DELIVER PERSONALIZED CONTENT IN REAL TIME
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Tips on how to deliver personalized content in real-time with Gretchen Scheiman
- I would say personalization is utterly fundamental and core to any marketer’s strategy. Almost 90% of retail marketers are using personalization today.
- In an email, you need a vendor that can help you overcome the limitations of flat emails and change images on the fly and make them more dynamic
- It is an ongoing source of tension for marketers because a customer is always going to buy more when things are personalized. We’ve proven that over and over again. But a customer is also always going to be very, very concerned when somebody gets too personal.
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I would say personalization is utterly fundamental and core to any marketer’s strategy. Almost 90% of retail marketers are using personalization today.
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Doug: Well, welcome back listeners to another episode of Real Marketing Real Fast. Today in studio joining me is special guest, Gretchen Scheiman. She is the senior director of marketing for a company called Liveclicker. It’s an advanced personalization platform that helps brands create timely, relevant, engaging moments that inspire action. She has over 15 years experience in marketing management, building and leading high performing teams on the client and the agency side. Gretchen specializes in methodical marketing funnel optimization and bringing an analytical perspective to how organizations can best use their talent. The tool that I’m sharing here with you, Liveclicker, gives marketers the ability to instantly personalize messages with any data from any system all at the moment that the subscriber opens your email. So, at last, it’s possible to execute the long-held vision of personalization of scale. So I’d like you to join me in welcoming Gretchen to the Real Marketing Real Fast podcast today.
Doug: Hey Gretchen. Good morning and welcome to the Real Marketing Real Fast podcast today.
Gretchen S.: Thank you so much for inviting me, Doug. I really appreciate it.
Doug: Well, I think it was a mutual friend, I think it was a Ryan Phelan who introduced us and I’m happy he connected us. I really thought the information I found on your website in terms of personalization was super interesting and will make a great conversation today. So why don’t you start us off and just give us a little bit of background on who you are and what you do?
Gretchen S.: Sure. Well, I am the senior director of marketing for Liveclicker. That’s an advanced personalization platform. We help brands create awesome, amazing, engaging moments that just inspire customers to act and to do and to buy or anything else their brand is looking for. I have well over 15 years of experience in marketing management. I’ve been doing this for a long time, both on the client-side, on the agency side and now on the vendor side. And personalization has been near and dear to my heart from the days of Epiphany and some really old systems that are out there. And we’ve been working on it for quite some time now. So I’m just excited to talk about that today.
Doug: Well, I’m excited about all the changes in terms of technology and how it makes the experience for the end-user better, opposed to just a more technology for marketers who often just like the shiny new objects. So for our listeners who aren’t aware of what you mean by personalization, can you just take a few minutes and explain what that is, please?
Gretchen S.: Absolutely. I would say personalization is utterly fundamental and core to any marketer’s strategy. And realistically, almost 90% of retail marketers out there, if we’re just looking at one segment alone, are using personalization today. But that includes some really basic stuff. And personalization has a pretty broad spectrum. So if we think about it from the basic to the really advanced, basic personalization would be putting someone’s first name in there. So instead of saying, “Dear customer” you could say, “Dear Doug” or “Dear Gretchen”. But that’s the easy stuff. And I have to say a lot of customers and people out there these days are so used to it that they kind of expect more. And so what marketers are starting to do is create true one-to-one experiences for their customers. Instead of creating a marketing campaign and then saying, “Oh, we can add in some personalization, “Dear Doug”, they’re actually thinking through the customer experience first and then building a campaign around the best customer journey. And so that means it’s really about the customer and not about the technology. The technology is there to enable the things that you want to do.
Doug: Now in terms of marketers adopting this new way of thinking, where do you think we are today?
Gretchen S.: So it’s all over the map. Some really strong and well-known brands are doing basic stuff and some really tiny brands are doing amazing things because the technology is out there to support it. So you can look at your email or your website and you can say, “I really just want to show somebody the best next purchase for them based on what they’ve already looked at on my site.” So if you are a guy coming in and you’re looking at dress pants for men, showing you a dress for a woman is probably not going to cut it. I mean you might have a significant other that is a woman who needs a dress for the same occasion, but chances are you are not shopping for that person.
