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The Marketing Millennials
MARKETING MEDICINE SERIES 👨🏼⚕️| Prescription for Curing Personalization Pains with Carina Pedersen, Sr. Lifestyle Marketing Manager at IPSY | Episode 5
00:34:32
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- [00:08]
Daniel Murray
Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS Marketing Podcast. I'm Daniel Murray and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind Marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the welcome back to another episode in our series, Marketing Medicine. Today we're tackling a common and frustrating problem. You've got abundance of first party data, but data silos and technical hurdles are keeping you from using it effectively for personalization. It's a challenge that leaves marketers feeling stuck and customers missing out on tailored experiences that they deserve. But don't worry, we've got the perfect doctor in the house. Dr. Karina, Senior Lifecycle Marketing Manager at Ipsy. She is here to diagnose the issues and prescribe actionable solutions. Now let's dive into this episode. Okay marketing bestie, I'm going to say something crazy. You don't need more customer data. You have the info. You just don't have the time or tools to actually use it to drive revenue or nurture customers. If that sounds like you, you need to visit Iterable. Iterable is an AI powered platform for marketers that takes first party data and delivers ultra personalized messages for every marketing channel. Without the engineering lift, Iterable's AI features help build personalized campaigns fast, predict what your customers need and fine tune every message for your engagement, cutting busy work so you can focus on being creative. It doesn't matter whether you're using email, text in app, web, OTT or all the it all works together seamlessly. Most importantly, Iterable is super simple. No coding skills needed. No wonder brands like Redfin, Priceline, Calm and Morning Brew all use it to put their data to use. If you want to make your data work for you instead of the other way around, head to iterable.com TMM TMM for the marketing Millennials for helpful resources and sign up for a demo. That's iterable.com TMM Dr. Karina is going to solve a problem we have that a lot of marketers have is we're in an era where companies are collecting more first party data than ever, but they still aren't using it effectively for personalization. There's challenges with that and we're going to talk about the challenges, technical challenges, data silos. But I first want to ask you Dr. Karina, why is it beneficial for companies to start investing in building up personal marketing campaigns?
- [03:08]
Dr. Karina Patterson
Yeah, definitely. One thing we are seeing is overall across all marketing efforts Marketing trends are evolving more towards enabling customers to deliver more relevant messages. I'm going to restart that. Marketing trends are evolving more towards delivering more relevant messages to customers. You know, the age old question and the age old prompt that many marketers across different industries hear all of the time is making sure the goal is to deliver the right message to the right customer at the right time, using the right channel. So that's the many different factors to consider when you're thinking through your strategy. The fact of the matter is, now more than ever, we live in a world that's much more data centric and technologically advanced than the generations before us. And we're starting to notice our customers actually expect brands to craft and customize personalized messages to them and what their needs are and what their wants are. They kind of set the tone with brands like Amazon and Spotify, et cetera, that have really raised the bar in delivering these sort of crafted, personal, personalized experiences to consumers. And so having had a little taste of that, many customers then apply that and really expect to see that with all brands that they interact with. So you kind of have to raise the bar and meet customers expectations there. The good thing is, effectively personalized campaigns are an incredible way to build brand trust and loyalty with your customers. If you're able to execute it properly, your customers will feel like your brand actually understands them and what their needs are and what their wants are, which can translate into impacting your business. KPIs for example, increased customer engagement, maybe lowering your acquisition costs, translating into higher conversion rates and even having better brand loyalty.
- [05:26]
Daniel Murray
I'm glad because a lot of marketers actually think that personalization is just using first name and that's personalization. But as we know, I like how you stated that these other companies, and especially for like B2B and also E commerce, like some companies set the bar so high for us as marketers. Like you said, Amazon and all these companies doordash where they have all these personalized recommendations, all these personalized things. And we're not saying that you have to be that, but people want to have things tailored to them they don't want to be getting. If I'm a guy, I don't want to get like woman makeup served to me. I want to get what I want. And if you're a woman you can get something different. Or if you're interested in tennis versus interested in this, you can get different. So that's why it's so important to collect these first party data stuff. But we'll talk about some challenges when it happens, if you collect too much and you don't know where it is. But I want to go into the next question for you is talking about challenges. What are challenges? What are the challenges that impact marketers ability to personalize messages for their users?
