This week I had the pleasure of reading a new report from Smart Insights on the State of Digital Marketing 2015 and decided to dig in a bit further with an interview. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Dave or Smart Insights – Dave Chaffey is CEO of Smart Insights, a publisher of planning templates and articles focusing on Digital Strategy with channels on B2B Marketing and Marketing automation. The following is an excerpt from our discussion, I hope you enjoy it.

1) What do you think the biggest change to Digital Marketing for B2B firms will be in the next year?

I think content personalization is the biggest opportunity into 2016 for B2B Marketers. Most B2B service marketers know the value of tailored landing pages to drive traffic and capture leads for niche B2B buyer personas. Let’s face it, these options have been around for fifteen years – your question takes me back to a workshop I did for Siebel systems around then, before they became part of Oracle. We were looking at optimizing targeted landing pages through Siebel for different search behaviors even then before some of today’s well-known marketing automation services like HubSpot, Marketo and Salesforce were even established. These types of services and many others have made scalable lead generation affordable for businesses, but I often feel the potential for lead scoring and lead nurture through personalization isn’t being exploited as much as it could.

At SmartInsights.com, for example, our home page and member benefits pages are tailored by role based on their registration – so a marketing manager gets a different message and different content than say an agency manager. We setup our personalization rules in WordPress, but for marketers who don’t role their own there are many plugins and services to support greater B2B personalization, for example BrightInfo, Evergage and Marketizator to name three players. Again this approach isn’t new technically innovative, but it is underexploited. It is getting more sophisticated with automated content recommendations based on profile and content consumption – for example Idio can be used by larger businesses for this.

2) What do you see as the biggest mistakes being made in Digital Marketing by B2B firms?

The most common mistake I see is getting the balance of Content Marketing activities wrong. We all know content marketing is at the heart of digital marketing, yet often content marketing strategies don’t invest sufficient in the right range of content across the buying cycle and by content I am referring to our Content Marketing Matrix which helps businesses review the best types. The CMM also helps you think about the right balance of what Michael Stelzner of Social Media Examiner called nuclear and primary fuel. You need to invest in that emotion-inducing or shareable content that cuts through otherwise others who have made that investment will win across the channels whether that is SEO, Social media or Email marketing.

Then there’s content distribution… putting the investment into marketing the content you have invested in. Here there must be the right balance between paid, owned and earned media. Paid media, remarketing or retargeting through AdWords, LinkedIn or Facebook helps remind prospects about your services so it’s a mistake to miss this – it gives probably the best paid digital media ROI available. With Earned media it’s about putting the time into influencer outreach – it’s a popular buzz word, but few do this as well in my experience.

3) What one Digital Marketing tactic should a B2B Marketer adopt in the next year?

Simple – Retargeting using paid media as mentioned in my previous answer – if you’re not doing already it’s a great opportunity. If you are, there are new options available all the time, like the recent launch of the LinkedIn ‘Lead Accelerator’. You can review the options on our Content Distribution matrix.

4) What one Digital Marketing tactic should a B2B Marketer stop in the next year?

That’s tricky Paul, because we believe that any tactic can be optimized and most techniques can be made to work. If you’re not getting ROI from digital media that has to stop! But I’ll give you a simple marketing automation technique that any B2B marketer can apply – stop sending out welcome sequences that aren’t targeted, i.e. one-size fits all welcome emails. Since you collect the profile information of a prospect when they subscribe it’s a ‘no-brainer’ to target by role or vertical or need – whatever will give you the biggest uplift and different points in the lead nurturing.

Talking of Marketing Automation, we have a new survey on the opinions on Marketing Automation of B2B marketers in 2015 just launched. We’d love it if your readers can share their experiences and of course they’ll get the research report when it’s completed.

This week I moderated another Social Media Today webinar as part of their Best Thinker webinar series, this time on the topic of Social Customer Service is the New Heart of Marketing . This webinar was sponsored by Lithium and featured Dave Evans (@evansdave), the VP of Social Strategy at Lithium, Erna Alfred Liousas (@ErnaLiousas), an analyst serving B2C Marketing Professionals at Forrester Research, and Brien Hall (@BrienHall), Social Media Manager for Guest Services at AMC Theatres. We discussed why social media is becoming the primary channel for customer care.

