# Personalization in CRM: How to Make Your Campaigns Stand Out

- Link: https://phiture.com/mobilegrowthstack/personalization-in-crm-how-to-make-your-campaigns-stand-out/
- Published: 2020-12-01T11:09:52+01:00
- Author: Elsa Massoudi Aguilar

![Personalization in CRM](https://phiture.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/personlization-
in-crm-min.png)

_Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Elsa Massoudi Aguilar__. Elsa is a CRM
Team Lead at Taxfix. Originally from Spain, she has more than six years of experience
in marketing, having fully specialized in CRM almost since the beginning of her 
career. Before her role at Taxfix, she has worked for different companies such as
Omio (formerly GoEuro), EuroOne or Adviqo GmbH__._

Open your inbox right now and take a glance at all of the campaigns you get from
your subscriptions. How many of these are _personalized_? In other words, _tailored
to you_? The answer is probably not many.

Day in day out, users continue to be exposed to generic campaigns based on the assumption
that a whole user base is interested in the same products and news. That has a lot
to do, in turn, with the concept of a newsletter: if we look back just a few years
ago, CRM marketing was basically synonymous with newsletters _only_. The newsletter
is, by definition, a generic campaign sent to all of the user base. I don’t wish
to argue that newsletters are bad—not at all. But they serve specific needs, and
aren’t characterized by their level of personalization. Quite the opposite, in fact:
they’re one-size-fits-all. 

The simple truth is this: to make your campaign stand out, you have to personalize
it to the user base you’re sending it to. This may sound like an obvious thing to
say—but the word personalization itself tends to mean different things to different
people. I always find it interesting to hear what people define it as. Some people
tend to think that personalization in CRM is about the messaging (for example, the
content of an email); others think it may refer just to specifically targeted campaigns
that you send to your user.

Personalization is actually much more than that. As I explore in this article, personalization
can also refer to the timing of a campaign, the channel selection, or the audience,
among other variables. To ensure a successful customer experience, as CRM managers,
we need to send the right message to the right person at the right timing with the
right channel. That is personalization.

![personalized campaign from youtube](https://phiture.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/
12/image2.png)

_A great example of a personalized campaign from YouTube, summarizing yearly accomplishments._

### **Why should I personalize my CRM? **

If CRM communications are personalized based on each user’s interests, demographic
attributes, and behavior in the app/website, the chances that the user is going 
to find your communications interesting are way higher. Why? Nowadays, all of us
are exposed to a huge amount of marketing campaigns of all sorts—performance marketing,
CRM, offline, TV, and more—constantly. We all see and interact with marketing campaigns
daily, often without even realizing it.

This constant stream of advertising means all of us are overloaded. We’ve all learned
how to _not _pay attention to ads in general, especially when we receive around 
50 email campaigns in our inbox every day. Why would we open them? First of all,
we don’t have time for that. Second of all, every time we do open those emails, 
they’re totally irrelevant. It’s almost as if we’ve developed a Pavlovian reaction
to bad marketing campaigns, which are often also, frankly speaking, a waste of time.

For all of these reasons, personalization is the only factor that can make a difference
here. By standing out from all the other campaigns, users are being exposed to your
brand by sending them relevant content that makes them open your campaign and engage
with it. At a very basic psychological level, when an email is directly addressed
and tailored to a particular user, they’re more inclined to trust and interact with
it as they would any other email directly addressed to them. It hits a different
part of the brain.

### **How can I personalize my CRM? **

People tend to think that personalization is all about messaging. Truthfully, there’s
much more to it than just that. 

Firstly, it’s important to acknowledge the role of segmentation. In fact, it’s probably
the first step every CRM manager should take when starting to work on a campaign.
Why? Defining segments will help you understand the different audiences within the
user base and identifying what needs each of them has. Based on that, you’ll be 
able to define how each segment should be treated and proceed to create/request 
content, creatives, and designs that work accordingly to each of them in order to
maximize their conversion and performance. 

After that, I think it’s really worthwhile to think about the following four elements
in conjunction with one another:

 * **Timing**
 * **Channels**
 * **Audience**
 * **Campaigns**

Let’s start with **timing.** Take the following example: as a CRM manager, you’re
analyzing a campaign’s engagement and realize that specific segments of users are
engaging more during the afternoon, while some other audiences are engaging way 
better during the early morning. You then personalize your campaign timing based
on your audience. 

The same can happen with CRM **channels**. Some users might be more receptive to
push notifications, while others tend to open emails. You even have another segment
of users that might prefer other channels such as web push. A good CRM manager will
be able to identify what channel is best for each user; it doesn’t make sense to
overload them with campaigns across all the different channels. This is an example
of great personalization based on channels.

**Audience **is an equally important variable. At [Taxfix](https://taxfix.de/), 
for example, we focus on personalization to provide a successful customer experience.
As a fin-tech company that offers tax returns services as the main product, we understand
that we need to assess the needs of our customers differently given that tax information
can vary a lot depending on who you are. A user who is married and has kids has 
totally different needs than, let’s say, a user that is unemployed and single. On
top of that, people have a lot of uncertainty about taxes during normal periods,
let alone during the pandemic, which has seen plenty of our users change their profession
or adapt to another employment method. What we need to assess is their doubts are
at the current moment in a really personalized way. 

Because of that, we’ve become even more customer-centric in our recent **campaigns**,
which leads me to my final point about personalization. As CRM managers, we have
to understand what situations our users are living in, creating the right kind of
campaign to communicate with our users in a way that matters to them—personally 
and sympathetically. We have to help them understand what next steps are needed 
at any given moment. 

Imagine if we were sending pages and pages about all the tax information and use
cases to all our users irrespective of who they were, or their specific labor situations.
Our users would never open those emails. But imagine creating a targeted campaign
to address the exact needs of someone who has just lost his job, or somebody who
is about to switch tax class. The difference is immense.

### **How much is _too_ much personalization?**

Despite all the benefits of personalization, you have to keep in mind one thing:
there’s a very fine line between personalization and creepiness. We all know that
in CRM platforms, there can be a lot of information stored about the user base. 
It’s very important to know how to use it, especially nowadays, when awareness and
concerns about data privacy have only increased.

Let me illustrate this with one example. Let’s say we are an e-commerce company 
that is working on a personalized reactivation campaign for customers that didn’t
purchase in the last six months. There are two main ways the personalization of 
the message can be done:

 1. ** Hey first_name, we miss you! It’s been a while since the last time you visited
    us. That’s why we wanted to give you a 30% discount on your next purchase**

 

 2. ** Hey, first_name, we miss you! It’s been 6 months, 3 days, and 27 minutes since
    you purchased the product \*Green wallet for men of the Brand X\*. That’s why we
    wanted to give you a 30% discount on your next purchase**

This example may seem hyperbolic, but campaigns like this one are unfortunately 
more common than you may think (take a look at the example below). Yes, we all know
all that information will be available in the CRM platform but, as you can see, 
we need to be extremely careful in defining what data is relevant and what data 
is just turning your personalized campaign into a very creepy message.

![An example from Uber of mining data](https://phiture.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/
12/image1-min.png)

_An example from Uber of mining data in a slightly creepy way (1678 days ago? I 
don’t need to know that)._

It’s up to the CRM manager to evaluate what information can add up value to the 
user in terms of personalization and what information will just ruin the whole experience
by scaring the user. 

If you avoid this pitfall, however, and follow the four key steps above, then you’re
bound to create CRM campaigns that stand out. Personalization may seem obvious, 
but if you do it right, it will make a difference in creating resonating messages
for your customers.