One-to-One Marketing Definition
One-to-one as a marketing strategy isn’t new. Don Peppers and Martha Rogers coined the term in their 1994 book The One-to-One Future. Essentially, one-to-one marketing is a strategy that builds customer relationships, emphasizing personalized interactions to foster customer loyalty and increase customer lifetime value.
One-to-one marketing is the online version of your favorite deli handing you your order before you even place it. It means getting to know your customers in such a way that you can serve them best.
What is the goal of one-to-one marketing?
The overall goal of this one-to-one marketing strategy is to create a better advertising experience for your customers. Nothing is worse than opening an email or text to see a discount or sale for products you’ve never been interested in for brands you don’t ever remember interacting with. This is avoidable through the highly-personalized approach of sending out marketing messages to your customers on an individual basis. One of the best ways to do this is to send triggered emails based on your customers’ onsite actions and behaviors. We’ll dive into this a bit more below. In the meantime, let’s discuss why eCommerce brands should care about this one-to-one marketing strategy and what goes into the making of these personalized marketing campaigns.
Why should eCommerce Brands Care about One-to-One Marketing?
Simply put, one-to-one marketing is the best way for eCommerce brands to engage with their customers during the state of the current industry. During the onset of the Pandemic, consumers were wary of shopping in person and shifted their spending habits online. This behavior was only heightened by the release of government aided stimulus checks and while there has been a return to in-person shopping, the shift to digital looks to have been drastically accelerated and permanent. On paper, this is great for eCommerce brands, but with that shift comes increasing competition as more and more companies begin to move their marketing efforts online.
With each new brand comes more and more marketing messages that are drowning consumers in a sea of forgettable content. As mentioned above, the last thing you want to do is join this sea by sending batch-and-blast emails. This gets to the core of why one-to-one marketing is so important, it helps your eCommerce brand stand out from competitors by showing consumers content that directly relates to products they viewed or actions they took on your site. This personalized touch helps to create brand affinity, while drastically increasing the chance that your consumer will come back to your site and make a purchase.
Components of One-to-One Marketing Strategy
Building an individual marketing strategy that includes one-to-one marketing takes several different forms depending on the channel and your goals. Consider each type a different tool in your toolbox — you’ll need all three components to make one-to-one marketing a reality for your business.
1. Personalization
It’s the personal touch.
This goes beyond saying “Hi [Name]” in your emails. Personalized one-to-one marketing means sending the most relevant communications in real-time — triggering emails based on behavior, retargeting customers who browse on your website with ads, or providing recommendations on similar products or articles based on what they’ve already looked at.
2. Customization
Customization gives the power back to your customer. Giving your customers a choice on how they want to hear from you builds trust. This can be as simple as a double opt-in process, an easily accessible subscription page for customers to choose their cadence, or offering flexible pay-as-you-go plans.
This level of freedom can make things complicated logistically, but it allows your customers to get exactly what they want out of your product and communications and puts them in the driver’s seat.
3. Segmentation
Behavioral Segmentation takes personalized one-to-one marketing one step further by creating different groups of your customers, prospects, and partners and communicating with them differently. You might create multiple versions of an email campaign based on what data you have about your customers — for instance, promoting a sale on sandals for customers who have ordered them before — so that everything they receive is relevant and targeted.
Steps to Launching One-to-One Marketing Campaigns
Getting started with one-to-one marketing is easy. Here’s are the steps for launching your one-to-one marketing campaign:
1. Build the Right Databases
The foundation of any one-to-one marketing program is customer data. You need to understand your customers so well that you know exactly what they need, when they need it. If you want to build out real-time communications, you’ll need to build out your databases first.
If the price drops on a product, or you’re restocked, you should know exactly which customers should be informed based on past browsing data. The first step should be to understand what data you have available and how you can use it to your advantage.
And don’t worry—qualitative customer data counts, too. It adds a story to the numbers you’re already seeing. Sit in on sales calls, run a survey, or sift through your customer support tickets to get a window into your typical customer’s mind.
2. Create Customer Profiles
Marketers talk a lot about customer personas, but to make one-to-one marketing work, you have to build segments of “one.” Drill down to the customer level.
Data can tell you a lot about any given customer. Create a unique profile for all of your prospects and customers using:
- Browsing Data: What pages do they visit? For how long?
- Purchase Data: Have they already purchased from you? If so, what did they buy? Are there patterns?
- Abandoned Cart Data: How likely are they to make a purchase or are they serial shoppers?
- Customer Support/Sales Touchpoint Data: Have they spoken with someone on your team before?
- NPS (Net Promoter Score) Data: How satisfied are they with your business?
You need to know more than their title and demographics, but exactly where they are in the funnel and what they need to get them to click that “Buy” button again and again.
3. Design the Golden Customer Journey
Once you’ve built out your customer profiles (no small feat!), look for patterns to the smoothest possible customer journey. Is there something all of your repeat customers have in common? For example, you may find that the average person who signs up for your subscription service reads three blog articles before doing so.
