Delivering a one-to-one marketing customer experience with a CDP

You know the old adage: If you cast too wide a net, you’ll catch no fish.

The same holds true for your marketing efforts. If your marketing message speaks to everyone, it’s really speaking to no one. To be truly effective, your marketing efforts must be tailored to the customers you’re trying to reach. 

Segmenting your customers into different audiences based on shared behavior and traits makes it much easier to tailor and target your messaging. But what’s better than a segment of a few hundred customers? We’d argue that it’s a segment of just one.

That’s where one-to-one marketing comes into play. 

Below, we define one-to-one marketing, walk through the benefits, and offer a couple of examples of this strategy in action. We also give you a step-by-step guide to implementing a 1:1 marketing strategy for your business. 

What is one-to-one marketing?

One-to-one marketing (or 1:1 marketing) is exactly what it sounds like: A marketing strategy in which your communications, messaging, promotions, and recommendations are all tailored to individual customers, based on what you know about them. This empowers you to create hyper-targeted marketing campaigns that are often more effective than more generic campaigns that try to appeal to a wider audience. 

It’s also called personalized marketing, individualized marketing, or relationship marketing. 

The top benefits of one-to-one marketing

The hyper-personalization and targeting that 1:1 marketing offers can bring several benefits, including:

• Increased engagement: When your marketing message resonates with your customers, they’re more likely to make repeat purchases or renew their membership/subscription.
• Cross-selling and up-selling opportunities: Convincing someone to make their first purchase with your business is often the hardest part of the customer relationship. Once you’ve got them hooked, one-to-one marketing opens the door to cross-sell and up-sell related products they may also enjoy or need.
• Lower CAC: Reactivating dormant customers with 1:1 marketing, especially after a period of long disengagement, can help you lower your customer acquisition costs (CAC) and increase the cost efficiency of your campaigns.
• Higher customer loyalty: The more a customer returns to your brand, and the better their experience is with your company, the more loyal they will be. This makes it harder for your competition to woo them away and may increase word-of-mouth referrals. 

At the end of the day, all of these benefits translate into increased sales, higher revenue, and more profit for your business.

How to get started with one-to-one marketing

Implementing a one-to-one marketing strategy may sound complicated, but it’s rather intuitive when you stop to think about it. At its heart, personalized marketing revolves around you having a clear understanding of who your customers are — which is to say, it revolves around the collection, interpretation, and leveraging of data.

1. Gather customer data 

Without customer data, one-to-one marketing would be impossible. After all, it’s what you know about your customers that allows you to create individualized messaging and assets. With this in mind, if you want to implement a 1:1 marketing strategy, you will need a plan in place to gather this data. 

At an absolute minimum, you’ll need your customer’s name and contact information. This is enough to facilitate the most basic level of individualized communications (i.e., emails). But you’ll ideally collect additional information as well, which you can use to glean deeper insights to power your campaigns. This can include, but isn’t limited to:

• Transaction history
• Website interactions
• Page and product views
• Abandoned carts
• Mouse clicks and keystrokes
• Survey, poll, and quiz results
• Form submissions
• Customer journey and lifecycle

The good news? You likely already have a lot of this data stored in various systems such as your CRM, content management system (CMS), e-commerce platform, POS system, marketing platforms, etc. Learn why it’s so important to have a plan in place to collect zero- and first-party data. 

2. Create customer profiles and segments

Once you have as much data as possible about a given customer, you can organize that data into a centralized customer profile, or 360-degree view. 

These profiles hold everything you know about a customer — all of the different data points we discussed above, regardless of the source of that data — and act as a point of reference for your marketing efforts.

Customer profiles aren’t just handy for facilitating one-to-one communication. They also make it easier for you to group your customers into segments or audiences based on their similarities. You can then adjust your messaging, creatives, promotions, etc. based on what you know of each of these segments. 

There’s no limit to how you might slice and dice the data to generate your segments. That being said, generally speaking, segmentation will fall into one of four buckets:

1. Demographic segmentation: Segmentation by age, gender, income, job title, religion, marital status, etc.
2. Psychographic segmentation: Segmentation by personality, lifestyle, social status, attitudes, activities, interests, opinions, habits, etc.
3. Geographic segmentation: Segmentation by location, climate, culture, population density, language, etc. 
4. Behavioral segmentation: Segmentation by purchasing behavior, customer journey stage, customer loyalty, satisfaction, engagement, etc.

3. Serve individualized promotions, recommendations, and messaging

Once you’ve collected and analyzed your customer data, you can begin putting it to use marketing to your customers. A handful of examples of one-to-one marketing in action include:

• Individualized communication through email, social media messaging, and even text messaging — depending on which communication channel each of your customers prefers
• Personalized product recommendations based on past purchases and activity, and everything else you know about a customer
• Tailored promotions and sales based on your understanding of what each of your customers values
• More compelling ad creatives, landing pages, and calls-to-action (CTAs) that resonate with your customers and increase their likelihood of converting (or reconverting)

The right infrastructure makes all the difference

As we’ve noted above, one-to-one marketing is dependent on you having customer data. 

But simply having that data isn’t enough. In its raw and jumbled state, living in separate systems around your business, it would be extremely difficult — if not impossible — to leverage that data for your marketing efforts at scale in a meaningful way. 

To deploy one-to-one marketing at scale, you need to have the right technological infrastructure in place first. That’s where a cloud data warehouse (CDW) and customer data platform (CDP) come into play.

A CDW, like Snowflake, looks at all of the different systems and platforms that hold your customer data and brings it into a centralized database, where it can be cleaned and organized. A CDP, like the Simon CDP, pulls that structured data out of the CDW and uses it to generate the profiles, segments, and audiences you need to power your marketing efforts.  

Ready to start building your one-to-one marketing strategy? Take a look at our CDP Buyer’s Guide to learn more about what to look for as you evaluate your options.

Interested in learning more about how Simon Data and Snowflake can help you truly unlock the power of 1:1 marketing? Request a demo today.