Here are three of the key takeaways:

1. Become customer obsessed! – Forrester research predicts we are in the Age of the Customer and that in order to become customer obsessed you need to master 4 business imperatives: embracing the shift to mobile, turning big data into big insights, transforming your customer experience, and accelerating your digital transformation.
2. A majority of tweets to a brand go unanswered! – Its simple shocking since its proven that customer are more likely to buy when you respond that still companies don’t get it.
3. Social media to become the primary channel in 5 years for customer care  – We spent some time discussing the impacts on the call center, first call resolution and do we need to create separate channels just for customer care in social media.

To get a copy of the slides or to listen to the replay, please click here. You can also scan the highlights of this webinar on Twitter by reading the Storify below. Our next webinar is titled Is the Death of Social Greatly Exaggerated?; be sure to sign up for it or view the schedule of other upcoming webinars here.

Knowing how the human mind processes information and images—and putting that knowledge to use—can help you become a more engaging and effective marketer.

Here’s a look at some fascinating facts about the human mind, from a marketing perspective.

Whether you completely neglected to build a website for your mobile platform or there’s a lacking call to action, there are common mobile faux pas than can result in lost loyalty, brand following and even support.

This week I moderated another Social Media Today webinar as part of their Best Thinker webinar series, this time on the topic of: Scaling Social Globally: Best Practices for Engaging with an International Audience. This webinar was sponsored by Act-On Software and featured Mike Stenberg (@stenmic), Global Vice President of Digital Marketing for Siemens, and Andrew Ashton (@AndrewLAshton) Social Media Analyst at Yum! Brands. We discussed the best practices in scaling a social media team and content on a global basis.

Here are 3 of the key take-aways:

1. Team structure matters – Andrew talked about an approach he called the Dandelion approach: having a central team that can provide training and social media tools to more distributed teams that can engage on a local level.
2. Roll out a common set of tools – Both Mike and Andrew talked about having one tool — like BrandWatch or Netbase, respectively — to give them one version of the trust across all markets. In Mike’s case, he has 160 markets to evaluate, while Andrew has 120. Strong translation capabilities and sentiment scoring were also mentioned as key features.
3. Make it feel like one social team globally – Both Mike and Andrew also highlighted that while it’s important to have the local teams engage in a dialog with clients, they also felt you needed tools like Yammer internally to help coordinate efforts and answer questions in real time coming from the local teams.

To get a copy of the slides or listen to the replay, please click here. You can also scan the highlights of this webinar on Twitter by reading the following Storify:

With constant access to a growing list of channels and devices, today’s connected customers are no longer satisfied with vanilla, one-size-fits-all experiences and offers. To stand out in the increasingly crowded and competitive marketplace, many C-level executives from the world’s most iconic brands are not content with just “Keeping Up With the Joneses.” Instead, they are actively seeking opportunities to better understand their high-value customers across every channel and device.

The reason for this is simple: These customers are more often than not brand loyalists and willing to persuade others to become regular brand purchasers if they’re kept happy and engaged consistently in every single place they are interactive with brands. But the task of keeping brands happy and engaged beyond one big “win” isn’t easy. It requires CMOs and the entire business, for that matter, to combine their internal resources with technology that’s both powerful and agile enough to boost customer engagement and revenue long term. And a brand’s success today, in this hyperconnected and digitally dependent environment we live in, depends heavily on leveraging digital to reward high-value customers. Rather than spout out a to-do list of tactics that show high-value customers they’re appreciated, here are some specific benefits instead that can be derived from deep and sophisticated forms of segmentation:

Don’t confuse high-value customers for high-volume customers.

In the less digitally savvy days, brands and their teams of analytics “experts” would navigate through Excel spreadsheets with massive amounts of data. In those days, there was sometimes confusion and lack of knowledge as to what constitutes a high-value customer. As a result, high-volume customers would often be mistakenly categorized, and subsequently treated, as high-value customers. But the reality was, and still is today, that people who interact with a brand frequently aren’t necessarily going to be the ones that have the most value from the perspective of consistent engagement, conversions and sales across multiple channels – from being inside a physical store to making a last-minute purchase on their mobile devices or shopping from their PCs. So it was common for those brands to see a huge surge in traffic for a short burst of time, but after the excitement faded, so did the engagement and ROI.

