Mark Bower

Personalising your online strategies can open up powerful opportunities to increase your ROI, retain customers, enhance your brand image and generate free word-of-mouth marketing.

Personalisation is key to keeping the consumer engaged with your brand, and therefore must remain at the heart of your digital strategy.

Calling on some of the best ‘cult’ status films from the last decade for illustration, here are a few insights that might help it all become clear.

1. Rita, Sue and Bob Too – know your audience
Find out who your target audiences are; every variation, then ask yourself why they choose your brand, and how it is you can help. Do they want information? To purchase? Or simply want interaction with the brand? Anticipate their needs and begin building your relationship from day one. Offer them related products or give them suggestions i.e. ‘other customers also viewed…’ Also examine where your customers are in their buying cycles and present content to them that will suit their needs.

2. Seven – understanding decision making
The main component to consider for any online business, is the ‘end-user’. Users are the central ‘cog’ in any online business, around which the website should revolve. Every brand needs to understand why their users make the decisions they do, in order to predetermine an effective strategy which will lead consumers towards purchasing, engaging and re-visiting.

3. It’s a Wonderful Life – ensure efficient customer care
Greet them every time they log in and be just as accessible online as you would in person. Ensure you employ plenty of customer service reps to answer calls throughout the day, just as you would a sales assistant 9-5. Aim to respond to all email queries within the working day, if not sooner. Personalise the e-mail, attaching a contact name, e-mail address, and phone number to use if your customer needs further help. Integrate an application on your website so customers can leave their contact number for you to call them back..there are many options out there to make people feel like you really want to service them.

4. The Matrix – create a virtual reality
Taking personalisation quite literally, look to computer games for inspiration, turning your customers into their very own virtual self. Allow their virtual character to roam the site. For fashion brands why not enable customers to key in their body dimensions and shop to suit those? Create a custom mannequin within your online store and allow the customer to try on outfits. For non clothing brands, provide something which allows the customer to test your product just as they would instore. The importance is in providing the shop experience online, so customers get a ‘feel’ for the product without actually touching it.

5. Human Traffic – go overboard with social interaction
Websites are now required to be communication channels, ways in which the customer can engage in a conversation with the brand itself. Social media alone is by far the most relevant example of free advertising through word-of-mouth. Keep up to date with social media, keep your status updates and tweets regular and relevant. Provide advice, offers and exclusive opportunities to your followers. Allow customers to chat to one another about the products available, comparing previous purchases and discussing future ones. This will lead to recommendations being made.

6. To Kill a Mockingbird – treat every customer equally
Anything that is offered online must be honored instore, for example online gift cards and certificates. Reassure the customer that any item will be possible to return both through the post or at one of its stores and that refunds and exchanges will be honored efficiently, regardless of the place of purchase. This is about reassurance to put your customers at ease any remove any objections they might have about shopping with you online.

7. Me, Myself & Irene – ‘individualise’ your customers
Customers may have similar interests, but remember they are individuals. Add personalised touches to your consumer interaction that are individual to them such e.g. mailers, offering birthday discounts or gifts. When new products launch related to their previous purchases, send them a message ‘thought you may be interested in this…’ Customers love to feel valued, so give them something back.

8. The Good, The Bad and The Ugly – user-generated content
It is widely acknowledged that adding customer reviews to a website has direct benefit. Customers want to feel part of the brand and therefore deserve acknowledgment for taking time to provide an opinion on your product. Personally thank everyone for their review, but be creative, think of another media other than email. By publishing this, the customer is becoming part of your team, so treat them like it.

9. 300 (IMAX) – enrich your media
Take your audience on a customer journey using rich media such as videos, zoomable images, and 360-degree views. Generate an emotional attachment which will resurface whenever they are reminded of the brand; be it through conversation or sight of the logo. Create a lasting impression by tapping into a variety of senses, making your website the most memorable out there.

10. The Italian Job – consider the finer details
Don’t go to all the effort prior to purchase and then forget the rest. Review your checkout process to ensure it’s not too complicated or long winded. Unnecessary information requirements will just put the customer off. Allow the customer to track their purchase easily online and over the phone. Really consider attention to detail where your packaging is concerned. Mirror your brand, its image and audience with its packaging – quality products deserve quality wrapping for quality people.

