I recently had the honor of speaking at Personifest, the annual Personify user group meeting. Held in San Diego, April 2-5, the event was perfect for anyone looking to learn and share knowledge about Personify. For those who are unfamiliar with Personify, they offer association management solutions. Americaneagle.com partners with this Association Management System (AMS) provider to enable us to create cutting edge digital solutions for associations.
This blog post is the first of a two part series and will provide an overview of my presentation. This post focuses on the first topic – building a 360° View of Your Members.
A Few Statistics
I began the presentation by providing a few key statistics that demonstrate the need for great customer experience and personalization.
Know Your Members from Every Angle
The first step towards providing an exceptional customer experience is to know your members from every angle. There are many systems in use at an organization today, which all contain data about your members.
One way to help connect the members across those systems is to combine data to understand members from all channels and their interactions with your organization.
Members are coming at you from every angle and expect a consistent, cohesive experience. From event interactions to mobile apps and the web, you want to give them personalized experiences that flow together.
All marketers of constituent based organizations (e.g. non-profits, associations) face the challenge of truly understanding the needs of their members:
- What they want.
- When they want it.
- Where they want it.
You need to know how members interact with your organization and across what channels. What are the best channels that contribute to macro and micro conversions and when are those channels best utilized during the member’s journey? It’s crucial to get a handle on this information.
There are two main problems that marketers often face with building a 360° view of their members:
PROBLEM #1: Data is often in silos, so piecing it together seems nearly impossible.
PROBLEM #2: Once you’ve compiled the information, identifying actionable insights from multichannel data can be overwhelming.
Batch marketing and generic blast methods are no longer an option. Members expect you to know who they are and what they’re interested in.
You need to know what content individual members respond to, what channels they use, and how to most effectively target them.
The Personify 360 Platform can help you achieve this goal of seeing your audience from every angle. Americaneagle.com’s experienced team can help guide you along this path, leading to not only a better user experience, but more conversions and efficiency within your organization.
The more you know your audience, the better you connect.
When gathering data, online and offline, it’s nearly impossible to stitch it all together without a strategic plan. You need to be able to combine all your data in one place so you can identify your most valuable segments across every channel.
People are using their phones to find information as and when they need it more and more today than ever before. Here are a few figures from Google’s 4 New Moments Every Marketer Should Know PDF:
Keep Up With Your Members. They’re on the Move.
Members have blurred the line between online and offline interactions. They expect a seamless experience no matter how they choose to connect.
Marketers need to be able to tie together every interaction, from mobile to web to physical events, etc.
The 360°View
-
It Starts with identifying your audience before you begin a 1-to-1 personalization
- What systems have data that would be beneficial?
- What data is relevant to the organization objectives and goals?
- What do our members expect from the data that they provide?
Qualities of Actionable Audiences
High reach: Your audience should have high reach to maximize its impact. Reach can be defined either by volume or value.
- Volume: The audience should reach a large percentage of your site’s visitors.
- Value: Your audience might reach a small audience but each visitor in that audience may be extremely valuable and deserve a unique message.
Identifiable: You must be able to identify members of this audience. - Can you target this audience using the data available in existing audience conditions?
- Do you need to set up new tags or events on your site to capture behavior?
- Will you need to use an integration with a different system to access other attributes?
Defining the Audiences
Audiences are the building blocks of personalization. Each campaign starts with a few unique groups of visitors who each receive a targeted experience.
Actionable Audiences
Think about who you want to target. In other words, which audiences (member segments) do you want to personalize for?
Audiences are the building blocks of personalization. Write down all the potential audiences you will target and any notes.
External Systems
What are the systems you’ll use to discover audiences and connect into the personalization platform for targeting?
After you’ve defined who you want to target, you need to understand how you will identify these visitors technically. While many of your audiences may be contextual or behavioral and identified by your personalization tool, others will come from third party data. Identify the tools (i.e. website analytics, your CRM or a DMP) you will use to identify audiences.
Most Valuable Experiences
Where are the most valuable experiences on your website you want to personalize for?
You can deliver personalized experiences on many different pages on your site. Identify a few of these important pages and the section of the page you would personalize. This is intended to get you thinking about the personalized experiences you’ll deliver.
Key Messages or Experiences
What are some key messages or experiences you want to show each audience? Describe the unique experience you want to deliver to this audience. Is there a special message, image, or promotion for them? This is a thought exercise to help you prioritize which audiences you personalize for. If you have a lot to say to certain audiences, you may find that you can break the audience down into smaller groups.
Thank you for taking the time to read this post – look out for Part 2, coming soon, on personalization.