Marketers today need to adopt a more realistic and accurate definition of value that’s based on “the combination of opportunities to convert and increase potential order value, and maximizes both, while at the same time, yields your highest value customers.” But identifying the best customers online and serving them the content they need is easier said than done. The key to obtaining a 360-degree view of high-value customers means personalizing and differentiating every message by offering an array of online content to drive maximum conversion and revenue uplifts.

To get there, the modern brands of today must, and I repeat must, push beyond the basic forms of personalization – think product recommendations or ads that chase you around on the Web. Instead, these brands are likely to be best served by leveraging the power of technology, real-time data and automated segmentation to effectively profile individuals who are in actuality high-value customers. That identification is the first hurdle that brands need to overcome. From there, it’s all about extending personalization across every device and channel to delight and please consumers with the most humanly relevant, easy-to-navigate and engaging offers.

Tap into the beauty of data to boost cross-channel ROI.

The urgency to identify high-value customers online is being fueled by a number of factors. First, the online channel represents the biggest growth opportunity for most brands. According to a new Forrester Research global eCommerce report, e-commerce revenues are going to continue to grow in 2014 as customers’ online buying habits evolve. Meanwhile, a new study released by IBM in 2014 reveals that brands stand to lose $83 billion due to poor customer experiences.

When you think about it, that’s a lot of revenue that could be left on the table if brands don’t put every segment of their customers first. For example, brands are able to gather intelligence on channels shopped — including Web, tablet, mobile phone or store — and then integrate data from a CRM system, POS, DPM or other source to help augment customer profiles. By combining intelligence on shopping history, search history and Web behavior, this combined intelligence can help brands identify when to offer an in-store promotion, extend a seasonal offer or make a product recommendation. If brands are able to identify their high-value customers, then they can scale the business more efficiently and ensure that every decision and action they make is focused on delivering the right actions defined by the right data.

Discover unique attributes of unique markets.

One common challenge that today’s brands face is a tendency to make decisions based on data points as opposed to data profiles. In these instances, it’s not that uncommon for brands to use pre-existing data models to identify their buyer personas as well as the content and offers they deliver on their websites and mobile sites.

By using automated segmentation and targeting, brands should be able to detect segments unique to their brands and industries. This process turns traditional targeting on its head because buyer profiles and offers are all determined by real-time intelligence gathered against real-time customer behavior. One example of such a data profile could be a “weekend shopper” persona. Based on their digital behavior and purchase activity, these shoppers may spend significantly more money (at multiple channels) than mid-week shoppers. So it’s more than likely these shoppers would be frustrated and intolerant of being shown irrelevant and mismatched offers that would better suit mid-week shoppers. That is where many brands today realize that even with all the benefits of technology, they have made shoppers that much less tolerant and patient with poor experiences.

Move away from campaign analysis; bring it back to the customer.

One of the ways brands have traditionally gathered intelligence on customer behaviors is through basic A/B testing of different content and offers. Building on the quantifiable value of testing, many innovative brands are now shifting from campaign-driven analysis to a more holistic and accurate customer-driven analysis. By doing so, marketers can get a more robust and humanistic view of every single customer segment, as well as being able to identify which segments are performing better than others. With businesses – across all teams – being challenged to consistently demonstrate ROI, this ability to gauge the value of high-value customers and appropriately target them with the best content on the best devices at the best times and places, is especially critical to success.

Responsive design brings a variety of benefits – both for brand marketers and the consumers interacting with content across multiple devices. According to data from a December 2012 study conducted by eConsultancy, nearly 70 percent of client-side marketers described their experience level with responsive design as “average” or better, and more than half of that group described their companies as “ahead of the curve” or “state of the art” when it came to the design technique.

As advanced as some brands and in-house digital marketers may believe they are in responsive design, there are still quite a few challenges that optimization experts and digital marketers must heed. Here are some lessons CMOs can use to get strategic in their approach while driving real, impact-filled growth to the bottom line.