- [06:43]
Dr. Karina Patterson
Yeah, I definitely think that marketers can face lots of headwinds when trying to get started on building out like a really hyper personalized experience or campaigns like with their customer base. In my opinion, I feel like better personalization is always driven by really good data. We kind of need effective and easy ways to collect, to prepare to activate the data that our businesses has to be able to convert and craft that into relevant marketing messages. So it kind of is like that's where we need to start. And I think that's where some problems and challenges like also tend to arise. I have two that I want to talk about today. The first one that I've seen kind of like across many different industries and many different types of brands is not really having proper data enablement. Basically what that means is the data that you have needs to be accessible, usable and valuable to your marketing team. If your marketer is going to craft a relevant personalized campaign, they really need to have the information about the user that's going to give them insights about like what type of content is going to resonate most with that customer. So one thing that I do think that can prevent teams from accomplishing this is if there are data silos in your organization, meaning different teams have access to different data sets or there's data, different data dispersed across like multiple different platforms and kind of prevents your company from approaching your marketing in a cohesive and omnichannel way. Making sure that everybody has access to the same type of data. It's really important to keep in mind like proper data hygiene, making sure that your data is not error prone or inaccurate, that it's like correct, and that you're able to like really leverage that and activate that in the campaigns that you're crafting. One thing that goes into that is yes, having proper data hygiene, but also the processes and regulatory systems in place to make sure that you do have proper data hygiene. Something we call data governance. And these are typically owned by your technical partners and the teams in your org that manage the data and own the data. But are rules that are designed to ensure that your organization's data is accurate, it's secure, it's accessible and used appropriately throughout the customer lifecycle that ensure what marketers get is accurate and accessible. Really important for Marketers to be able to have confidence in the data that they have. There's nothing worse than receiving a campaign and building out a strategy and realizing that it's not relevant at all to your customers because it's incorrect. So that's definitely like a foundational piece to keep in mind and maybe facing some headwinds if you don't have like the proper data hygiene or data governance in place. Obviously as a marketer you don't really own these types of things, but it helps for you to like kind of take ownership and be proactive and make sure that you have a generalized system understanding so that you can influence and advocate for your needs across like different departments. So that's like one challenge that I've seen like across the board. What do you think about that?
- [10:21]
Daniel Murray
Yeah, yeah, I think, I mean that symptom, especially for marketers when they are using a ESP or marketing automation like that. Marketing automation has to have that data delivered into the fields that you want those fields to have. So if you don't have a good data governance data taxonomy, you are, you need to have that data fed for for example like your email campaigns or text message campaigns or ever like you need them to be formatted the right way and also formatted how that system will accept them. Because sometimes if you have data the wrong way the system won't accept them or if they put it populating in the wrong field. So it is so important to like set up a good data governance and data taxonomy at the beginning before starting to collect all this first party data. I also think having one source of truth is a big thing. I think a lot of people have too many sources of truth. And what I mean by that is like they will have something maybe in their salesforce or they may be in the interval and then they'll have it in another place and in another place, in another place and another place. And you just. I found that like having a data warehouse that pumps into an interval or pumps into something where you can feed data from multiple places from one place to multiple places is the best way to do it. And because that will keep your data consistent if you have one source of truth of data.
- [11:53]
Dr. Karina Patterson
Yeah, I 100% agree with that. And I think that's one of the challenge with having data silos where you don't have that single source of truth. You've got different sets of data coming from different places or they're not cohesive and you don't really know where that single source of truth is that can be A big challenge for marketers to know like, well, which dataset do I, do I like use or how do I get access to that or those types of things?
- [12:25]
Daniel Murray
And that causes another symptom too, which is over reliance on having to keep asking data teams and other people to what data should I use? And that slows down campaigns and everything. But I know you wanted to talk about another symptom that and affect this personalization. So you want to go into that.
