Running With Mobile But Crawling With Personalization

If you want hype or smoke and mirrors, you can easily find 100 people who will tell you a tale about the mobile wallet’s role in eliminating cash (it hasn’t) or the ways that beacons have saved retail’s brick and mortar locations (they haven’t).

But if you want to know what really is happening – or isn’t – in marketing, you check in with Noah Elkin, now a research director at Gartner. I met Elkin more than 10 years ago when he was Chief Evangelist at eMarketer. His book, Mobile Marketing: An Hour A Day is a great read, even six years after its publication.

What caught my eye recently was Elkin’s positive assessment https://blogs.gartner.com/noah-elkin/mobile-marketing-means-serious-business/ of where we are with mobile marketing.

“A big theme in Gartner’s recent Multichannel Marketing Effectiveness Survey is the emergence of mobile as a dominant channel for multichannel marketers," he wrote. "Now, for those who have been watching mobile’s share of ad revenues and digital time spent climb steadily upward, the notion of mobile’s dominance may seem old hat. It clearly enjoys that status for the audiences marketers are trying to reach.

“But marketers often have struggled to effectively incorporate mobile into their marketing strategies. We’ve seen that most multichannel marketers, for example, don’t see a need to go beyond creating mobile extensions of existing desktop-based engagement techniques (e.g., the website, advertising, search and email) — a finding consistent with the marketers who’ve used Gartner’s “Marketing Maturity Assessment” tool and rated mobile marketing their least mature capability.”

But lots changed in 2017, according to Elkin.

“This is one of those rare occasions where we can legitimately say, 'What a difference a year makes,'” he said. “In 2016, marketers told us that on average, they were using 3.5 mobile techniques (out of a total of 13 we asked them about) and had another two in the pilot stage. Fast-forward to 2017, and marketers now have 4.3 tactics live on average, and are piloting 3.1, representing a combined increase of 33 percent.”

To go deeper, I dialed up Elkin for a The Art of Mobile Persuasion podcast interview. In part 1 (episode 24 - https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/art-mobile-persuasion-podcast/id1156481550?mt=2), we talk about the increase in maturity, but also the distance that we still have to go to deliver on the one-to-one communication that so many hype.

“You see marketers taking something of a crawl, walk, run approach,” he told me. “There is this promise that if you are fully invested in personalization, it promises great things from a business results perspective. But most marketers really are starting with one channel. You’re starting with basic e-mail personalization, for example. I have a lot of calls with our marketing clients about just taking those baby steps about how to do better customer segmentation. That’s a long way from being able to personalize across the entire customer experience.

“There are cost implications. There are complexity implications.  The technology is there but one thing we see not just with personalization technology but with marketing technology in general is that marketers buy it with intent to fully deploy it, but there is lag between when they adopt it to when they fully utilize all the capabilities of the tools that they have.”

To believe that drastic improvement is coming is, in Elkin’s view, a bit too optimistic.

“The way marketing technology weaves itself into organizations tends to be more incremental than rapid,” he said in the interview.  “We see marketers in to the 2 range (the developing phase) in the marketing maturity model and they want to get to a 4 (the advanced phase) (out of 5). Marketers really want to move up that maturity curve but the challenging part is how do you change processes, how do you bring on board new technology while you are still running your business day to day?

“That’s where some of that energy around maturing areas of marketing can fall down because it’s hard to be working on those parallel paths. How do you do these changes that have significant implications for how your marketing department is run and how it is structured, the technology it uses, the skills that you require while you are still doing the day to day and still being measured on where you are expected to deliver.”

Hear more of Elkin’s insights in part 1 and in a second part posting later in January.

Nothing Personal

For more than 300 days in 2017, signals were sent every time you and I and everyone else clicked or tapped.

We told marketers of our extraordinary interest in some things and our indifference in others.

Businesses knew – or should’ve known – every dollar that we spent with them with granular information that gave them daypart, offer acted upon, and purchase pattern, among other particulars.

Then the holiday shopping season came and for the most part we were treated by businesses as equals. The channels and screens were different from our youth, but the marketing was unquestionably mass as if we were still enthralled by the Ed Sullivan Show.

Nothing personal.

As I wrote in The Art of Mobile Persuasion, “I’ve never, ever had a meatball sandwich from your quick-service restaurant. You, Mr. or Ms. marketer, know, or should know, from my purchase history that my diet is vegetarian. Why am I still getting those damn meatball ads?”

If you wonder if it matters, 64 percent of consumers want personalized offers from retail brands, Salesforce says.

According to McKinsey, personalization can reduce acquisition costs by as much as 50 percent, lift revenues by 5-15 percent and increase marketing spend efficiency by 10-30 percent.

The stakes are high when you factor in loyalty programs. Consumers expect you to show them that you know them.

Yet in the often-cited Bond Brand Loyalty survey http://info.bondbrandloyalty.com/2017-loyalty-report, we learned that only 22 percent feel very satisfied with the level of personalization they experience with a loyalty program. Incredibly, that is down from 28 percent in 2015.

No one said that this personalization stuff is easy. As Gartner analyst Noah Elkin told me in an interview for an upcoming podcast episode, it is a crawl, walk, run process for most marketers who at best are implementing it in one channel.

The most egregious disconnect for me in the holiday season was after my wife and I were met with a dirty sock, used robe, and rumpled and unclean sheets upon check-in at the Magnolia Hotel in Denver.

Despite voicing our displeasure to three employees, our e-mailed bill the next morning came with this opening -- We hope you have enjoyed your stay with us.

To be sure, some brands noticeably stood out with personalization efforts (colleagues and others did an admirable job online and in mobile apps, for instance).

The most memorable one, again in the travel industry, came when the Kimpton Hotel Wilshire reached out to my wife to ask her if she would like to send along a photo of a loved one, pet or happy memory so it could be framed and set on the nightstand before she arrived.

In 2018, nothing personal just ain’t good enough.

If you are up for it, let’s take this improvement road together.

I’ll offer insights, actionable lessons, case studies and interviews in this space, on my The Art of Mobile Persuasion podcast https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/art-mobile-persuasion-podcast/id1156481550?mt=2, and @jeffhasen on Twitter. Expect a lot of it.

Your part of the deal? You’ll read, listen, engage, and maybe even catch my attention – and more of my business and loyalty – with a personalized ad, email or promoted tweet that speaks to me.

Thanks for being here. Happy New Year.