By knowing your online audience and understanding what it is they really want, you can create a lasting impression, build a lifetime relationship and dramatically increase repeat business. Whilst the perfect customer experience cannot guarantee an instant sale, it certainly helps.

Join the cult of ‘customer lovers’, give them what they want, and we’re pretty sure you’ll be hooked on the results.

Having more than 10 years under my belt as a director of a digital agency I’ve spent many years anguishing over why we, as a sector, so often fail to really get our message across at the most senior level within the business that we work with. You know how it goes. No matter how you try to explain the staggering potential benefits of the latest viral widget to Barry McLuddite, CEO of McLuddite Enterprises, they just don’t seem to get it!!

Well, after all this time, and a not inconsiderable amount of frustration, I think I’ve finally realised the answer – or at least maybe a significant part of the actually very, very obvious answer.

It’s because we, the digital sector as a whole, still have and awful lot of growing up to do. We quite simply don’t appear credible to these people and therefore aren’t being taken seriously.

Think about it for a minute. We work in an industry where the average age of an account manager is maybe 23. A ‘senior’ account manager will be typically 26-28 and it’s perfectly possible to find ‘account directors’ in their early thirties or younger, with maybe as little as 4-5 years experience under their belt.  It’s endemic within the industry and it’s definitely not doing us any favours.

Of course we understand digital implicitly, almost instinctively even. We’ve been raised on it. Some of our own staff could probably spell out CPA, ROI and PHP in their alphabetti-spagetti before they could walk.

But seriously, can you imagine what the archetypal scruffy looking, stubbly, jeans wearing, twenty eight-year-old, ‘senior account manager’ looks and sounds like to a typically beleaguered client under pressure to deliver against aggressive sales targets?

And what about when they subsequently meet your twenty five year old ‘head of development’ who reminds them a bit of their grandson who also ‘mucks about with computers for a living’?

Any wonder they aren’t 100% confident in handing over a couple of million pounds worth of precious marketing budget?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting for a minute that these fine digital people aren’t up to the job. We have some of the very best, highly trained, super-motivated people in the business, as I’m certain do many of our contemporaries. It’s just that we are all so bloody YOUNG!

It’s an old adage that people not only buy from and feel comfortable with people they like, but that, most often, this means people who are like them. And, in digital, those people are in extremely short supply.

I have a very good friend who told me what could be viewed as quite a depressing story.

After years of struggling in vain build a marketing business and consistently failing to have his ideas and work really taken seriously by clients he eventually turned 40, got fat and went a bit bald.

Guess what? Suddenly he’s worth listening to and can hardly stop winning business. He’s the voice of experience, a safe pair of hands, someone to trust.

So what can we do?

In an industry so desperately short on real commercial experience, it’s difficult to see how things can change quickly. Despite all logic and evidence to the contrary many clients still aren’t showing much sign of making the shift to digital as aggressively as they perhaps should be.

In short, they still aren’t taking it and us, seriously.

So, maybe it’s up to us to raise our game and figure out new and better ways to communicate. We need to start to look like the kinds of people that are likely to deliver results. Professional, dedicated, organised, and utterly trustworthy. The stakes get higher every day and digital simply has to find a way to finally come in from the cold and become part of the business mainstream.

But maybe some won’t relish the transition, choosing instead to continue to sulk and stomp about, bemoaning the fact that ‘no one understands us’ like the rebellious teenagers of the business world, all the while being secretly in love with our cool-kid, know it all status?

In the meantime I’m off to get myself a sharp new suit, a sensible haircut and maybe enrol myself on the next CIM or DMA professional qualification course I can lay my hands on while I’m at it.

Digital, it’s time to grow up.

Social media has been with us for a while now, but until recently it seemed that many in the business world had failed to grasp the true power of the social medium and were largely confused as to how best to embrace the phenomenon in any meaningful or useful fashion.

“Should we have a Facebook page” or “who’s going to be interested in talking about X product online” would be fairly typical responses to any attempt to turn the conversation to such matters. Of course, some ‘cult’ status brands have made some inroads via this approach due to their ability to naturally galvanize consumers into self-assembling groups of slightly fanatical ‘advocates’. This was happening any way, it’s just that social platforms helped these people to connect with each other in simpler ways without geographic restriction therefore increasing momentum.

