Gone are the days where you could pepper your customers with emails, SMS and other forms of communication.
Spray and pray marketing techniques will now alienate your customer base, see your email domains blacklisted and could very well land you in deep trouble with regulators, not to mention the potential of a hefty fine.
Personalization is expected
Your customers want to hear from you, and they expect you to border on psychic as to when and what about.
People have expected personalization for a long time, so much so that it is now a minimum requirement when it comes to customer communications. Because of this, we are now increasingly expecting to be hyper-personalized.
When we think of hyper-personalization, this in most people’s minds means to tailor content to a specific individual or group of individuals, which is absolutely valid.
I’m a middle-aged man and you could certainly avoid trying to sell me women’s clothes. You could probably also assume that I am not likely to buy super funky, tight clothing that your Gen Z audience might want. If you have purchase history, even better, as now you can show me product recommendations based on past purchases ala Amazon.
So everyone’s getting better on the content front, and here at Purple we’ve been helping our customers better understand the demography and social interests of their customers for many years. Learn more about how, here.
But what about timing? When should you send these hyper-personalized communications to guarantee the best return?
Real-time communications
There are some obvious moments that you’d want to get my attention as a consumer, maybe around my birthday, sales, holidays etc. That’s great and may be successful if I need some new swimming shorts for a summer holiday.
There is, however, a time where I am going to be extremely receptive to communications from you, and that is when I am in-store/venue.
I see consumers interest a little like an ECG. The waves indicate my level of receptivity to a message. Get it right and you have open arms.
The peaks occur when I’m in your store or venue. The other times, a hyper-personalized message may trigger an interest, but it’s not necessarily front of mind.
There’s a prime spot in my mind where I am completely focused on you. The problem is that you don’t know I am in your venue, and you may never know. If you’re running a loyalty system then maybe you’d know but that would be just as I’m leaving after paying my bill. At that point, the moment has passed and the wave is going down again. Now on that downward wave there’s still opportunity, but you’re not likely to drive me back in to spend more, this is more of an opportunity to push for a review or feedback on the experience.
So how do you capitalize on the in-store moment and identify that I am there receptive to all you have to say?
Apps were meant to be the saviour here, although as Gartner’s report around app fatigue showed, people will only use on average 11 apps and download 7 per quarter, of which some replace the 11 or don’t get used. They also predicted that 20% of brands will abandon their mobile apps.
So, even if you still have an app, and have been lucky enough to get it in one of those 11 cherished spots, it still leaves another problem…
There has been a huge lock down on location data within apps. Unless your app has a genuine reason to have background location running all the time then you’ll never know I was there.
What are the alternatives?
Step forward trusty guest WiFi.
Once someone has logged onto your guest WiFi, at any of your venues, anywhere in the world, you’ve not only provided a service as popular as running water, you’ve also gained invaluable CRM data and social interests. And the icing on the cake, you will know the minute I walk into your venue.
So go a step further on your hyper-personalization journey and leverage something you probably already have in place, guest WiFi.
Get in touch for more information.