Customer Experience & Growth (Examples)

The Role of Personalized Marketing in the Digital Age

Contextual marketing has become increasingly important. In the past, marketing was often focused on mass messaging, with businesses using the same marketing campaigns and materials for all customers. As we know, in today's digital landscape, customers are bombarded with marketing messages from all sides, and they expect more personalized and relevant, and dare I say human, interactions with brands.

Personalized marketing, focused on context, helps businesses cut through the noise by delivering messages that are tailored to each customer's unique situation and needs. By taking into account all of the factors we discussed, businesses can create messages and experiences that resonate with their customers on a deeper level. This can lead to increased engagement, better customer experiences, improved loyalty, and increased sales or revenue.

Customers are increasingly interacting with brands across a variety of channels, including social media, email, mobile apps, and websites. By delivering personalized messages and experiences across all of these channels, businesses can create a seamless and consistent customer experience that builds trust and loyalty.

How to Leverage Customer Context to Drive Growth

Creating a personalized customer experience involves tailoring your messaging and content to the specific needs and preferences of your target audience based on their context.

5 Steps to Creating a Personalized Digital Customer Experience with High-Context Marketing

Understand the customer’s context. (See this post!)
Segment your audience by commonalities
Created tailored targeted content
Use personalization techniques to like dynamic content, segmented email messaging, or add product recommendations to your site.
Test and improve!

What is an example of a personalized customer experience?

Here's an example of how you can use high-context marketing to create a personalized message and customer experience:

Let's say you're a travel company that offers adventure tours in different countries. To create a personalized customer experience using context marketing, you can follow these steps:

Understand the customer's context: Collect data on their age, gender, income, travel history, social media activity, and search behavior.
Segment your audience: Segment your audience into adventure seekers, beach lovers, and culture enthusiasts.
Create targeted content: For adventure seekers, you might create content that highlights the thrill of the adventure tours, such as trekking and rock climbing. For beach lovers, you might create content that showcases the beautiful beaches and water activities. For culture enthusiasts, you might create content that highlights the cultural experiences and local cuisine.
Use personalization techniques: Send personalized emails to adventure seekers that recommend adventure tours based on their past travel history or search behavior.
Test and optimize: Test different messaging and content formats to see which ones resonate better with each segment.

By using high-context marketing to create personalized messages, you can increase engagement, build stronger relationships with your target audience, and drive more conversions and sales for your business. For example, Seer’s Analytics & Insights team drove lead conversion rate by 150% through a deep understanding of customer’s context, data, and human behavior.

The Psychology of Context Marketing

Psychology plays an important role in high-context marketing as it helps businesses understand the underlying motivations and behaviors of their customers. By understanding the psychological factors that influence customer behavior, businesses can create more effective and relevant marketing messages.

One key psychological factor that context marketing can leverage is the power of social proof.

What is social proof?

Social proof refers to the tendency of people to conform to the actions and opinions of others. By highlighting customer reviews, social media shares, and other forms of social proof, businesses can increase the perceived value of their products or services and create a sense of community around their brand.

Another psychological factor that is relevant to high-context marketing is the concept of cognitive biases.

What are Cognitive Biases?

Cognitive biases are mental shortcuts that people use to simplify decision-making processes. By understanding common cognitive biases such as the availability heuristic or the confirmation bias, businesses can create messaging and experiences that resonate with their customers and overcome potential biases.

Delivering the Message through the Right Channel

By choosing the right channels, you can reach your target audience where they are and deliver your message in a way that resonates with them.

How to Determine which Marketing Channels to Focus on:

Understand what channels your customers are on
Segment by channel
Create channel specific content
Take advantage of personalization techniques for each channel
Test and optimize

Let’s dive deeper….

Here are some steps you can take to deliver your message through the right marketing channels with high-context marketing:

Understand the customer's preferred channels: Collect data on your target audience's preferred channels, including social media platforms, email, mobile apps, and websites. You can gather this information through surveys, website analytics, and social media listening tools. An easy example is that business professionals tend to frequent LinkedIn - so if your business is b2b that’s where you should be.
Segment your audience based on their preferred channels: Once you have identified the preferred channels for your target audience, segment them based on these channels. For example, if you have identified that a particular segment of your audience prefers to receive communications via email, you can tailor your messaging and content to this channel.
Create channel-specific messaging and content: Tailor your messaging and content to each channel. Each channel has its own unique characteristics, and your messaging and content should reflect this. For example, your messaging and content for social media should be shorter and more visually engaging, while your email content can be longer and more detailed.
Use personalization techniques for each channel: Use personalization techniques to make your messaging more relevant and engaging for each channel. For example, you can use dynamic content to show different images or messages to different segments of your audience based on their preferences or behaviors.