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I would say personalization is utterly fundamental and core to any marketer’s strategy. Almost 90% of retail marketers are using personalization today.
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Doug: That’s true. That’s true. I’d be offsite doing that.
Gretchen S.: You might be. You might be. But you know we’re going with the odds here.
Doug: Right.
Gretchen S.: And so showing you a dress shirt would make a lot more sense than showing you a standard image that might actually be focused more on women because women tend to shop at this particular brand more often than men. And so by saying, “Hey, we’re going to change our image on our website, in our email, everything, based on what you’ve recently done and who you are and maybe where you are or even what device you’re on at the moment, we can do pretty amazing things.”
Doug: Well I think that where you are for sure and the device you’re on are two that I see people fail at all the time. So great offer comes in the email, click and it’s like, “Oh, not available in your area.” It’s like, seriously, you guys couldn’t figure out where I’m located before I got to the very end of the shopping cart and now I can’t pay? So now not only have you wasted my time, now I’m ticked that you wasted my time and I can’t buy the product that I’ve got that I bought into.
Gretchen S.: Exactly. I think one of the challenges there is that in a regular email, regular emails are pretty flat and it’s hard to do some of the things that you can do on a website. On a website, it’s not necessarily easy, but you can certainly add personalization and there are lots of vendors out there that are making it much easier to do that. In an email, you really do need a vendor that can help you overcome the limitations of flat emails and change images on the fly, make them more dynamic, so that you can solve for some of those inventory issues, for example, like you just pointed out.
Doug: Yeah, I mean it’s funny because I worked with a brand and it was a ladies clothing store and it was very, very high end and it took a while to convince them to segment their data because the owner said, I said, “So who’s your perfect customer?” She said, “Well everyone can shop here.” It’s like, “Hmm. You know, I’ve done a lot of shopping with my wife and I realize these scarves in your store start at about $600 so I’d like to say that not everybody is your customer. There’s probably a certain demographic of people who shop here.” And if you can build that relationship, as you said, it’s very easy to follow up, “If you bought this, then you can buy that. And we’ve got a new fabric that’s in your color because we know what colors that you’ve bought before or the styles that you’ve bought.”
Doug: So is there an example of a customer, you can feel free to give them a shout out or not, that you’ve worked with that went from the standard, “Hey, I’m just going to send a flat email.” To, you know, “Dear customer.” Where they actually used your technology well and integrated it with data that would suit their customer?
Gretchen S.: You know, I have a fantastic example that speaks both to one-to-one personalization as well as the inventory example that you mentioned earlier. And it’s from a company called Hot Topic. They’re pretty amazing. They do the coolest little statuettes and things that are just… They’re fun to have. And so they tend to do very limited batches because these are limited edition. And they used to have a problem where they’d send out the email and midway through the email send inventory would run out and people would get upset and that would drive a lot of calls to customer service. And so they had the cost of customer service calls, they had the disgruntled customers, they had a terrible customer experience. All those things that were distressing to them, probably more distressing than even to their customer base because they did sell out so clearly there were a lot of people who are really happy with the limited edition things that they sell.
Gretchen S.: What they did is they said, “Let’s look at inventory management through dynamic email.” And a lot of marketers would stop right there and say, “Hey, this is too hard. We can’t get our systems connected. We can’t make this work. There’s too much technology creating barriers to make it work.” But Hot Topic didn’t do that. They actually said, “Let’s see if we can be creative.” And we wound up working with them to find a way to overcome all the system issues by avoiding it entirely, which is always a great way to overcome a problem, if you ignore it, eventually it goes away. So we actually used the power of dynamic images in an email and had them send their emails earlier in the day so that everyone could get them before the sales started, which immediately is positive in terms of customer experience. But what we had them send was a message that said, “Hey, the sales going to start at a certain time.”
