The How-To’s of One-to-One Marketing

the how to of one to one marketing

In 2020, when everything is customizable and targeted at a particular buyer persona, it is important to understand the power of a strategy at the top of the marketing food chain- one-to-one marketing. This article will give you a full picture of this most peculiar strategy and explain how to implement it with success. You will finally get close to your customers!

It’s common to think that one-to-one marketing is the most innovative and effective strategy for today. We agree with its effectiveness but oppose its innovativeness. One-to-one marketing’s efficiency is so high that it reaches the point of being obvious. It has been used since forever by the most clever merchants and shopkeepers that strived for client retention through their satisfaction.

Marketing example 1 to 1

How do you feel when you enter your favorite coffee shop where a barista greets you by name and makes your order without even asking? Or let’s assume that you are a coffee enthusiast and the barista knows exactly what beans you are interested in so you get to choose from the tailored top of the cream? You wouldn’t even think about going to the other establishment after such personalized, relationship-based customer experience.

It’s all one-to-one marketing aka individual, personalized, relationship marketing. It may carry many names but one fact is known for sure – it is awfully effective! Let’s dig into it!

1:1 marketing definition and its operation principal

What is one-to-one marketing? In a nutshell, it’s a promising strategy that is revolving around an idea of constant research of the customer base and behavioral change or development based on the collected data.

putting it in a more simple manner, one-to-one marketing is a healthy learning relationship between a customer and a business

What it means is that every interaction with a client should be analyzed and taken into account. All the improvements and updates should make your product a better pick for a customer, thus exceeding the competitors. Seems impossible for all those non-coffee-shop businesses, right? Well, modern technology makes it all easier. 

An enormous amount of information about your clients can be gathered via interactions on your website, social media, surveys, and so on.

The next step is the assessment and structuration of the gathered information into segments of the client base and buyer personas. The more clusters of information you will have to work with, the more one-to-one your marketing strategy is.

The last step would be the actual optimization of the product or the services related to the core offer. As mentioned before, due to the current digital technology advancements, possibilities to implement the information about certain customers are limitless. We will tap on some of the possible methods and explain them later in the article. 

Let’s make your strategy one-to-one

the three steps of 1 to 1 research action and analy

As you have probably already noticed, one-to-one marketing strategy can be executed by three following steps: research, analysis, and action. Note that this process is by no means fast or easy. It is time-consuming and demanding but the results are worth the hassle.

The Research

So, as described before, relationship marketing is built from the information about your client base. Knowledge is power after all. But what kind of information is key for one-to-one strategy?

Usually, all the information we have about our clients is credentials and addressable characteristics. People fill it in while registering their profiles (becoming leads) and/or placing an order. Of course, it’s important to understand the location and means of communication of a person, but it’s far from enough to create a special relationship with the subject.

The information you need to effectively segment your client base must concern its habits, preferences, general interests, and even irritants. After the segmentation, you should create several buying personas for each segment. But how to collect this much data? Moreover, is it even legal?

Well, yes! It’s all right there! First of all, take notice of all the interactions with the customers. From the phone calls to clicks on the website using various kinds of software like hotjar. Take into account all the possible ways of communication. Don’t repeat interacting with your customers. Continue them from where you’ve left off.

Apart from the experience coming from client interaction, you should take a look at your client’s social media profiles. People usually post a lot of content related to their interests and express their dissatisfaction with things rather vividly. The social media platforms usually provide all kinds of tools and analytics to research their users. On top of that, there are even more tools on the web.

The Analysis

To achieve success in one-to-one marketing, you have to assess both collected customers’ data and your own business before starting out. This will give you a proper understanding of how far from personalized your strategy is and it will show you the way to improvement.

First off, consult with your marketing team (if you don’t have one, consider looking for a marketing agency), executive managers, middle managers, and (of course) the sales team about the situation. This should also include a group of customers to paint a full picture.

some question

This stage of one-to-one marketing strategy implementation is considered finished when you understand your priorities and have developed a plan based on them. By prioritizing, we mean letting you choose the ways of customization and its degree.

For example, depending on your client’s persona, it might be most effective to customize your website, so users will see the content that is most relevant to them alone. Or it could be simply more efficient to switch the product line or the primary social media platform used for communication. 

Regarding the degree of your customization, Harvard Business Review has published interesting hypnosis:

“The more your customers’ needs vary, the more attractive they will find a learning relationship”

The idea behind it describes the necessity and relevance of customization through the previously described learning relationship. As for the budget, you’ll have to account for the steep skew. The same is outlined in the Harvard Business Review article: the more valuable your customers are, the more you should spend on the customization.

The Action

Now you have a plan, a budget, an audience, and… the ways of implementation? That’s right, we haven’t described any digital personalization channels in depth. So, to complete your one-to-one marketing strategy we will describe the most popular ones.

Pay-Per-Click – is paid advertising in search engines. Essentially, the first couple of results that pop-up first with a “sponsored” tag. To hit the right audience (and save money by targeting the right one) you should deeply research keywords searched by your chosen audience.

Website – website customization allows us to push the most fitting content towards the target audience. The most basic example would be a customizable pet shop website. It would push the products tailored to the kind of pet the user chose during the registration or simply showed more interest in, judging from the previous sessions (cookies). Why would a cat owner be interested in dog products on the main page? Customization helps to solve this problem.

Email – in this case, it’s quite simple: elevate your open rates by sending the right content to the right audience. It could be segmented by various topics or characteristics. For instance, in B2B it is most suitable to differentiate by industries, funnel stages, levels of responsibility, and so on.

Remarketing – the most basic way of customization which allows advertising your website for those, who have previously visited it.Social media – the most efficient way to learn more about your audience while using highly targeted advertising and engaging with your prospects.

One-to-one: the neverending story

We wish the best luck to you and your strategy panning out as it should. But we have to warn you once more: one-to-one is a high-risk, high-reward method. A/B testing is inevitable, so without the professional expertise, the process of personalization may turn into an expensive trial and error operation. Moreover, one-to-one marketing strategy requires constant change and continuous research. It may turn into a big mess and a general waste of time without consultation by the expert.

In the world of one-to-one marketing, no one just starts implementing the strategy. As mentioned before, a serious assessment is required to make it to the action stage. And how is it possible without a marketing team? If you don’t have one, consider giving us a call for a free consultation. We will be happy to help to build a bridge between you and your clients.

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