Rule #1: Don’t Become Complacent

Since the mobile marketplace is extremely dynamic and the mobile consumer is ever changing, don’t become complacent just because you launched a responsive-design site.  At the beginning of 2013, tablet users were already showing a higher conversion rate than desktop shoppers. Moreover, 20 percent of mobile users use it as their primary device. This means consumers are evolving more quickly than you may think, so closely monitor your analytics. In fact, companies like Gilt have seen a 100 percent increase in mobile users in a single year.

Rule #2: Always Be Refining

Continually develop and refine new design iterations that work seamlessly across multiple screen sizes and functionalities (e.g., touch, swipe). Being immersive is just as important as being intuitive. Pinch, swipe and zoom are features that smartphone and tablet users know and love. In the early days of responsive design, it was said that these were features that couldn’t be tapped into. With today’s more common blend of adaptive and responsive design, we know that this is not the case. Developers have touch-screen-specific controls at their disposal, and customization can be achieved through injection of JavaScript, for example. It’s important to strike the right balance between optimal performance (page-load time) and customization, as the two are interrelated.

Rule #3: Never Stop Testing and Learning

Always be testing and learning with your responsive-design site so that key information and functions are visible, prioritized and accessible to people regardless of what device they are using. Getting shoppers to move through the entire funnel – starting on the home page and moving to key product and landing pages all the way through the checkout process – is no easy feat. Each consumer, be it a first-time visitor or a longtime brand advocate, wants something different and unique from the checkout process. For a big-box apparel retailer, for example, free shipping can prove effective in rewarding high-value customers and cultivating loyalty among a brand’s average customers. This is where testing and learning play an integral role in pinpointing the optimal threshold for free shipping to boost online sales and grow the brand’s market share amid competitors. The data and insights delivered from a test-and-learn strategy could very well disprove brand assumptions and, in turn, generate the type of ROI brands seek such as higher average order value, as well as an increase in purchase conversions and overall revenue. 

Rule #4: Leverage All Data

Even the most basic site analytics can reveal huge potential opportunities.  Incorporating analytics early in the development of a responsive-design site is important. Set your responsive breakpoints you seek to track within your analytics solution and run a report for traffic to specific pages by device type. You’ll be able to glean a wealth of information about which areas of your site are seeing the heaviest tablet traffic, compared to areas with significant upticks in smartphone-only traffic.  You’ll also be able to see which areas produce low traffic or poor conversions. This tactic can help you optimize the customer experience to drive customer engagement, loyalty, conversions and revenue consistently for the long haul.

Back in 2001, when Google AdWords was just launched, I remember the day that my first pay-per-click (PPC) campaign yielded the first batch of leads for the company I was working for. In all, this tactic generated 42 leads, and a significant portion was even qualified. Better yet, the price was just right, ranging between 15 to 25 cents per click. It seemed like a great tool to grow our website traffic, as well as an effective means for generating unique leads. There was no doubt in my mind we were going to scale this campaign.

Since then, a lot has changed in the PPC world. Now there is a great deal more available in terms of competitive products from other search engines like Bing. You don’t just have an array of search ads; now there are native ads on Google that replicate the search experience, remarketing display ads, mobile ads, Facebook-sponsored ads, sponsored tweets via Twitter and LinkedIn ads. The CMO has fallen in love with performance-based ads like these PPC ad vehicles, mainly because they work (to some extent) and it’s easy to justify a budget for it when a return can be clearly shown to the CFO.

But like any ad, the efficacy of a single ad deteriorates over time because people become numb to repeated exposure to the ad. So the typical reaction is to change the ad around and run it again. But what happens when the efficacy of the ad network declines? The usual approach from marketers is to simply run more ads and spread them out in different places — all in the hopes that they will stick somewhere. But hope and guesswork do not make an effective strategy.

It’s amazing to me that so many enterprise-level CMOs focus on increasing their digital advertising budgets as the first option to increase online engagement. That’s only going to lead to a flawed strategy and less-than-stellar results. Why would you spend a lot of money, resources and staff hours on mobile ads if the online or mobile experience itself frustrates, irks and turns away customers?