Gretchen S.: People then could come back to that email at that time and the message would change because the image could change and it would say, “Okay, now our sale is on. Go ahead and buy it here.” And when the volume was high enough that they knew that their inventory was running low online, they changed the message again and said, “Go to your local store, we’re out online, but you can probably still find some of these in your local store.” And so all of a sudden the call volume went down, which means the costs went down, their sales still were very high because they sold out and customers were so much happier.
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I would say personalization is utterly fundamental and core to any marketer’s strategy. Almost 90% of retail marketers are using personalization today.
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Doug: That totally makes sense. That’s a really cool example. So I want to get just clear on how the process works. So when you’re saying dynamic email and being able to change the content, I understand how that works. How much data does the marketer need to actually capture when people subscribe to start to personalize? Is this a what’s in your database-driven technology or are we pulling information from a web visitor’s previous history with you? How does it work in the backend?
Gretchen S.: Well that’s the really cool thing. What you need in terms of data is defined by what you’re trying to solve. You don’t actually have to have a ton of your own data to be doing better personalization. You can approach it in a different way like Hot Topic did where they just avoided it entirely and solved the problem with a completely different approach. Or you can look at the data that you do have already and say, “I’m going to work with that because that’s what I have.” There are all sorts of data that you probably have and you don’t even realize it. Things like the type of device somebody is opening on can tell you whether they’re in the home or out of the home potentially, or at least give you a reasonable guess. The time of day that they’re opening things can tell you something, the business data that you have on them, the first-party data that you may have on their purchases or other things. And then, of course, you can go out there and buy certain data as well to augment it.
Doug: Sure.
Gretchen S.: There are all sorts of different things you can do from high to low. You can get incredibly complex or insanely simple.
Doug: Well I’m still getting lots of emails that don’t have my name and that says, “Dear subscriber.” Or, “Dear…” Then space and there is no merge field. So obviously there’s lots of room just to get to the basics. I mean I had commented before we started recording this episode that I had read your post on are you still emailing 1999 and thinking some people are still, they’re probably pre 1999. So like you said, there are lots of opportunities to get more personal. Now in terms of data from the website, do you have the ability when you’re doing this to pull from your customer’s journey? Because a lot of CRM systems, a lot of technology, allows us to track the customer journey so we can see what they’ve looked at, what pages they may have spent time on. I’m assuming we can pull that sort of information into and enrich the database?
Gretchen S.: Yes, absolutely. In fact, we’re working very closely with an online ticket retailer who, I won’t mention a name just because we don’t yet have permission to talk about them specifically, but I can certainly say that we have helped them understand their website data, take the information about what someone who is identifiable and has browsed maybe a couple of different venues or a few artists or teams and take that and then make smarter suggestions. Just because they’ve looked at the Jets and name an artist, Bruce Springsteen says, doesn’t mean that they’re going to buy a ticket, but it does mean that if I talked to them about the Giants or another competitor and I talked to them about, I don’t know, Blue Man Crew, they might be less interested. So instead of putting out deals that are not relevant to them, I can start talking to them about the Jets, I can start talking to them about Bruce Springsteen and where he’s going to be in both large and small venues, and have a much better chance of meeting their needs and expectations and having them then make a purchase through me instead of another vendor, another provider.
Doug: Yeah, I mean I’ve bought tickets online and I bought tickets when I’ve traveled as well using, I’m not going to name the brands because I’m not sure who you’re working with either, but it’s interesting because they very quickly identify what my interests are. And if I’m traveling, obviously that’s not my ongoing interest because I might not always be in New York, so as much as I like to go see the Yankees play or the Rangers play, that’s not my hometown. But it’s funny because like you said, they can track that and be personal. But what I find interesting is this conversation and I think maybe we’re at a threshold, I’d like your feedback, and that is around what the consumer thinks of this type of technology as opposed to what marketers think. And the feedback that I’m hearing is, “Oh, you know, you guys with your remarketing you’re following me around.” And I’m saying, “Hey, we’re making the world better for you because we’re not showing you irrelevant things to buy. We’re actually trying to be more personal and send you less irrelevant ads.” So where do you see the consumer feedback these days as we’re getting so much more personal and delivering, I think it’s a better message.