- [12:46]
Dr. Karina Patterson
Actually like what you brought up is exactly what I was going to talk about next and kind of leads me to sort of the second challenge that I've identified is like marketers not necessarily having the right Martech tools and the technical infrastructure to effectively activate the data that you do have so you can have all the amazing data in the world at your fingertips. But without the right technology and the tools to be able to activate that data and like physically personalize your campaigns, you can face many headwinds in bringing your idea to life and actually bringing it from an idea to like execution and being able to deploy that. So I cannot stress enough like how important it is to invest in the right marketing automation tool and really understanding how the data is flowing in and out of that tool that you use. Like where is that data coming from? Who owns the data that's collected? Are there user behaviors that maybe we're capturing in the back end in the data warehouse as a business that aren't available to marketers in the tools that they use. So really trying to like ask those questions and identify like your setup and are you really set up for success is important. For example, the marketing automation platform that we use at ipsy is iterable many and they actually provide many different solutions to make personalization easier for marketers. Whether that's like building out different data feeds or catalogs to be able to bring in like business level data to like supplement the user behavior data or like the profile attributes that you have or even simply using handlebar logic to bring in different creative into a template. There's many different ways that you can set it up and customize it and craft it to your needs as a team. And like with what data you have available, it really just adds that flexibility that we all want and need to be able to craft the campaigns that we want. Another thing to consider that I always like recommend is do you have the right setup to be able to support personalization with the creative assets. We spoke a lot about like the technical like challenges, but there could also be creative assets because if you're trying to craft like custom experiences like for your customers. Customers. Like what does that look like in terms of like a visual element? Do you need images to be brought in dynamically or like different types of copy? Like thinking through like how your infrastructure is like set up and like if you're able to scale, that's important too. So that's definitely something to consider. And one other thing that I thought of that that might also be helpful is do your martech tools communicate with each other effectively? Like let's say you're running a personalization model on products on your website with a third party tool or a third party vendor, are you able to send that information elsewhere? Like maybe your marketing automation tool. You kind of need seamless integrations between all of the systems that you're using across like the company and making sure that that's a requirement if you're moving in that direction to really like look into when you're evaluating your martech stack. The good thing is most martech tools nowadays are developing features to help marketers accomplish this. Like we know that personalization is such a hot topic right now and like being able to craft those like really, really relevant messages for customers, that's like a need all marketers have. Like across any type of industry. It's not just limited to like one type of company or one type of industry. From CDPs to marketing automation platforms to even third party vendors whose primary function is to make personalization easier. There's all this available at your fingertips and it's really about finding what's the right fit for you and setting your team up for success with what your goals are as a company. The one thing to keep in mind is when you're evaluating all of this is making sure it's like the tools that you have are marketer friendly and self serve kind of speaking to like, the observation you made earlier is not having to rely too much on your technical partners for support and making sure that the platforms and the like tools that you use enable marketers to be able to go in and be agile and like adjust things and have that flexibility without like too, too much reliance on like their data teams or engineering teams or technical partners because that can lead to bottlenecks down the road.
- [17:42]
Daniel Murray
We all know you should personalize customer experiences, but actually doing it across every channel. Good luck. Thankfully there's Iterable. Iterable uses all of your first party data to talk to your customers across email, sms, in, app, web, Ottawa, everywhere, all your channels, one place seamlessly. Oh, and it has AI insights and features that make you feel like you have a super smart marketing partner that hustles to get things done, personalization done, cross channel engagement, duh. Go to iterable.com TMM for additional resources and sign up for a demo. That's TMM for the marketing millennials. I love that. I like to think about tech, stack and data as like a house. Right. I think a lot of people don't like the foundation of the house is one of the most important things. And then the pipes in the house and the electrical wires are. What do you think about how those data and how things are streaming through the foundation? So if you don't set up your foundation with good martech tools, good pipes that are easy, imagine having like a pipe to the toilet that you can plunge yourself because you needed something every single time. Or imagine like to do, you need to do something really electrical to get lights on every single night. You it would be a pain to live in the house. The same as like marketing things are going to feel seamless. Like when you walk into a house, electricity works, plumbing works. Those are just table stakes now. So. But you need to have the right partners in the room. Like you said, marketers, data people, all these people to make decisions, to be like, is it marketer friendly? Is it do, will it work without data infrastructure we're doing right now, do I know how to use these tools? Are they hard to use? And all these things that you were saying are such good things of foundation because otherwise you're putting duct tape on a house and it will eventually fall. And before you get into the scale of a business, you need to not keep putting duct tape on every single level. So I love those. The two things you said, the data silo problem, how to think about data silo, and then also like having a foundational good marketing tool. Those are the two symptoms of what happens when things can go wrong with personalization. But I want to go into some treatments for this. Like what? What are some effective ways marketers could leverage first party data when building more personalized campaigns?
