.
On top of this demographic data we also use HubSpot to add a layer of behavioral data…
Which helps us understand how an individual is interacting with our content.
Such as the content they’re reading
Or pages on our website they’re viewing – such as our pricing page
And what they are talking about on social media
All of this data give us a 360° of every person in our database.
A real understanding of…
Who they are
And what they are interested in
It’s only when we have this data that we get a real understanding
And we start to speak to them as individuals.
So, let’s take a look at we use this data to personalize their experience...
This however, is not personlisation.
You need to go all-in.
The REALITY is, our customers don’t want to feel part of a crowd.
They’re don’t see themselves as a metric in our marketing funnel.
What are the shared characteristics are of our ideal customer and use that information in our marketing.
We don’t want to waste our marketing resources marketing to people who will never buy our product.
We want to attract people who will get value from what we’re offering, people who are likely to become happy repeat buying customers who refer us to all their friends.
The people are referred to as buyer personas. Personas are so much more than just targeting a specific industry or size of company. It’s more than saying you target Accountants, or Marketing Managers. You need to know their challenges, goals, motivations, and how your product or service helps make their life better. And if you start using this approach, you’ll be ahead of 99% of other marketers
Let’s take a look at Marketing Mary, HubSpot’s primary buyer persona.