Gretchen S.: It is an ongoing source of tension for marketers and the people that they’re trying to turn into customers because a customer is always going to buy more when things are personalized. We’ve proven that over and over again. But a customer is also always going to be very, very concerned when somebody gets too personal. It’s the same thing when you’re walking down the street. If your friend walks up to you and says, “Hi Gretchen, I’m so happy to see you today. I would love to tell you about this band you’re interested in.” If it’s my friend, I’m going to be okay with that. They’ll sound a little stilted maybe, but I’ll be okay with it. If it’s a complete and utter stranger, I’m going to call the police. I’m going to be very not okay with it. So everything is about context.
Gretchen S.: I know that there’s a researcher who many years ago, his name is Mike Bloxham, and he did some amazing research around privacy and how context absolutely changed people’s willingness to share certain pieces of information. And so you couldn’t look at a privacy discussion and a willingness to share as a yes or no, a black or white question. You had to put it in context. There were very few things that changed, that didn’t change rather, outside of context. And so marketers need to be very careful not to be creepy. I think we’ve all heard that word, the creep factor.
Doug: Yeah.
Gretchen S.: And we just need to not be creepy and to be really respectful of people and how they perceive their relationship with us as marketers and how we need to talk to them in order to make sure that we don’t turn them off by being a little too personal.
Doug: Well and I wonder how much that doesn’t start with the intent. So is the intent to just really hit a sales number or as an intent to serve my audience? And if I give my audience a great experience, whether or not I see this all the sales that day or in the future because I built a relationship, it’s likely to be a better longterm relationship than, “Hey, let’s just hit the list and see if we can generate some more sales.”
Gretchen S.: Well, it would be nice if we all had the luxury of only thinking about what’s best for our customers. Unfortunately, most of us do have goals to hit. So it needs to be a balance between the two. We have to make our goals, we’re running a business. We’re trying to make sales. But we need to recognize that our customers are the way we do that. So they’re incredibly important.
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I would say personalization is utterly fundamental and core to any marketer’s strategy. Almost 90% of retail marketers are using personalization today.
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Doug: So where do you think, for our listeners that understand email and understand the customer, where do you think the low hanging fruit is? Because this is likely a new topic to them. So if they were to get started where would be the starting point?
Gretchen S.: So the low hanging fruit is obviously the first name personalization. But I would say that’s pretty much table stakes. You kind of need to be doing it already. And most email service providers have that low level of personalization just built-in and it’s been there since not too long after 1999 probably. But the next level is really starting to think through, “What is the easiest thing I can do that’ll make a difference?” Certainly the, “You bought this, now buy that.” is actually pretty straightforward to implement these days.
Gretchen S.: And really what we want to do is go a little bit beyond that into offer optimization, thinking about, “How do I make my offers more compelling?” And send the right offer to someone. You don’t want to send a 20% off offer to somebody who would be happy with a 10% or somebody who won’t buy until they get the 40% off. And you don’t want to send the 40% off offer to somebody who would have bought at the 20% rate.
Doug: Or bought full price, yeah.
Gretchen S.: Exactly. Do any of us buy full-price anymore? But you do have to really think about those types of things. You also don’t want to send it, back to our original example, the guy shopping for dress pants, you don’t want to send him something for his wife. It may be not entirely inappropriate, but it’s still, you’re not going to get a sale and guy’s not buying dresses for his wife. You’ll have more success selling the dress pants to the wife.
Doug: There you go, make [inaudible 00:19:52] Well, I mean we worked with a number of retailers and it was funny that once we trained the staff on how to talk to the customer how much information the customer was willing to share once they understood the intent. So we’ve got the basic 411 information, but then we got marital status and birthdays and anniversaries. And I was really surprised at how willing people were at that particular time, I don’t know if it was 1999 but it was a number of years ago, to share and that allowed our client then to look for different partnerships. So they weren’t in the flower business, but it was very easy to go talk to a local florist and say, “Hey, you know, I’ve got these customers and this is their anniversary and we can send an offer.” So it allowed them to partner and help sell other products into the customer database that were helpful for the customer.
