Commentary

Personalisation Is Key As Holiday Season Approaches

It may sound like an oxymoron, but the one time of the year when you can be sure people are likely to be buying as much for other people as themselves is also the time of the year when IBM researchers say personalisation is more important than ever.

Its Email Marketing Metrics Benchmark Study 2016 points out that holiday email open rates are usually down on non-holiday periods and the same applies, to a lesser extent, to click-through rates. This actually isn't the end of the world when you consider that frequency goes up considerably as all brands ramp up efforts to reach customers for Black Friday and then Christmas itself. So as email volume balloons, even though interaction rates may go down, they are are measured as a percentage of a larger figure. In other words, overall opens and click-throughs are up in number, but down as a proportion of a larger total.

The figure that does potentially matter the most is click-through rates. While one can understand a reduction in open rates as consumers suffering inbox fatigue, it is arguable that if the offers were right, click-throughs would remain constant. The lesson, then, IBM research conclude, is that brands could be finding two issues. They are either not giving as good an offer as they could or they are not personalising enough.

Hence, if there is one lesson from past holiday seasons, it's the importance of refining customer data. That means email marketers still have a couple of months before Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaigns are launched in earnest. That's two months to get a better insight to customers. 

It's important because it's not too difficult to segment a customer for most of the year when they are buying for themselves. The tricky part comes in trying to preempt what they may be interested in buying for other people. Some obvious segments need to be added to existing ways of refining customers. Aspects of their lives such as having a young daughter or son or perhaps older children are very useful insights. Perhaps they're an unmarried person with a partner or perhaps the will be prioritising purchases for older family members, such as their parents. 

To gain a deeper insight into a customer database can never be a bad thing, but in the holiday season it could well prove to be a great way of boosting open rates by being far more personalised. Without trying, brands cannot claim to be doing all they can to stand out from a tidal wave that will hit all customers' inboxes in just a couple of months time.

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