All of this somewhat misses the point to a certain extent.

If you’re looking for some pointers as to the true power of social media and a hint of how marketing, or rather, business will look in the coming years, you need to look no further than the recent, startling announcement by advertising giant Pepsi Co. that it would pull its entire $20M US Super bowl advertising budget and dump the lot into a huge social media campaign. Yes, you read that right, the whole $20M.

The campaign sees Pepsi giving away the entire sum to worthy causes – causes suggested by guess who? Yes, you, the public. The full details can be found here http://www.netimperative.com/news/2010/february/pepsi-ditches-super-bowl-tv-ads-for-20m-social

Now, that’s a pretty seismic event. In the world of advertising, few slots offer a larger captive audience than the US Super Bowl, meaning that 30 second ad slots go for up to $2M a time. This is an incredibly bold move by Pepsi – who I guess have deep enough pockets to give such a thing a try in the first place – and maybe there’s a certain shock factor to the whole thing which will help to propel this particular campaign forward, but, looking beyond the headline, it’s worth thinking about what’s actually happening here. Pepsi are effectively exploring different ways to create exposure and ‘brand equity’. Rather than spend the cash on flashy adverts in a slightly underhand attempt to subconsciously influence the masses in a single sitting (i.e. traditional advertising) they are in fact engaging people consciously on a one to one basis and – it has to be said – doing and awful lot of GOOD in the process.

Self-serving, admittedly, but the end result is the same. The money gets spent, people ‘benefit’ and therefore Pepsi gains kudos, masses of ‘free’ exposure and lots of those lovely warm fuzzy brand association-type feelings that all brands ultimately strive for.

So there we have it. Maybe we’ve just witnessed the birth of a whole new advertising model. Admittedly it’s one that’s been gestating for some time, but now it’s here, will things ever be quite the same again?

What if ALL advertisers decide to dump their budgets into building orphanages and healing the sick? Sadly I can’t see that happening any time soon, but maybe, just maybe we as consumers might start to favour brands who spend their budgets in a slightly more ethical and responsible manner than chopping down acres of rainforest and subsequently posting it in pulped and luridly printed form through our letterboxes against our will? I guess time will tell, but to me it feels like there’s something afoot here that isn’t going to go away quietly. Watch this space.

TOYOTA APOLOGY

As if all that wasn’t enough, last week supplied a second ‘fall of your chair’ social media moment when Jim Lentz, president of Toyota USA, appeared on the companies YouTube channel to apologize in person over the recent ‘sticking pedal’ recall debacle. You can see the whole thing for yourself here. http://www.youtube.com/user/ToyotaUSA#p/c/9FC450C0F2BFE90B/2/ZCb2dEFBq7I

Let’s sit back and examine what just happened here. Things are moving so fast in this space that there’s a real danger that we could all get a bit ‘yeah, so what’ about this. This is the PRESIDENT of a major international manufacturing company apologizing IN PUBLIC and IN PERSON for problems within the business and offering sincere assurances that the issues are being taken seriously and addressed.

Not only that, but the medium chosen to offer this apology? Not television, but YouTube, a social media platform. I don’t know about anyone else, but I think that’s an incredibly brave and forward thinking move by TOYOTA and presents the company as a very in-touch, human and caring organization. You’d be lucky to get a letter of apology from most CEOs – let alone a personal statement on YouTube and if there’s one thing that today’s consumers crave it’s power.

We want our voices to be heard. We want to know that ‘they’ are paying attention and that they are responding to our needs. The fastest (and possibly only) way for brands to build real equity in today’s marketplace is to enter into exactly this kind of two-way dialog with consumers. Treat us as equals, partners and respected individuals with opinions that matter and we will flock to you in droves. But disappoint or mislead us at your peril, for, thanks to social media, we now have the tools to tear down and destroy what took years of toil and effort to build, in the blink of an eye.

Oh and one final thing, don’t break our guitars, ok?

Or we might just tell 7,691,614 people. And counting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo

There’s an old saying that there are three kinds of people in this world. Those who make things happen, those who watch things happen, and those who wonder what the hell happened!