Gretchen S.: That’s fantastic. And yes, absolutely partnership offers are a great source of revenue. And it makes the customer feel happy when you’re saying, “Hey, I can solve not just the problem I’m here to solve for you, but I can help you solve some of the related things that you need to work on.”
Doug: Well, one of the partnership offers that I had talked about that I really enjoyed was from Tory Burch. So my wife likes some of the stuff at Tory Burch and we’re both Fitbit wearers. And so Fitbit sent on an offer saying, “Hey, you know it’s…” I can’t remember what it was, whether it was Mother’s Day or something was coming up and said, “Hey, here’s a new Fitbit for Mother’s Day.” I’m thinking, “Yeah, she has a Fitbit. So there’s really no reason to buy another one.” But the other half of the email was an offer from Tory Burch, “Buy mom this new…” Whatever. It was a more jewelry style. So guess what? I signed up with Tory Burch, bought a very expensive piece of jewelry to hold a Fitbit and then had to buy the new Fitbit to go in there. So a great example of them knowing who we were and identify that to bring us a partnership offer. And you know, I ended up buying their product as well.
Gretchen S.: That’s fantastic. Tory Burch is really amazing in the personalization space. They do such fantastic stuff with it and they’re definitely ahead of a lot of retailers.
Doug: Yeah, I had to unsubscribe from that list, it becomes very expensive for me. It’s like, “Oh that’s cool.”
Gretchen S.: See it works. A little too well apparently.
Doug: Yeah, it does. So in terms of the industry and all the changes in the privacy, in terms of GDPR and the California Consumer Act that’s coming in in the new year, how do you think this is going to affect the personalization moving forward? I mean obviously you guys are at the forefront of this.
Gretchen S.: Absolutely.
Doug: Do you want to share where you think the consumers are going to be and the regulators as we get more personal and collect more data?
Gretchen S.: So again, it’s all about the context. And certainly, we are very on top of GDPR, the California Act that’s coming up, just making sure that we always have the utmost permission from the people that we’re working with and we encourage our customers to do the same for their customer base. Once you have that relationship, it is that process of building things slowly over time. And getting permission. If you have permission, you’re always going to be in a good space, especially if you’ve logged it. And if you are trying to go out there and really dive into details on someone that you aren’t working with, don’t know, haven’t gotten permission from, you’re always going to get in trouble. So good businesses, good brands that run really tight ships around permissions are not going to have issues with the new law.
Doug: Well I was kind of excited to see how quickly people, at least from my perspective, how quickly people moved over to adopt the permission on all the websites. I just didn’t expect that the move would be so quick and people would willingly go in there. But I’ve been happy to watch as a marketer, that has become kind of the gold standard and that’s just a minimum to move forward.
Gretchen S.: It is nice to see. It’s been a culmination of a long line of experiments and efforts by multiple vendors out there to say, “Let’s try to see how we can give customers more control over their data and see if that will help them and help us.” And it’s nice to see that that’s coming to fruition in smart ways.
Doug: Now there are a couple of other examples you can share just to make sure our listeners are pretty clear on what the opportunities are to use your platform to provide a better-personalized experience for their subscribers.
Gretchen S.: Absolutely. I’d be more than happy to share. Let’s see if I can come up with another good one off the top of my head.
Doug: I’ll give you a second to think. But what I’m wondering really here is for our listeners, so they get a clear picture of what are some of the things you can do with personalization? So not everybody is as creative and thinking of maybe where your company is, but just give them some ideas of, “How could I implement this?” So one example you gave was with the inventory, which totally makes sense. Running out of inventory, don’t want to tick off the client, give them a chance to say, “Hey, we’re out here. Go over to the store.” I’m sure there are a hundred different ways that people can implement what you’re doing.
