Personalized marketing automation: pros and cons

Why Automated Persona Marketing?

With current technology you can easily send personalized information to users. Think of showing products on the website in which the lead may be interested, of automatic emails to retarget customers or of an exit pop-up with an offer if the lead wants to leave your website. The advantage of personalized marketing is that it stands out in a market with one-sided and impersonal information. The advantage of automation is time savings in the long term. With automated persona marketing you can have the best of both worlds: tailor-made offers, info, solutions without taking a lot of time!

Which tool? HubSpot!

For persona marketing it is important that you segment your leads. Only then can you send the right information to the right person at the right time. To segment your leads, you first have need information about your leads† That makes your CRM system a good starting point. After all, that is software to record, report and analyze your interaction with others. Based on the segments in your CRM, you can then create automated emails or other forms of automated marketing.

The all-in-one tool for automating and personalizing your marketing is HubSpot† The HubSpot contact database gives you all the information about your prospects and leads you need to lay the foundation for your automation process. The contact database is easy to to link with the HubSpot CRM or other CRMs. This gives you the opportunity to segment your leads and customers based on various criteria and from there to send emails, automate your website or personalize marketing campaigns. This way you get automatic marketing that suits your prospects, leads or customers.

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Pro's

Persona marketing has many advantages. As a company, you can nurture more leads with less time and thus bring in more customers. We will go into some of the advantages in more detail.

1. Scalability

By (partially) automating the marketing process, you make your company scalable. The same effort it takes to bind ten leads to you is also suitable to bind a hundred to you. This means that persona marketing gives you the opportunity to grow as a company, without having to immediately hire many new people.

2. More time for the most important leads

Personalized marketing automation increases your productivity. Your marketing and sales departments save time by reducing the number of times they have to manually perform the same action, such as sending an email to a specific group of customers. The time you gain can be stolen in the final steps of the marketing and sales funnel. This means that you can go through automation for real personal attention with the people who have the best chance of becoming customers.

3. Measurable Marketing Campaigns

Automation works both ways: you give your leads something in the form of, for example, an email tailored to their areas of interest, but you also get something in return: data. By using automation tools and tracking and monitoring the results, you gain a lot of insight into who (or which company) visits your website and what they do there. You also gain insight into how customers respond to a personalized pop-up, e-mail or whatsapp.

4. Data-driven marketing

You can use the data you collect about your marketing campaigns to your advantage, namely by optimizing your subsequent campaigns. In fact, Social Brothers recommends a structured A/B testing to see which form of persona marketing works best for your customers. This way you get the most out of your data.

5. Error-free and strategic workflow

With personalized marketing automation you automate part of your workflow. That has two other advantages. First of all, you are less likely to make mistakes. If you keep typing a message, you quickly make a spelling mistake or forget to add a good CTA. You don't run that risk with a few personalized emails that you've thought about carefully. A second advantage is that automation forces you to think strategically about your workflow.

6. Nurture leads more efficiently

But your work will also become more efficient in other areas. With an email, pop-up or other message for a specific segment of your leads or customers, you can ensure that you deliver the right content to the right people at the right time, in the right format and via the right channel. With messages tailored to all these elements, you bring in more customers than with one email to all. That's efficient nurturing leads!

7. Customer retention and customer recall

A well-thought-out automated workflow will improve your customer's experience. This is good for your customer loyalty. With a good automatic flow you can mean more to your existing customers and they will use your products and services more often. But it is also good for retargeting leads, such as people who look around your webshop and put something in their shopping cart, but do not order. If this happens, automatically send an email, possibly with a discount code and a large part of them will come back.

cons

Automated personalized marketing is not the direct path to success. There are certainly disadvantages that you should take into account. It's complex and you run the risk of driving customers away if you don't do it right. We list the disadvantages for you and immediately indicate how you can overcome this.

1. Invest

To get started with automated, personalized marketing, you need to invest in technology. Think of software to get a picture of your leads and divide them into different segments, the CRM in which you store this data and software to manage your emails, for example. However, automation also yields a lot: more leads, more customers and therefore more turnover. So if you do it right, there is a nice Return on Investment (ROI). In addition, you will already have a lot of the technology and can use it for other purposes.

2. Setup takes more time

While the automation of your marketing will ultimately save you time, you do need to invest the time to set it up. Don't forget that it takes time to fine-tune the automatic process further and adapt it to changes in the market. In any case, count on a nice investment of time for plotting your strategy, for segmenting your audience and for drawing up customer profiles. However, you save that time because you no longer have to manually compose emails.

3. It's complex

Personalized marketing is complex, partly because you have to think about the right strategy. A common mistake is that companies in their automated marketing mainly focus on the middle of the marketing funnel and forget to address new leads, while an automated process is also very useful for this. Furthermore, segmenting the audience through trial-and-error will also require some thinking, as will building customer profiles or personas. The further you segment the audience, the more customer profiles you need.

4. Mistakes have a bigger impact

Also keep in mind that if you make mistakes in the automated process, they have a much greater impact on your business process. The error affects not only one customer, but immediately all customers in the segment. Making no mistakes is the best solution here. So check your workflow and the personalized content carefully. Check-check-double check.

5. Danger of over-messaging

You probably know it: you left your email address somewhere and suddenly you are bombarded with emails or other messages. That company probably won't make a good impression on you and the chances of you ever going back to it are slim. When optimizing (partially) your marketing flow, keep this risk of over-messaging in mind. Rather start with too few posts than with too many.

6. Danger of Depersonalization

Also keep an eye out for the danger of depersonalization. Use the data you have to properly segment your audience and personalize your posts based on this format. If you miss opportunities here, you will still send emails that are too general, or worse, emails aimed at the wrong segment.

Want to know more?

When applied properly, automated and personalized marketing certainly benefits your business. Keep a close eye on the pitfalls and go for scalable, measurable and efficient marketing.

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