Personalization is not the Holy Grail of CRM

CRM marketers are often faced with the difficult task of balancing sales pressure and customer experience, and believe that personalization is the solution to all their engagement challenges. Find out what the biggest CRM challenges are and why personalization isn’t the answer.

Maintaining a balance between sales pressure and the customer experience

Customer marketers are the guardians of a brand’s most valuable asset: its customers.

CRM helps build lasting relationships with customers. It can also help companies improve their performance and meet short-term business goals. That’s why marketing teams often turn to their CRM resources when they need to increase conversions or boost sales quickly.

For a CRM marketer, the challenge is therefore to strike the right balance between achieving short-term business goals and maintaining a customer base that remains engaged over the long term. Many companies are turning to CRM personalization, which allows them to offer personalized journeys and content to their customers, and a better overall customer experience. CRM personalization relies on the use of explicit customer data, such as purchase history, purchase intent, birthdays, and so on.

And while this technology undoubtedly offers a better experience and a more personalized journey for their customers, is it truly capable of addressing the business realities that CRM marketers face on a daily basis? Sending mass campaigns multiple times a day remains the de facto strategy, which can harm your CRM by flooding your customers with untargeted messages.

CRM marketers are faced with requests like this every day:

• “ This product has a higher margin; we need to highlight it.”
• “ We’re 5% below our sales target for this category; we need to boost sales.”
• “We need to promote this partner ”
• “ We need to clear out our inventory ”

The list is long…

Personalization relies on automation, and many marketers find that an automated approach makes it difficult to adjust their strategy.

Business priorities often require last-minute changes that affect campaign planning. Personalization solutions are not designed to adapt easily to these changes.

But if personalization fails to meet companies' short-term needs, is there a better approach?

Understanding a customer’s true purchasing intentions for a product could make it possible to meet those needs, and this understanding can only be achieved through advanced deep learning technology that goes far beyond the analysis of explicit signals such as intentions or purchase history.

The implicit signals a customer sends are much stronger indicators of their actual purchase intent, and personalization is well-suited to this type of artificial intelligence.

Let’s take a closer look at two concrete examples from the business world.

Marketer’s Challenge #1:“I need to promote more products than I have room for in my campaign schedule”

Personalization tools suggest that the solution lies in recommending the right products to the right people based on explicit signals. AI for personalization is useful for delivering dynamic content to each customer at every stage of their buying journey. However , personalization often fails to identify actual purchase intent for each product based on the data you have about each customer.

This creates two problems:

1. Explicit signals, such as purchase intentions or past conversions, do not accurately predict future purchase intentions.
2. It’s easy to end up over-promoting certain products at the expense of others that actually offer great opportunities.

By using deep learning to generate insights that reveal their customers’ true purchasing intentions, CRM marketers can send more targeted product campaigns to the customers most likely to buy them. This allows marketers to send more product campaigns to drive incremental sales without risking a negative impact on the customer experience.

Personalization tools simply cannot identify these opportunities because their technology isn't designed to adapt to business realities.

Marketer's Challenge #2:“We need to increase sales to boost revenue”

CRM marketers often have to step into the role of a superhero when revenue is lagging. Customer acquisition is expensive, and it also takes time to convince a new customer to make a purchase. Generating revenue in the short term isn’t always the best option. That’s when CRM marketing is often called in to save the day.

When it comes to increasing revenue to meet goals, CRM marketers need to create new purchasing opportunities. As a result, new mass campaigns are planned, using basic segmentation based on simple demographics or purchase intent, or new products are added to a newsletter that is often already quite long.

CRM marketers who have access to the power of deep learning—such as Splio— can plan marketing campaigns that bundle products that are genuinely appealing to the same audiences. Now, customers receive newsletters and campaigns featuring products they are highly interested in.

Ultimately, CRM marketers can promote more products, launch a greater number of targeted campaigns based on purchase intent, and generate more revenue. All of this without having to plan months in advance… These campaigns can be created in record time.

And we all know that time is a precious resource for marketers.

Ensure a positive customer experience

It is clear that personalization offers benefits for certain types of businesses. It is a valuable skill for creating unique and tailored customer experiences. The digital shopping journey is becoming increasingly sophisticated, and consumers expect more than just generic messages and product recommendations based on website visits.

But then, is it possible to deliver an optimal customer experience while still meeting your company’s business objectives? To create campaigns in just a few hours? It would seem so, and the promise of incremental revenue offered by personalization is losing its appeal.

These day-to-day business pressures are a reality for CRM marketers. And it is only by identifying new product opportunities and understanding their customers’ true purchasing intentions from the planning stage onward that marketers will be able to satisfy both their company and their customers.