Gretchen S.: Absolutely. I think the challenge is always picking just one. So let me start with Chico’s. Chico’s actually managed to double their conversion rate by putting multiple deals in a single email. So they did a clever thing that they could probably run every once in a while, so it is repeatable, just not every single day. They did a 3 Deals 1 Day email and they sent out the email in the morning with the first one and then they told people to continue to click during the day and come back to the email and open it and they would see a different deal. That had double the conversion rate and it had a really impressive, unique click-through rate for shoppers who said, “Yeah, I’d be interested in this type of thing.” So you can do something very simple. That’s just three versions of a creature that changes during the day. It’s one send. And it’s having the offers out there. Not a whole lot of personalization there, but enough to say, “I know what my people want and I know what they’re interested in and I can then do further testing to see which of those offers works well.”
Doug: Wow, that’s a great idea. That’s super cool. You can run a sale all day with the new special every hour without having to send another email.
Gretchen S.: Yeah, exactly. It’s fun stuff. I know that there is a company not in the US or even in North America, but instead out in Turkey that does sportswear. And so something very popular and we probably all have, a shirt with our favorite player’s name on the back, but they had a twist on it where they would offer a shirt with your name on the back and they tried to sell that showing you the shirt, and then they did a test to see if it would actually work better if they showed you the shirt with your name on it. And so you’d get a picture of the shirt with [Morneau 00:27:06] written on the back, and that absolutely had a huge response rate, 130% conversion rate in a lift. Just an incredible result just from something that was really simple. You just need your customer’s last name in the database. And most of us have at least something close to that. Not everybody’s data is fully clean, but the name is kind of among the basics that you have for at least more than half of the people in your database.
Doug: Yeah, that’s really cool. And like you said, with the ability to append data, I mean it’s not difficult now to add where people live so you could use images that reflect where they are. That’s really cool.
Gretchen S.: Yeah.
Doug: So in terms of what you’re doing and you guys charging down this path of personalization, what’s some of the bad advice that you hear in the industry around email or dynamic data within an email?
Gretchen S.: Most of what I hear is people getting very concerned that they need too much data, that they don’t have it in a way that they could use, that they are worried that it will take too many technical resources to implement. And nothing could be further from the truth. Our platform works with your existing email service provider. You don’t have to change your process to take advantage of what we offer. You just have to plug it into what you’re already doing. There’s a ton of things that you could be doing in personalization that take less effort than you think. And so really it’s about looking at it very carefully and understanding your customer experience well enough to say, “Huh, if we tweaked this, and maybe we can tweak that, we would have a much better experience.”
Doug: Well, I mean that’s a great tip. Great point there. So in terms of making changes to your technology, as you said, you’ve got your existing ESP, whatever it is, whoever it is you’re using, you’ve likely got somebody, a team on staff that’s writing copy and content and HTML, so you’re just really adding a new piece of code into your existing HTML to provide this better experience for your user.
Gretchen S.: Exactly.
Doug: Cool.
Gretchen S.: It’s pretty simple.
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I would say personalization is utterly fundamental and core to any marketer’s strategy. Almost 90% of retail marketers are using personalization today.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Doug: Well, I mean it’s simple for you because this is what you do. I’ve tested it and I love the new technology because it gives that personalized experience, but for a lot of people, as you said, that is still not using the first name, it’s just a great opportunity. And it’s a reason I think for customers, or companies rather, to really look at their database and say, “Am I being as effective as I could be? Is there more data and information I should be collecting from my consumers?” And what I’ve found often is that you don’t need to ask everything upfront. If you’ve got their email and their first name over a period of time if you’re sending relevant content, you can give your subscribers a reason to share more information and continue to enhance your database. So it’s not like a, “Well I don’t have a lot of information, I can’t start it.” It’s like you said, I can start today and then over a period of time I can make it better.
Gretchen S.: You can. You have to recognize that your click-through rate is your click-through rate. And so the number of people who are going to share that information with you is going to be pretty small. It’s hard to do that type of progressive profiling that we call it, getting more information over time, without spending a lot of effort making it happen unless you have a large enough database that that small percentage turns into a large number of people. What works really well though is being smart about the type of questions you’re asking and then using the idea of modeling and lookalikes and saying, “Well these people said that they like red versus green, so I’m going to be able to expand that to this other group of people.” Or making sure that the question you’re asking is so critical and you can get the information from other clicks as well that you just wind up with a fantastic number of data.
