5 Mistakes to Avoid When Running Personalised Marketing Campaigns

Consumers now expect personalised marketing and businesses that use data-driven campaigns to tailor their content tend to see the result. Anything from Coca-Cola’s ‘Share a Coke’ campaign to the magic behind Spotify’s ‘Discover Weekly’ playlist to curate a playlist of tracks each individual user would love, personalised marketing campaigns go a long way.

Studies have shown that businesses that adopt personalised marketing see an average of a 19 percent increase in sales while 80 percent of consumers are more likely to do business with a company if they offer a personalised experience. So, customers value it but only if you do it right.

Here are some common mistakes you need to avoid.

• Not Having Default Field Backups

• Using Personalisation Too Soon is Creepy

• Not Considering the Buyer’s Journey

• Not Being Narrow and Focused Enough

• Collecting Too Much Information Too Early

Not Having Default Field Backups

How many times have you come across an email that’s supposed to be personalised but it’s a massive fail because rather than mentioning your name or company, they’ve left in something like ‘Hey [first name]’ - literally leaving in the term ‘[first name].’

This tends to happen because you’re trying to use personalisation tokens you don’t have in the first place. To avoid the mistake and stop overly using form fields that you’re not confident in, set up some default backups in a platform like HubSpot.

Let’s say you do want to send a personalised email by referencing each user by their actual first name, but the problem is, you don’t have their first name. By having a backup in place, the first name field can be switched to whatever you’ve set as the backup, such as ‘there’ or even the company name.

Think if it as: ‘If we don’t have this, swap it with this instead.’ Trust us, it’ll work. It gets the same custom message across and you look like less of a personalised rookie.

Using Personalisation Too Soon is Creepy

Seeing a welcome message with your name on a website you’re visiting for the first time is a little on the creepy side. Using personalisation too soon can backfire massively. The mistake you need to avoid here is using it at the right time and not for the sake of it.

You should use personalisation and what you know about your visitors to help them in their marketing journey, not using what you know to prove you know a lot about them. The fact is, too much personalisation too soon is really weird. It doesn’t help your readers and in fact, it can deter people from working with you.

To avoid looking like a creep and shining your business in a negative light, use their information smartly to help them in their marketing journey. 

Don’t Bombard Leads With Marketing Materials

A common mistake that’s made during personalised marketing campaigns is that marketers often go in blind without taking the buyer’s journey into account. That results in providing too many marketing materials too soon.

Instead, be aware of where your visitors are in their journey.

If they’re at the top of the funnel, slow down your workflows. This is because if they’re at the awareness stage and you bombard them with emails and other marketing materials, then you’ve misunderstood where they are in their journey. That provides a bad experience.

The personalisation journey is a lot better and more seamless if your visitors are at the top of the funnel. The lower they get or as they make their way around the Flywheel, you should speed up with the level of content and emails you provide. And the closer you get to someone, the more frequent they should get.

It’s simple - provide daily content and don't bombard those at the top of the funnel with materials they don’t need yet as means they’ll switch off quicker.

Not Being Narrow and Focused Enough

Personalised marketing campaigns obviously need to start broad, but they should become more narrow over time as they feel more personal that way. That’s a mistake that’s often made - not being as narrow and focused as possible.

If the only thing you know when using smart content, for example, is the language then that’s obviously a more broad approach and not really personalised. Personalised marketing campaigns should become more 'narrow' as you learn more.

Collecting Too Much Information Too Early

We’re not saying you should avoid collecting information entirely, but you need to find the right balance of how much you gain and how soon you should act when it comes to offering a personal experience.

Getting too much too soon reduces conversion rates. Instead, take a more patient approach and understand that it could take a little time to get all of the information you need. You need to know the size of the company, the location, language, their budget, where they are in their journey and more.

That’s where being patient comes in, as you can expect to gather all of that information right away on the first form a lead fills out. You just won’t have great personalised marketing campaigns moving forward as opposed to playing the waiting game for better results.

Find Out More About Running Effective Personalised Marketing Campaigns

Knowing the mistakes to avoid is a crucial first step to creating an effective personalised marketing campaign. You know what to avoid and how you can set yourself up for better success, but there’s more to think about when it comes to delivering inbound campaigns on an enterprise level.

By downloading our free Inbound for Enterprise eBook, you’ll learn a lot more about personalised experiences as well as other useful enterprise strategies, such as account-based marketing (ABM) and even event marketing.

Plus, there’s plenty of useful information in there about using HubSpot to deliver enterprise marketing, how you can get buy-in from the top and much more.

To get your copy, hit the link below.