ASDA’s investment in personalisation shows importance of targeted marketing

Last month, Asda announced a new partnership with Salesforce, designed to enhance the experience of its customers.

‍

The deal will see Asda use Salesforce to improve customer personalisation and tailored experiences in order to provide customers with a ‘connected and consistent experience across every channel and device’.

‍

This investment is set to pay off. Consumers are increasingly shopping online for their groceries: although pandemic restrictions have widely been lifted, a McKinsey survey found that most European consumers plan to use online grocery services almost equally often as they did in 2021.

‍

And with a previous McKinsey report finding that 71% of consumers now expect companies to deliver personalised interactions, it makes complete sense that Asda is pursuing personalisation of its services.

‍

But personalisation isn’t just for retail giants. Brands of all sizes and from all sectors need to take note of such statistics and realise that personalised, tailored marketing needs to sit at the heart of their services and campaigns.

‍

In a world of increased competition of decreased consumer attention, personalisation has become non-negotiable.

‍

Let’s take a look at the reasons why personalisation is so important and the ways brands and agencies can embrace it in their marketing.

‍

‍

The importance of customer personalisation

‍

Say you have two friends.

‍

One remembers your tastes and interests, texts you when they see something you talked about and cares about whether you’re having a good time when you do something together.

‍

The other forgets what you like, never follows up on previous conversations and on your birthday gives you a Snickers bar when you’ve told them you have a peanut allergy.

Who do you want to spend more time with?

‍

The same kind of thinking tracks to brand-customer relationships, where brands are looking to build a friendship with customers.

‍

A brand that can demonstrate they remember consumer’s individual needs and preferences, show them relevant marketing content and proactively ask for their feedback will fare much better than one who fires off generic emails.

‍

Consumers want to be made to feel important and valued by brands: according to McKinsey’s Next in Personlization 2021 Report, 72% of consumers said they expect the businesses to buy from to recognise them as individuals and know their interests.

‍

‍

Using data to boost customer retention

‍

The brands that can personalise will be rewarded. And tailored marketing is especially effective in boosting customer retention.

‍

McKinsey’s report found that not only 76% of consumers are more likely to consider purchasing from brands that personalise, 78% are more likely to make repeat purchases.

‍

Additionally, personalisation prompts word-of-mouth marketing: 78% of consumers are also more likely to refer friends and family to companies that personalise. That’s free marketing being handed to brands.

‍

But at the heart of personalisation - and its power to convert - lies high-quality data.

In order to serve customers the content most relevant to them, brands need to truly understand their preferences and behaviour, and this comes down to the way data is collected and organised.

‍

Collecting data from a range of sources, including zero party data, allows brands to gain in-depth insights into the needs and priorities of customers, that not only helps with targeted marketing but can guide research and development, design choices and overall business strategy.

‍

Once this data is collected, brands must make sure they are properly structuring it through data segmentation in order to use it for tailored marketing. This allows them to sort customers into groups based on their stated characteristics and preferences, allowing them to send these groups marketing that specifically addresses these needs.

‍

‍

How Odore helps brands personalise their marketing

‍

At Odore, we’re experts at personalised marketing and we help you become experts too.

‍

Our digital marketing platform not only makes it easy to launch campaigns across multiple channels, it helps centralise and segment data so you can effectively target customers.

‍

Our integrations with platforms like Salesforce, Mailchimp and Shopify allow businesses to access all their campaign and customer data in one place and then build out customer segments for future campaigns. This means brands can make sure the right marketing is being shown to the right customers.

‍

We also help brands improve the way they collect data, which in turn improves the quality of their personalisation. With our drag and drop campaign builder, brands can embed online quizzes in their sampling campaigns to collect zero-party data from customers. This allows brands to ask specific questions they wouldn’t get as clearly answered elsewhere, and helps them decrease reliance on third-party data.

And we prove that personalisation doesn’t have to break the bank.

‍

Brands don’t need an Asda budget to start repeating the benefits of tailored marketing: we offer our platform as an SaaS solution so businesses of every size can scale our services according to their resources and needs.

‍

Want to see how you can personalise your marketing with Odore? Book an introductory call here.

‍

‍