What CMOs need to do is focus on creating seamless, easy-to-use-and-navigate, relevant and meaningful experiences for customers, regardless of their device or channel. And that doesn’t mean launching a full redesign of your website with fancy UX architecture, nor does it mean you should put all your mobile eggs into the responsive design basket. It means taking the slow and steady approach to test and tweak every single experience across the entire engagement funnel and using real-time data to power more personalized experiences that meet the individual needs, habits and behaviors of customers.

But before CMOs raise their hands in the air in praise of online testing and personalization, they need to make sure that they’re measuring the right metrics (that really matter for their business). For instance, analyze bounce rates and your average number of page views. These types of insights can tell you a story about your visitors — who they are, what they’re doing, where they’re going within your website or mobile site and what types of actions they’re taking. What if you have a high double-digit bounce rate of 30%, 40% or even 50%? This is what’s commonly known as the “show up and throw up” approach in the Web business. Most likely, you have a low single-digit page view of 1.xx or 2.xx, which is not uncommon. This is where the money is literally falling out of your budget. And that’s not something CMOs can or should take lightly.

Consider taking a piece of your PPC ad budget and instead, put it to good use by testing and optimizing your online experience. I’m not talking about search engine optimization (SEO). What I’m talking about is making every single page a funnel within a website or mobile site optimized and personalized for the actual traffic you are driving to it. For example, if Facebook is driving a certain portion of traffic to your website, are you using all of the data you have about those visitors and combining it with Facebook data to create the most intuitive, relevant and engaging on-site experience to convert “lookers” into purchasers? If a mobile ad is directing smartphone users to your mobile site, have you tested the specific page they’re landing on and optimizing it to drive higher engagement, conversions and cross-channel revenue? If your answer is no, then you have a serious problem.

The reality is that in a world where the consumer reigns supreme, there is an abundance of opportunities for brands to connect, interact with, speak to, engage and convert casual browsers into loyal brand advocates. So it’s high time brands stop running themselves ragged with PPC ads and start putting their attention toward creating a unified customer experience across every single device and channel.

As mobile devices continue their gains in popularity and usage worldwide, more consumers are interacting with brands at various stages of the buying life cycle—from browsing, researching and comparing products to reading reviews, sharing their experiences and making actual purchases. The digital affinity of consumers, who once were bound by a very tactile customer experience of seeing and touching products in-store, has put a lot of pressure on CMOs to become the boss of their online customer experience.

While being a CMO connotes leadership and authority, it doesn’t inherently mean brands need to be forceful or intimidating in how they speak with their online customers. What does work is a smarter and more nuanced approach to listening to their customers’ explicit actions and using those actions to become more relevant to each individual customer. Brands that get this approach see it pay off with greater respect, trust, loyalty and, of course, revenue.

So to help CMOs master their online customer experience, I have outlined five surefire rules they should follow to get customers to respect, trust and spend more dollars more often with them across multiple channels.

Rule #1: Don’t shout and bulldoze your customers into clicking and buying.

In the traditional model of sales, salespeople often acted and operated under the premise that being louder, pushier and more forceful was the way to win over, or bulldoze, consumers to get them to say “yes.” There was a notion that salespeople could wear down consumers into succumbing to their will and, as a result, get them to make a purchase.

While that approach may have resulted in a one-time sell, we would all agree that it isn’t the most effective way to generate repeat, long-term loyalty and purchases from customers. Today’s customers have almost limitless choices and options at their disposal. If they can’t find a product in-store, they can easily and quickly type, click, tap and purchase away on a number of competing online sites. If they’re strapped for time, they don’t have to wait (for hours) to get in front of their desktop/laptop computer at home. Instead, they can browse, compare and shop from thousands of product options on a brand’s mobile-optimized site directly from their iPhone, Samsung Galaxy, Apple iPad or Google Nexus tablet.

Even more than convenience, consumers aren’t as easily swayed by hyperbole, outlandish claims or dubious offers. Brute force and fear are no longer profitable strategies. It’s the brands that are authentic, humble and real that get consumers to keep their eyes (and hands) on their online and mobile sites longer and ultimately clicking through multiple areas of the site to the checkout or to request a quote.

Perhaps more important, it is almost impossible to guess at what ideas and appeals will resonate most with your buyers and entice them to buy. Lower costs? Free shipping? Sustainable materials? Thirty-day guarantees? Bigger images? Different CTA? Guess if you want. But the only way to truly know for sure what attracts your customers is to test and learn what they really want. More important, it is to use the big data from your tests to tailor what you’re saying, doing and offering across all devices. The most successful online marketers aren’t browbeating; they’re influencing by showing value. They are experimenting and exploring all the time.

