Balancing ‘Automation + Personalization’ Results In Successful Brand – Customer Relationship

Several brands today have incorporated automation into their business procedure to simplify their everyday task. Social Media Today's recent survey says that around 75 percent of marketing teams employ some automation tool for their work. However, with this growing fame comes a certain matter of concerns. The report also said that nearly 61 percent of marketers are worried about regarding the lack of personalization due to automation.

Similarly, PWC's global study revealed that with technology advancements, most consumers want brands to use technology for personalization touch. Or we can say customers desire to have more human interaction than before.

Therefore, to satisfy the need of business and customers, it is important for brands to maintain the right balance between automation and personalization. While organizations which prefer extreme automation can become detached and generic at a certain point and those with too much personalization with the customer can come out to be intrusive and creepy.

Well to keep a successful balance between automation and personalization marketers can offer timely and valuable content, respect consumer privacy, enhance the customer experience and create a perfect combination of automation and human touch.

Content: Value and Timing

To offer valuable and timely content, email campaigns are considered as an effective and low-cost method to leverage automation and personalization at the same time. But marketers should congest customer's inbox with too much content rather they should focus on offering relevant content excluding intrusive data. In fact, using transactional data while sending automated and personalized can be less intrusive. Such data source is considered as natural and at this point of time, is a significant component of brand-customer relationship.

Customer Privacy

Some researches show that around 81 percent of consumers want brands to get to know them and understand when to approach them while not invading their privacy. There is a very thin line between personalized marketing and invading customer privacy which marketers need to keep in mind. In terms of email marketing, sending a mass email with the same promotion is not a good tactic to justify one's strategy. Marketers need to pay attention to their target audience and their requirements and desires. Also, ineffective use of consumer data and too much personalization can just put them off the brand and product.

Customer Experience

In the present time, the most significant use of technology can be for enhancing customer experience rather than eliminate the human touch. For example, Sainsbury, a British grocery chain, delivered an extraordinary customer experience with one of its campaigned titled "This time It's Ultra Personalized." Under this campaign, the grocery chain used customers' smartphone location data to provide personalized offers to customers via mobile devices in their hand as they walked around the store. This campaign promoted in-store offers and helped the company gain insights about how people navigated the aisles. Through this campaign, the brand was able to make better-merchandising decisions and enhance its in-store customer experience. Hence, marketers must know that customer-brand relationships are vital in business and automation tools are there to provide additional support.

Automation + Personalization

Many ways exist where marketers can combine automation with personalization – inserting tags to add customers' names in emails to make them feel like the message addresses them individually, encourage team members to interact with potential customers by making calls, sending emails or requesting a connection on social media. The mix of both the method is quite effective in leading the brands but there must be a balance between them. Automation overdone makes brand irrelevant and robotics while overwhelming personalization disturbs customers. Therefore, the right blend of these two is the key to a successful brand-customer relationship.