Gretchen S.: I know that one retailer did that, their click-through rates went through the roof when they asked, “Which house do you belong to for Harry Potter?” And so anybody who wanted Harry Potter merchandise would certainly turn around and say, “I’m Slytherin or Hufflepuff.” Instead of Gryffindor if they wanted to get that merchandise. Which is great and it’s definitely personalization, but it’s an unusual case. Most people aren’t that willing to offer data on things that are not as important to them as the house they belong to.
Doug: That’s funny. So looking forward to the next six months or maybe beyond, what are you most excited about in this space?
Gretchen S.: I am so excited about seeing more and more people do amazing things that actually change their whole business. It’s very cool to say ask which house you belong to and get better sales on your Harry Potter merchandise. But it’s even cooler to do things that ultimately reduce your call volume to your call center and increase your customer satisfaction just by personalizing when you send information and what people see. And I love those types of stories. I think it’s amazing that we can change so much more than just the incremental revenue on an email and do so much more for the business. And those are the things that really excite me.
Doug: Yeah, I mean that’s a really great point. Like you said, on the front end there’s a better experience for the customer, there are more sales for the company, but on the back end there’s a lower cost for customer service in terms of a call volume, which ultimately is better for the business as well. So I think so much of the time we spend all our time looking at the front end without looking at the backend. And the ultimate goal would be, “Hey, if we could deliver such great service, maybe we wouldn’t need to have a call center for people to phone in.” But I don’t know if that’ll ever happen.
Gretchen S.: That might be a little ambitious.
Doug: So I’ll ask you two more questions and I’ll let you get back to your day. So who is a guest that you think I absolutely have to have on my podcast?
Gretchen S.: So Galina Khorkova is an amazing marketer. She’s done things all-around direct marketing and brand marketing all over the map. She’s incredibly well rounded and just gets what’s needed and brings it to life. So you should definitely reach out to Galina.
Doug: That would be amazing. If you could make an introduction that’d be even more amazing.
Gretchen S.: Sure.
Doug: And then the most important question today is for our listeners who are tuning in and this might be new to them or maybe they’ve had some experience, what’s the best way for them to connect with you and with Liveclicker and get more information?
Gretchen S.: So connecting with me LinkedIn is definitely the best way to do it or I can be reached on email. In terms of LinkedIn, we have a full website and I would encourage anyone who wants to see us in action to request a demo.
Doug: Cool. There you go. So yeah, listeners, if you head over to Liveclicker.com we’ll make sure that this information is in the show notes. I’ve looked at the website, there’s a ton of great information on the website, would highly encourage you to go there.
Doug: So I just want to say, hey, thanks so much Gretchen for taking time out of your day as we’re heading towards the holidays and sharing with our audience.
Gretchen S.: Thank you so much for having me. And enjoy your holidays.
Doug: So there you go, listeners. There’s another episode of Real Marketing Real Fast. I love the dynamic content and I think that’s something if you’re not doing, you definitely need to take a look at it. It’s low hanging fruit. It’s not that difficult to implement. I did some testing, it took less than 30 minutes to be up and running, so I’d encourage you to do that. We’ll make sure that we have transcribed the show notes for you, so head over to the Real Marketing Real Fast podcast, and you’ll be able to download the information there and we’ll make sure we’ve got all the links for Gretchen and Liveclicker there. So thanks for tuning in. We look forward to serving you on our next episode.
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SHARE THIS POST: DELIVER PERSONALIZED CONTENT IN REAL TIME
DELIVER PERSONALIZED CONTENT IN REAL TIME
I would say personalization is utterly fundamental and core to any marketer’s strategy. Almost 90% of retail marketers are using personalization today.
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Get in touch with Gretchen:
- Web – Liveclicker
- Liveclicker on LinkedIn
Find out more about Gretchen:
- Liveclicker on Twitter
Links to other related podcasts and or blog posts:
HOW TO EFFECTIVELY USE EMAIL MARKETING
IMPROVE EMAIL ENGAGEMENT WITH AUTOMATED DYNAMIC CONTENT