Rule #2: Listen to your customers and make their lives simpler and more productive.

The reality is that customers will be more accepting and responsive to messages and offers that have real value. If there is no perceived value, they’ll click away without batting an eye. At the end of the day, consumers want the same thing from the online customer experience as they do from the products they’re buying. Simply put, it needs to solve a problem. If your customer experience isn’t solving a problem for your customers, you’ve got a big problem on your hands, and all the fancy design work you can imagine (and spend money on) won’t make any difference.

The key to rule #2 is not to guess at what problem drove the customers to your site. Instead, it is to serve up only what your customers truly want based on what you know about them as well as what they have previously asked or searched for. Recommend products that make sense for them, not for you as a brand. By listening to your customers’ needs and digital footprints, you can tell a lot about them and what types of messaging and offers are likely to resonate with them and make them more willing to spend money repeatedly across all devices with your brand.

Rule #3: Be in more than one place at a time.

Consumers don’t just look for and buy products in one place. They’re using multiple devices simultaneously throughout their day and juggling dozens of activities at once. In this “Age of the Customer,” the adage of “I can’t be in two places at one time” no longer rings true. For brands that want to get customers to experience and interact with them and their products/services consistently and repeatedly, it’s important to be in more than one place at a time and deliver a consistently great experience in all of these channels.

Rule #4: Never pistol-whip new visitors.

For your website’s home page, the easy way out is to display three, four or even five offers, rotating in sequence. On the surface, it makes sense: The more “stuff” you show, the better your chances are of finding something that a given customer may like. Better yet, it also satisfies all those internal groups that are clamoring for exposure on the website.

However, this approach is problematic because the data shows that few visitors (other than your internal teams) ever get to the end of your rotating banners on your home page. This is because there is an average of a 50 percent drop-off after each banner. Experience also shows consumers do not have the time or the patience to wait for the right offer to appear. It’s much more effective to test home page offers (to quiet those internal groups) and use that data to personalize the offer based on who is visiting your website.

Rule #5: Cement boots do not create loyalty.

In all cases, you will make more money across multiple channels from customers who return again and again. The long-term revenue opportunity lies in building trust and loyalty with visitors who keep coming back and recommend your site to their network of friends and family.

What is the best way to get customers to sign up for newsletters or emails? What should you say in your follow-up communication to customers? Should you offer exclusive products or discounts? How should you greet repeat visitors and what should you offer them? Have you tested and experimented with this content? These are all great questions brands should be asking themselves when optimizing their online presence.

There’s a reason why Amazon garners such incredible repeat business. The online giant understands which groups of consumers they are actively selling their products to and integrates those consumers’ digital history, preferences, behaviors and actions into their customer experience across all devices. If brands want to learn anything from Amazon, it should be that engagement across multiple channels is less about muscle and more about smarter marketing.

Should every visitor to your website be treated the same? Should each customer see the exact same offers, options, products and pages?

The more forward-thinking online marketers recognize that “personalizing” each customer’s experience on their site can make a dramatic difference in ultimate sales, customer loyalty and long-term profitability of the business.

Fact is, in many markets, customers have actually come to expect individually tailored offers and experiences—based on who they are, what they’ve bought before or even how they have come to the site.

But exactly what should you personalize on the site? Which offers, products or promotions should you present to which customer? And how can you tell what each type of customer will respond to best?

When you know what you want to accomplish, you will be able to identify the right combination of technology, tools and strategy for personalizing each customer’s experience. Here is where to start:

Harness the Power of Big Data, Big Testing

The notion of big data holds great promise for finding ways to personalizing the Web experience for individual customers. The vast amounts of data on customer behavior and history that can be captured via the Web and be invaluable in making decisions about how the website should work, what customers respond to, and understanding the discrete segments in your customer base.

Marketers who can harness the power of big data will be able to make decisions based on evidence, rather than guesswork—giving them a distinct advantage over the competition.