Boom. Now you know what lever to pull.
The average e-commerce shopping cart abandonment rate is 65.57%. That means the majority of your customers will likely abandon their cart at least once, from sticker shock, distraction, or reviews. Triggering an email to address their concerns and remind them of their purchase smooths out the journey and makes it easier for your customers to buy from you.
The easier you make it for your customers to buy from you, the more money you’ll make. And that starts with data.
5 One-to-One Marketing Examples
One-to-one marketing can take different forms based on your organization’s goals. Here are five one-to-one examples to get you started:
1. Personalized Emails
With email, personalization isn’t just important — it’s expected. Start with basic information your customers already give you during the signup or purchase process, like their birthday, zip code, or whether they’re interested in men’s and women’s clothing.
Abandoned cart emails don’t have to involve a literal cart. Your prospects won’t convert unless they’re spending time on your site or in your product. This email from Netflix is a great one-to-one personalization example of increasing engagement (not to mention a slick design, too).
2. Personalized Text Messages
No one goes anywhere without their phone nowadays — it’s an extension of self, so it doesn’t get more personal than that. Text message marketing is still relatively new, but it grew nearly 200% between 2015 and 2017. Despite the rise in messaging apps like Facebook and WhatsApp, the vast majority of smartphone users (94%) are still sending texts. To receive updates, discounts, reminders, and alerts, consumers opt-in using a distinct shortcode, similar to subscribing to an email list.
Text marketing can be a super powerful retention tool. It goes back to making it as easy as possible for customers to buy from you. And the best part is that, just like email, you can send one-to-one triggered text messages that are based on your customers’ specific actions. I love it when my doctor sends me reminders like this rather than calling me since I can respond right away without disrupting the flow of my day:
Text messages are limited to 160 characters, so you’ll need to get your message across straightaway. For more on how to build out a successful SMS program, click here.
3. One-to-One Triggered Emails
Email marketing is already one of the highest performing channels in a marketer’s arsenal, but triggered emails go above and beyond:
- Triggered emails generate 24x more revenue per send.
- They also see more than double the engagement, with 2.2X open rates, 2.1X click rates and 4.1X conversion rates compared to batch-and-blast emails on average.
- And triggered emails have lasting impact. Visitors who receive triggered emails engage sometimes months after an email has been sent. Roughly 18% to 23% of engagement happens after the 24-hour mark.
Automating your email strategy based on the customer journey delivers relevant information to your customer at the right time. You can trigger your one-to-oneemail based on:
- Example: Time or date trigger to say happy birthday
- Example: On-site events like abandoning a cart
- Example: Sending shipping or order confirmations based on customer actions
There are many more triggered email options to choose from, of course. But, one thing to remember: Just because they’re triggered emails doesn’t mean they’re “set it and forget it.” Continue to test and iterate on these emails by tracking opens, clicks, and other basic email metrics. You should also be tracking site visits, conversions, new customers, and revenue from these one-to-one emails to help you optimize your efforts and best engage your recipient list.
4. Recommended Products
Increasing customer lifetime value means you’ll need to encourage purchases again and again. The best way to do that is listening to your customers through the purchases they’re already making.
Amazon is the king of this one-to-one marketing approach. Everywhere you look on the site you can find product recommendations based on your browsing history, purchases, reviews, and more.
Can you tell we’re doing some DIY projects right now? ^
You can provide personalized recommendations in your emails, too. OpenTable does this on a monthly basis:
One thing these all have in common? Easing decision paralysis. There are thousands of products on Amazon, videos on YouTube, restaurants in Chicago, and songs on Spotify. These emails help guide the customer to what matters to them rather than sifting through all that content.
5. Customer Loyalty Programs
Your most valuable customers are the ones who buy your products again and again. It costs about 5-25x more to acquire new customers than to upsell existing ones, according to Harvard Business Review. And existing customers spend up to 67% more. This makes one-to-one marketing for customers incredibly important.
Reward that customer loyalty by building out a membership program. Not only does this build a community around your brand, creating a sense of exclusivity and excitement, it also gives you the opportunity to collect even more data about your customers. It’s a virtuous cycle so you can keep providing them with a relevant, personalized experience.
These are your super-users, so make them feel special.
Sephora does a great job of this with their Beauty Insider program. The more you spend, the more points you receive you can trade in for rewards. Why shop anywhere else, even if you can get the same beauty products at Ulta or Amazon?
Up to 84% of people told Shopify they’d be more likely to stick with a certain retail brand because of a customer loyalty program.
Loyalty programs work really well in your emails, too. You can celebrate great milestones:
Now it’s your turn
Whew, that was a lot of information. We hope you enjoyed taking all of that in and learning more about why one-to-one marketing is so pivotal to creating long-lasting, trusting relationships with both customers and prospects. If you’d like to learn more about how you can get your one-to-one marketing campaigns up and running today, please feel free to reach out to one of us.
