When NOT to use personalization

With ever-growing technology in marketing automation, hyper-personalization has quickly become one of the hottest trends in marketing. It’s become more scalable and affordable for marketers, making it more accessible than ever before. But, what many marketers fail to realize is that just because something is more affordable doesn’t make it more profitable or more effective. The purpose of this post is not to try and disprove the effectiveness, it is highly effective. But, we live in a time where most consumers are savvy enough to know almost no communication cadence they receive from a brand is truly 1:1. Yet as marketers, we often fail to acknowledge that. Marketers, we have to be smarter about how we use personalization because let’s face it; we’re not fooling anyone by using consumers’ first name in a mass-distributed email.

We need to be creative and use personalization in ways consumers would never expect — to make them really feel special. We have to be strategic and find unique ways to connect with consumers. In order to do this effectively, we need to first explore the instances in which we should stop using personalization.

1. When it’s not relevant. We often have information about our consumers, but don’t use it in the right context. For example, just because you know someone’s household income doesn’t mean you would display it on your homepage every time they visit your site — that would be extremely discomforting for the consumer. Having information is only half the battle, knowing when to use it, and how to use it is the real challenge. It’s not always as simple as inserting a personalization token to show consumers what you know about them. Using personalization can be more subtle. If you live in Irvine, California. Apple isn’t going to send you an email about how it’s a sunny day in Irvine, and suggest you should buy some Air Pods to use while going on a run. It’s great that they know you live in California but it’s not relevant to you buying AirPods. But they might instead use that information to offer certain promos that have regional restrictions or when they need to recommend an Apple store to get your phone fixed. In these instances, the personalization feels natural. It makes it convenient for you to use an Apple store to get your phone fixed versus some competitors because Apple has done the heavy lifting for you in their personalization and you already know where one is. Apple doesn’t need to blatantly say they know where you live but rather do so subtly making the experience feel more natural. The same goes for any brand. Simply regurgitating information makes personalization feel creepy and inauthentic. Find ways to seamlessly tie in personalization and eas customer experiences.
2. When it won’t generate a positive ROI. Personalization, when automated, is meant to be a scalable way to improve your marketing efforts. But, that doesn’t immediately make it a good investment. Building the forms to collect information, gathering respondents, segmenting the consumers collected from it, and building a strategy on how to use that information takes time, and costs money — usually a lot too. Forms to collect consumer information can cost tens of thousands of dollars and if you’re not going to use the tokens collected from them in a way that’s going to generate more revenue than it costs to collect the information; then it may not logistically make sense to use personalization. For instance, to invest in a form that collects respondents' names, email, address, income, employer, marital status, etc, and then only use their first name as a personalization token with no segmentation isn’t a good investment. The rest of the information is going to waste and so did the money you spent to collect it. It’s essential that you plan out what information you actually need and will use to collect in your forms. Collecting information you’re not going to use not only hurts your ROI as you spend money on something you’re not getting value out of, but it also hurts your response rate. The more questions you put in a form, the fewer respondents you will get. Be strategic in the building of your data collecting tools.
3. When it makes you look like you have your head in the sand. I mentioned earlier that most consumers are savvy enough to realize that emails, or any communication cadence for that matter, they receive from brands aren’t actually 1:1. What this means is that using someone’s first name in an email or telling them where they live doesn’t make them feel special to the brand anymore. It doesn’t make them feel like you know them because all you’re doing is spitting back demographic information, and every consumer already knows they filled out that information and gave it to you. There’s no need to regurgitate it back at them. It just adds fluff to an email and makes the actual actionable item harder to find. For a great example of a direct-to-the-point, yet still personalized, email check out this post by Neil Patel. It cites great examples of how using less personalization can actually make emails feel more human. Instead of trying to force an email to feel humanized by inserting personalization tokens, the brands take the time to instead use the information to craft emails that actually are centered around that individual’s demographical statutes. The bottom line is de-personalize the information that you’re just regurgitating and up the ante information you actually have to dig to collect.

Determining when to use personalization is far from an easy process. As personalization grows in popularity it only becomes harder and harder to use effectively, and consumers’ expectations of meaningful personalization will only continue to rise as it grows in popularity. With this being the case, it’s essential that we rethink the way we use personalization. We need to cut out the personalization that consumers are numb to, and stop using it just for the sake of using.

We need to dig deeper than just demographic information that consumers expect us to know and provide deeper real insights about their psychographics. For example, knowing what times or days of the week consumers shop, knowing how they shop (in groups, alone?). Demographic information is great for sorting but should be left out of personalization. They already know that, give consumers insights that will actually benefit them, not you.