Measuring the impact of Context Marketing and a Personalized Customer Experience

Measuring the impact of high-context marketing is crucial to determining its effectiveness and making data-driven decisions for future campaigns. Here are some ways to measure the impact of context marketing:

Track engagement metrics: Monitor engagement metrics such as click-through rates, open rates, time on site, bounce rates, and social media shares to gauge the effectiveness of your campaigns.
Analyze conversion rates: Analyze conversion rates by tracking how many people take the desired action after engaging with your campaign, such as making a purchase, filling out a form, or subscribing to a newsletter.
Measure brand lift: Measure brand lift by tracking changes in brand awareness and sentiment before and after a campaign. This can be done through surveys, social media monitoring tools, and other methods.
Use attribution modeling: Use attribution modeling to determine which channels and tactics are driving the most conversions and sales for your business.

According to McKinsey, "Context marketing makes it possible for companies to deliver personalized experiences that are relevant to individual customers, at scale, with the speed and agility that are required to stay ahead of the competition." By measuring the impact of context marketing, businesses can identify what is working and what is not, and adjust their approach accordingly to improve results.

Harvard Business Review showed that personalized email messages improve their click-through rates by 14% and conversion rates by 10%. This underscores the importance of personalization in context marketing and the impact it can have on engagement and conversion rates.

Why measure impact?

Measuring the impact of high-context marketing is essential to understanding its effectiveness and making data-driven decisions for future campaigns. By tracking engagement metrics, analyzing conversion rates, measuring brand lift, and using attribution modeling, businesses can optimize their context marketing efforts and drive better results.

Don’t know where to start? Let’s chat.

4 Benefits of Personalized Marketing

High-context marketing is a powerful strategy that allows businesses to deliver personalized and relevant messages to their customers based on their individual needs and preferences.

Here are some of the benefits of high-context marketing:

Increased customer engagement: By delivering messages that resonate with customers on a personal level, businesses can increase customer engagement and encourage them to take action. According to a study by Accenture, 91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands that recognize, remember, and provide relevant offers and recommendations.
Better customer experience: Personalized marketing can help businesses deliver a better customer experience by providing customers with the information and resources they need at the right time and place. A report by Forrester Research found that 77% of customers have chosen, recommended, or paid more for a brand that provides a personalized service or experience.
Improved customer loyalty: Context marketing can also improve customer loyalty by creating a deeper connection between customers and brands. A study by Infosys found that 74% of customers feel frustrated when website content is not personalized and 59% of customers say that personalization influences their shopping decision.
Increased sales or revenue: Context marketing can drive sales and revenue by delivering more targeted and effective messages that are more likely to convert. According to a study by Epsilon, personalized emails have an open rate of 29.3%, compared to 22.1% for non-personalized emails.

High-context marketing offers numerous benefits for businesses, including increased customer engagement, better customer experience, improved customer loyalty, and increased sales or revenue. By leveraging data and technology to deliver more targeted and personalized messages, businesses can create deeper connections with their customers and drive better results.

Still not sure? Our Analytics & Insights team drove conversions for a healthcare client by 32x and 22x through personalized marketing! Read the full case study here.

Challenges and Limitations of Personalized Marketing

While high-context marketing has many benefits, there are also several challenges and limitations that businesses need to be aware of. Here are a few examples:

Data quality and privacy concerns: Personalized marketing relies heavily on collecting and analyzing customer data, which can be challenging due to issues with data quality and privacy concerns. Businesses need to be transparent about how they collect and use customer data, and ensure they are complying with relevant regulations such as GDPR and CCPA. (More on this below!)
Integration challenges: Context marketing requires integration across multiple channels and touchpoints, including websites, social media, email, and mobile apps. This can be challenging to achieve, particularly if businesses are using different technologies and platforms for each channel.
Personalization at scale: Delivering personalized experiences to every customer at scale can be a significant challenge, particularly as the number of customers and touchpoints increases. Businesses need to have the right processes and technologies in place to ensure that personalization remains consistent and effective.
Contextual relevance: Finally, ensuring that content and messaging remain contextually relevant can be challenging, particularly as customer needs and preferences change over time. Businesses need to continuously monitor and analyze customer data to ensure that their marketing messages remain effective.

Overall, while personalized marketing offers many benefits, it is important for businesses to be aware of these challenges and limitations in order to develop effective strategies that deliver the best results for both the business and the customer.

This is where we come in. (*wink wink*)

Context Marketing and Marketing to Generation Alpha

Context marketing is increasingly important when it comes to engaging with the younger generation, such as Generation Alpha, who are growing up in a world of personalized and on-demand content.