Of course, making sense of huge volumes of data, which may be in different forms and come from different sources, is not so easy. What’s more, it’s also difficult to translate that information into “personalizations” that are meaningful and compelling to your customers.

That is where today’s more advanced tools come in.

The aggregation and use of big data are crucial to segmenting and targeting your individual customers with the appropriate experiences. It requires employing predictive behavioral targeting and optimization techniques to remove the complexity. Your systems need to make real-time digital decisions for the masses—anytime, anywhere.

Love Your Loyalty Programs

For most marketers, loyalty programs provide a wealth of personalized data on your most desirable customers. But once you’ve enrolled customers, what should you do with the data?

This data isn’t just for tracking points and past reservations. It can be used to digitally personalize the experience for each customer in real time. Initiatives like offers, promotions, calls to action, special prices—whether on your website, mobile site or app—can all be preselected or promoted based on each visitor’s unique profile. This tactic ensures visitors see content relevant only to their loyalty level and behavior. A better experience leads to higher loyalty.

With each loyalty program visitor who comes to your website comes their unique “virtual profile” that can—and should—be used to tailor their experience on your site, in real time. Insight on behaviors such as previous products researched, frequency of purchases, the nature of past purchases, and ads or offers they’ve clicked can inform what content and offers you should make available to each individual, and precisely when in the process.

Don’t Upsell or Cross-Sell Too Soon 

One mistake marketers often make is automatically tagging on extras, such as upsells, options or accessory products, as their customers enter the booking funnel. The customer who already had a price in mind suddenly sees that number increase just as it’s time to purchase. By forcing these add-ons at the wrong time, you’re more likely to elevate annoyance levels than average sales.

With recommendations, upselling and cross-selling, timing is everything. Don’t be pushy up front; instead, leverage CRM and personalization data to get the right offer in the customer’s face at the right moment.

Ditch the Rules; Get Automated

While rules-based targeting may work, it won’t get you very far when you’re trying to personalize offers for millions of site visitors. It is virtually impossible to manually create rules that can handle the thousands of combinations of behaviors, products and promotions, for every single person.

The next best option (and next big idea) is automated personalization solutions. Advanced predictive models can dynamically serve content and offers based on a user’s current and past online behavior. This way, your visitors will always have the most relevant and appropriate experience on home pages, landing pages, search engine results pages, the booking funnel and every page in between. In the case of repeat visitors to your site, for example, you might retarget them with an offer based on their last purchase, or their last search, all in real time.

Making sure these tools are on hand can ultimately help the business build consumer-centric promotional strategies.

Sync Your Channels

Your customers don’t think in channels; they think in brands. So they expect the same personalized experience they get on your site to be on their smartphones, in their email and even on Facebook. Customer experience is the number one ticket to prolonged brand loyalty and engagement.

How does your brand look across channels? Is it 100 percent consistent, optimized and personalized? If not, you could be missing a golden opportunity to improve hotel, call center, direct mail, social and mobile experiences. No matter where they visit you, your brand experience should be ready. Thanks to automated technologies, you can more accurately predict a customer’s next interest and follow up with optimized, targeted messaging, no matter how, or through which channel, they access your brand.

Combining this data with CRM data in real time to drive sales and customer retention is the future. CRM practices were born and bred in the offline world, but today marrying offline, online and mobile consumer data through new technologies can help you achieve better CRM and multichannel marketing outcomes: more precise targeting, personalization and consumer connections across all media channels, and delivered at the time most appropriate to increasing conversion—a very important factor in online marketing.

Imagine being able to target your consumers across the various phases of purchase with different messages at research, selection, shipping and the like. Not only can you dramatically enhance and personalize their experience with your brand, but increased retention, loyalty and customer lifetime values also result from a truly connected multichannel experience.

Remember, personalization isn’t just marketing hype. It’s a complex concept that really can live up to its billing. But first, marketers must identify what personalization really means in their business—and what it means to their objectives, target customers and buying cycles.

When it comes to their websites, mobile sites, apps, social media and CRM platforms, the online industry must realize that only through a customized combination of multivariate testing, optimization and personalization best practices can they truly begin to reach consumers with personalization that is effective and full of impact. There are no easy answers or instant solutions for creating personalization that works. It’s about evolution rather than revolution.