Yesterday I was lucky enough to spend a day in the company of some of the nations leading retail movers-and-shakers at a special summit designed to focus the attention and hopefully shed some light upon the manifold, complex issues facing those brave enough to venture (or perhaps unfortunate enough to have been pushed) into the murky world of multi channel retailing.

I don’t envy them. As the pace of change continues to accelerate, many are realising that they have failed to keep their eye on the ball and are now struggling to catch up. Woolworths, Zavvi, Borders et al, as we all know, weren’t so lucky. Indeed, some would say there is a palpable undercurrent of anxiety in the room.

All of these people, I assume, were in attendance with a view to gaining insight and knowledge – of which there was an abundance on offer – but I suppose what’s really important with any of these events is what happens when the newly informed and motivated individuals arrive back in the ‘real world’ – armed with some new strategies and ideas and begin to grapple with the day to day issues of implementing such wide ranging and fundamental changes across the disparate and often badly integrated departments making up a typical ‘old school’ retail operation.

In the vast majority of cases what happens, at least in my experience, is not a great deal. Goodbye Borders. Goodbye Woolworths. Goodbye Zavvi. Who’s next?

This is why the ‘few who do’ are always in the minority. Having the right information (i.e. watching what’s happening) is very definitely not the whole solution. Action, often on a huge and undoubtedly daunting scale, is, at this late stage of the game, mostly what’s required.

Indeed, sitting in the crowd and listening to the ostensibly very positive, forward looking discussions taking place, my feelings were, I have to admit, ones of mild boredom verging on despondency. Admittedly the content of the individual presentations was on the whole excellent and in some cases exceptionally good. But once again it occurs to me that there is really nothing new being said here.

Am I suffering from déjà vu? Can this really be Jan 2010? Hasn’t everyone known all of this stuff for most of the last 10 years at least? Unfortunately, I have to say that I think the answer is that, yes, we’ve known it, but what has anyone done about it?

An example.

A question was asked about multi-variable testing. A show of hands was requested to indicate who had ‘heard of’ such a thing. The result? Three hands went ‘up’ out of an audience of maybe 100 people – two being mine and that of a colleague sitting a couple of rows in front.

Come on guys?

Multivariable and A/B testing have been cornerstones of any effective online optimisation strategy for literally donkey’s years – and I’d argue that, in 2010, anyone with the vaguest connection to multichannel retailing, however tangential, ought to give themselves a proper kick up the backside for not being aware of such a simple, powerful tool. Look it up. Its reasonably easy to do, and could (depending upon the size and level of optimisation of your existing online business) make you a couple of extra million in sales, almost overnight. No joke.  If you don’t believe me, give me a call in the office and we’ll come and explain how you could do something similar.

Let’s be honest about this. It’s not a lack of available information that has prevented retailers from delivering properly integrated, multi-channel offerings before now. Nor has there been a shortage of well-qualified potential partners, advisors and strategists available throughout this period to help such business successfully undertake the required transition, should they have felt compelled to do so.

To be perfectly frank, for those of us on the outside looking in, for the last 10 years it’s often felt like we were witnessing a wholesale, ostrich-like, head-in-the-sand denial of the fact that the issues even existed. And boy have we tried and tried and tried again (in some cases for the best part of a decade) to get the message across.

Which is what makes the likes of the demise of companies like Borders, Woolworth’s and Zavvi all the more depressing. I often wonder if those businesses had whole teams of agencies and potential partners practically knocking their doors off the hinges, just trying to communicate ideas and strategies that they just knew would help to make a difference?  What went wrong? Whatever happened, they failed to respond quickly enough and it cost them the business. And that probably didn’t have to happen.

I suppose in closing, the take home message from this event has to be that the time for ‘standing by and watching how this thing develops’ is definitely, definitively over. It’s now time to make something happen – or resign yourself to the ‘what the hell happened there’ gang. The pace of change is, if anything, accelerating and for some, maybe it could already be too late.

Personally I doubt if we’ve seen the last of the major high street disaster stories, but for those brave enough to step up and grasp the multichannel nettle firmly and with sufficient determination, the rewards will be enormous.