Marketo is quite known for its accessibility and user-friendly interface, which does not require any major technical knowledge as long as your marketing foundation is solid. Just like all the other functions of Marketo, customer data management, and delivering identity-based relevant emails is a hasslefree process.
Almost 74% of marketers have admitted to the fact that targeted email personalization has driven an increase in customer engagement for their brands, and with Marketo, this process becomes a cakewalk.
Read on to understand the importance of customer identity for email marketing campaigns, and incorporate that data in your email campaigns with the help of Marketo.
The Need for Customer Data
Visitors leave a lead trail for the marketers all around the wide web. By looking at the right place and with a timely email strategy, one can convert prospects into loyal customers. For this to happen, one needs to understand the customers’ needs and communicate accordingly.
63% of 25 to 39-year-olds (in 2020) are willing to share their personal information in return for relevant emails, offers, and discounts. In that case, the process of knowing a lead should be simple – you ask them about the information that will help deliver relevant service and they tell you all about it.
But things don’t always work like that. Sometimes, asking too many questions might come across as pushy and demanding, no matter how important those questions are.
Now, you need data to serve three primary purposes:
1. To deliver personalized, timely, and relevant emails.
Leveraging content that strikes a chord with the audience helps you win half the battle, while the other half depends on how well you communicate. For efficient communication, you can gather information and derive a customer identity by accessing data via third-party cookies. However, cookies only give you little information on the customer’s persona and buying pattern.
Another way that you can access information is by asking them to register or sign-up and share some personal details. This process of self-identification not only tells you volumes about your lead but also keeps them in the light of what information you have accessed.
2. To deliver cross-platform messages that resonate across all sources.
Identity data is crucial to determine customer persona to deliver content that is uniform across platforms. If your email is communicating something that is not reflected in your landing page or your social media channels, a visitor would simply question your credibility.
With Marketo, you can leverage uniform content across the marketing platform and monitor its performance from a single view customer database.
3. To avoid spam flags and unsubscribes and maintain a good email reputation.
The more relevant your emails are, the better impact it will have on your metrics. It would subsequently reduce the number of unsubscribes you get and more importantly it will avoid your emails being flagged as spams.
3 Smart Ways to Use Data in Your Email Marketing
Customer Journey
28% of email recipients have admitted that they dislike it when brands have their information without them having provided it.
As most of the customers are curious about the brand when they sign up, a welcome email is the best time to ask for more information.
The information you collect along the customer journey comes handy when a visitor is inactive for a long time and you need to engage with them to rekindle their interest in the brand.
Personal Information
Birthday and anniversary emails are the finest examples of how personal information of customers can help you automate your email campaign to deliver timely offers and discounts. This is not just a way to remind your customer that you care but also a great time to drive instant sales.
Trigger
Sending emails like cart abandonment emails, product recommendations based on past purchases, or stock replenishment emails- all based on the customer’s actions – increases the chances of a conversion, especially in the eCommerce sector.
Optimizing Email Campaigns with Customer Identity in Marketo
Manage data
Once you have accessed data, the next big step is to verify its authenticity. It is a good practice to ensure that all the customer identities you feed in your database are authentic. With Marketo, information is accessed, verified, and managed seamlessly with API based solutions.
Updating leads, be it from an internal or external system, is quite simplified with Marketo. While extracting a large number of leads, it is advised to use specific parameters like <includeAttributes/> which allow you to sync only the content that you are interested in retrieving. This will help reduce response payload and enhance query performance.
Segment audience
Consumers can be grouped based on their demographics like age, gender, location, and other psychographics like lifestyle, preferences, and buying patterns. In Marketo, this becomes even easier with unique segmentation lists.
You can create segmentation up to 20 and add 100 segments in Marketo – all this in just two simple steps.
Importing data into Marketo
It is very easy to import lead data to Marketo and get a single view customer experience all across the brand on various platforms. By mapping corresponding REST API fields you can create a file that looks like this:
After this, you can create jobs with various parameters and sync with the database.
Drafting tailored emails
Your email content should match with the persona of the consumer and be relevant to them. Especially when the content is spread across marketing platforms, it becomes important to maintain uniformity and brand recall. In order to jazz this up, Marketo uses personalized dynamic content based on customer identity with the help of tokens and snippets.
Adding a snippet can be done in two easy steps.
A 2 step process to adding tokens
Monitoring the results
Only when you monitor the email campaign performance, you will be able to analyze if your customer database is in sync with your email marketing strategy and whether your emails are resonating with the audience.
Creating an engaging and relevant email program based on the findings will amplify customer loyalty and interaction. It’s when you understand your customer’s actions across your various brand properties that you will be able to deliver relevant email content.
Wrap Up
We hope this blog has conveyed how important customer identity is. With Marketo, this process is even more tangible and simplified. If done the right way, by understanding and incorporating the guidelines we have shared, you will not only connect better with your leads but also boost your ROI.