This blog series highlights practical, immediate ways that brands and retailers can adapt and grow in the ever-changing world of a global pandemic.

Methods discussed in this blog:

• Revisiting Your Messaging
• Going Beyond Demographics
• Refocusing On Customers

Back in simpler times (like six months ago) when marketers talked about brand relevance, they often were talking about witty messaging and hip celebrity endorsements. During today’s pandemic people are struggling to pay bills, manage their kids, and stay healthy. A truly relevant marketing campaign requires more than sweet graphics and wordplay.

Previously, we discussed how repeat customers are the most valuable customers in the world. Strong customer relationships are essential to a strong business. How do you build and maintain those relationships? By knowing what people need, and letting them know it, and then delivering it.

In other words, you need to personalize. Personalize as much as you can. And do it now.

1. Revisit All Of Your Messaging Right Now

All of it. It doesn’t matter how perfect and branded it is. Strong messaging goes beyond traditional branding right now. You have to speak directly to the moment and make it sincere. Generic gestures of virtue aren’t going to win you any new converts. McDonald’s learned that the hard way at the start of the pandemic.

So revisit and revise today and make sure you incorporate these values to your brand image:

• • Sensitive
  • Useful
  • Accessible
  • Innovative
  • Proactive

And once you’ve recalibrated the assets in your queue, it’s time to focus on your outreach.

2.Go Beyond The Broad Demographics

Find the customers who will benefit most from your business and let them know how you can help them as individuals. This means reaching out to repeat customers. It also means identifying potential new customers, which requires a database (more on this later).

When you reach out, speak to each person in specifics. If you can address them by name, that’s great. If you can identify their interests based on SEO search, even better. And if you can tailor the interaction to the person’s unique habits, you can prove irresistible.

The goal here is to give each person exactly what they want. It’s a lofty goal, but it’s very much within reach. Artificial Intelligence tools will enable you to personalize outreach in substance as well as messaging.The more specific, the better.

Doing this will put you ahead of your competition right from the start, as 73% of customers expect businesses to understand their needs but 52% say that businesses are generally impersonal.

Try This: Optimize your offers

When you send out exclusive offers to targeted customers, use behavioral data to tailor each offer to each customer. If a $5 discount is enough to motivate one person, and $7.50 is proven effective with another, why bother sending $10 discounts across the board? This SmartOffer approach engages shoppers with more precision and it trims your marketing budget on the front end. The Kimberly-Clark corporation (makers of Huggies, Scott towels, and many more) took a Smart offer approach with RevTrax and targeted 1.3 billion customers.

3. Focus On Customers, Not Products

For the same reason you need to revisit the tone of your messaging, you need to revisit the focus of your campaigns: people don’t have the time or space right now to admire your brand. They have very specific needs to meet and problems to solve and you can offer solutions. Otherwise, get out of their way. Shouting your own name from a pop-up ad isn’t going to seduce anyone.

Focusing on the customer goes beyond the shopping cart. Customers are using a greater variety of touchpoints than ever before: 64% of shoppers use different devices to start and complete transactions. In order to reach them, you have to know where they are online, what they’re doing, what kinds of choices they’re making.

In other words, you have to focus on customer experience (CX). And it works: 77% of customers say they would return to a business for great service rather than a great marketing campaign.

Consider some opportunities for engagement across channels:

• Social media – Ads promoting products that each shopper has shown interest
• Apps – Notify customers when favorite products are back in stock
• Email – Optimized exclusives
• Website – dynamic one-to-one engagement

Try This: Centralize Your Data Management

Invest in an offer management platform where you can maintain all of your campaigns, individual interactions, and necessary databases. Campaigns with CX focus are multifaceted, and all of those moving pieces run the risk of getting messy without proper organization. A strong management platform should keep your assets safe, accessible, and easily administered. The easier it is to edit your campaigns and understand the data, the more creative you can be with your marketing.

Personalized Marketing Improves Your Workflow

When you improve your customer targeting and outreach, streamline your data-driven marketing campaigns, and integrate tech that lets data guide the way, you’re building more than just a clever marketing suite. You’re setting up your business to provide much better service.

Today marketers talk about Customer Experience (CX) as a stand-alone digital marketing method, but good business has always required a focus on customer experience. Today we’ve got tools to make it more precise.

Providing a quality Customer Experience (CX) requires collecting quality data. In the next installment of this blog series, we’ll look at first-party data in depth. In the meantime, the RevTrax team is available to get you started on the path to a better omnichannel marketing strategy.