One of the key factors that businesses need to consider when marketing to Generation Alpha is their digital nativity. This generation is growing up with technology and is going to be highly skilled at navigating digital platforms. As a result, businesses need to create content that is not only engaging but also accessible, and consistent, across multiple devices and platforms.

Another important consideration when marketing to Generation Alpha is their social consciousness. This generation is highly aware of social and environmental issues, and they want to see brands that align with their values. Context marketing can help businesses create content that resonates with this audience by highlighting their commitment to sustainability, diversity, and other social causes.

Overall, high-context marketing is critical for engaging with Generation Alpha, as it allows businesses to create personalized experiences that resonate with their unique needs and interests. By leveraging the latest technology and insights, businesses can create compelling content that builds brand loyalty and drives long-term success.

Context Marketing and Technology

Context Marketing & Web3

High-context marketing is likely to play an important role in the emerging field of Web3, which refers to a decentralized, peer-to-peer internet that is based on blockchain technology. Web3 is still in its early stages, but it has the potential to transform the way we interact with digital content and services.

One key feature of Web3 is that it puts users in control of their own data and online identities. This means that businesses will need to find new ways to engage with customers in a way that respects their privacy and autonomy.

Another potential application of personalized marketing in Web3 is in the area of decentralized marketplaces and communities. As more businesses and organizations move to Web3, there will be new opportunities to create decentralized marketplaces and communities that are based on trust, transparency, and shared values. High-context marketing could play a key role in these marketplaces and communities by helping businesses understand and respond to the unique context of each user.

Overall, the potential of high-context marketing in Web3 is vast, and it will be interesting to see how businesses and organizations use this approach to engage with customers in new and innovative ways.

Context Marketing & the Internet of Things (IoT)

High-context marketing is also poised to play a significant role in the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT refers to the growing network of physical objects or "things" that are connected to the internet and can communicate with each other.

As more devices become connected to the internet, businesses will have access to an unprecedented amount of data on each user's behavior, preferences, and context. This data can be used to deliver personalized messages and experiences that are tailored to each user's unique needs and preferences.

For example, imagine a user who has a smart thermostat in their home. The thermostat can collect data on the user's behavior, such as when they are home or away, what temperature they prefer, and so on. This data can then be used to deliver personalized messages or offers, such as reminders to adjust the thermostat when the user is away, or special discounts on energy-efficient appliances.

Similarly, personalized marketing can be used in the context of wearable devices - like smart watches or fitness trackers. These devices collect data on the user's activity level, sleep patterns, and other health-related metrics. This data can be used to deliver personalized messages or offers related to fitness and wellness, such as reminders to take breaks during the workday, or recommendations for healthy meal choices.

Context Marketing & chatGPT

As an AI language model, chatGPT can be used to support context marketing by providing personalized responses to customers based on their context. For example, if a customer asks a question about a product or service, chatGPT can provide a tailored response that takes into account their demographic information, behavior, and other contextual factors.

chatGPT can also help businesses create content that is tailored to their customers' needs and interests, based on the data that is collected from various sources. This could include creating personalized emails, social media posts, or other types of content that are more likely to resonate with customers based on their context.

At the end of the day, tools like chatGPT are only as good as the person using them. They’re a tool - not a full strategy.

Did I mention that we created reverse chatGPT - before it was cool.

High-Context Marketing & Privacy

Personalized marketing can involve collecting and utilizing customer data in order to create personalized and relevant experiences. With the growing concerns around data privacy, it's important for businesses to be transparent and responsible in their data collection and usage practices.

One way to ensure that context marketing doesn't violate data privacy regulations is to obtain explicit consent from customers before collecting their data. This can involve providing clear information about what data is being collected, how it will be used, and giving customers the option to opt-out.

Businesses should only collect data that is necessary for delivering a personalized experience, and should avoid collecting sensitive information such as health or financial data unless absolutely necessary.

By being transparent and responsible with their data collection and usage practices, businesses can build trust with their customers and ensure that their context marketing efforts are effective without compromising data privacy.

Conclusion

Overall, businesses can benefit from a deep understanding of their customers' context and the way in which it shapes customer behavior and decision-making processes. By leveraging data insights, businesses can create more effective and relevant marketing experiences that drive positive outcomes.

Context is important for marketing because it allows brands to understand and connect with their target audience on a deeper, more human level. It also allows brands to anticipate the needs of their audience and provide solutions that meet those needs. This human component is key to helping brands stand out in an increasingly crowded digital landscape.

Cut through the noise with high-context, personalized, marketing.