- [20:38]
Dr. Karina Patterson
Yeah, my prescription for these symptoms that we've just talked about is one thing I always like to do when I'm thinking about building out a more personalized campaign or like how I want to approach this problem is I have a framework that I use that kind of like set myself up for success. It's a four part framework. So I'll walk you guys through that right now. The first thing I like to look at is, okay, number one, what's the goal that I have and how am I going to measure success with it? So this is really thinking through what are the KPIs that are going to be impacted from running a campaign like this? Making sure I'm thinking through also that my goals have strategic alignment with my company's objectives as well. Because the work that I'll be doing and the campaigns that I'm building out and the personalization that I'm hoping to bring in, ultimately it should ladder up to what is your company trying to do or like the metrics that your company is trying to like impact at that moment in time. And it's a really unique opportunity for you to take what your company's unique value proposition is and then use the data that you have to then like enhance that and make it more relevant for the customer. So kind of thinking through, like, what's the problem? Like, how can I, how can I like change a customer's perspective? And like, what do I need to get that set up? The second part I think through is obviously what data do I need to personalize this experience? So we talked about data a lot already, but kind of thinking through like, what is it that I, that I'm hoping to accomplish, like with this initiative or this campaign? And really like talking to my tech partners about like, what do we have available versus like maybe what do we still need that we don't already have, like available and kind of thinking through that, listing out, listing that out in the framework. And then the third part is once you've identified like what information you need, okay, what is the structure of that data that I need? Like, how am I going to ingest it into my like marketing automation platform so that I can like effectively leverage it and my marketing campaign? Is it something that's like user behavior triggered, like that's going to come through maybe in an event, or if it's something that lives on the user profile that's descriptive about that customer, like, what is the structure going to be? Do I need to like activate business level data in addition to user level data? Probably going to need like a data feed or a catalog or something like that. Really thinking through, like, how am I going to structure it? How am I going to set it up and make sure like I'm set up for success when I'm like ready to go and like launch this? And then lastly, like the fourth part of the framework is how do you bring it to life? What's the impact that it's driving? Really making sure that you're Going after initiatives that are going to like move the needle in a significant way and like help enhance like the overall customer experience and journey that you've crafted. That it's like matches and like fits into all of that. And then really like making sure you're sizing it and that it is going to drive and like accomplish the impact that you're trying to reach. And who's going to help you get to that point too? Like what other like partners or team members do you need to help to help facilitate that? One example I can provide is like maybe let's say you've identified an opportunity like on your website you've noticed that a lot of traffic is going to like a certain page of your site and a lot of people are like browsing that site, adding products that you have to their cart. But there's a big friction point there where customers are like adding items to cart but maybe not like checking out and you've identified there's a huge drop off in the funnel there. Well, what can I do to help improve that experience? Both for the customer to give them that little extra nudge, but also for the business to help increase like conversions and like revenue and thinking through like, okay, maybe I need like an add to cart campaign. Okay, the KPIs for that is like helping improve revenue. It's strategic alignment for like helping us like grow that part of the business. Okay, what data do I need to personalize that campaign? That's a user behavior that I'll probably want to like have passed to me in real time in the form of an event. And then lastly like okay, what are people adding to cart? What are those like products that they're getting and that they're interested in and have shown intent for? I kind of need like something like maybe a data feed or a catalog to help like tie that business level product data back to like that action and then I'll be able to like launch the campaign.
- [25:51]
Daniel Murray
I think it's important to think about because I think when also people think about campaigns also they think about let's do this one off big holiday promotion for example. But campaigns could be these trigger based things where the same the event you want to collect is their birthday and you want to trigger an email on their birthday with a discount code. And maybe you've seen products that they've searched before so you have that data. But it's so important to know that hey, one, are we collecting this data or should we be collecting these data points, these specific data points? Two, if we're going to craft this campaign. Can we do that level of personalization or not? Are we collecting that data? Should we talk about collecting that data? And it also helps marketers not over promise what's actually going to be. If you know that like you can go. You sound like a way smarter marketer to be. Hey, actually we're, we're, we haven't been collecting this data for a year. Nobody has talked about this as a whole brand new initiative we want to do but we should start now and we should start collecting birthdays. We should start collecting. So I get what is that discount code we want to use? And that's a campaign that ultimately you said has a KPI which is I want people on their birthdays to check out and buy X, Y and Z. So it's going to drive revenue. So I think it's so important to think about all these trigger based things that you could do to increase revenue or increase retention in the product or and have a goal with those things. So thanks for breaking down that framework. Is there any other things you want to leave with us that we should be thinking about when it comes to personalization?
- [27:45]
Dr. Karina Patterson
Yeah, definitely. Personalization is so much more than just like dynamic content like in the body of a campaign. You can kind of like think about it like really holistically of all the different ways that you can reach your customers effectively. You can think through like what channels you want to reach them on. Like what's going to be more relevant or like what type of a customer is it that they're going to respond to. Maybe an email versus like an SMS versus like a push. If you have that type of like omnichannel like strategy set up. Obviously you can bring in like personalize the campaign itself through dynamic content like in the actual like visualization of it. But another way as you mentioned Daniel, is to like customize it based off of like certain subsets of a broader audience. Like is it based off of like a behavioral trigger or something that like a user has done in reaction to like your brand under your website that you'll want to follow up on. That's an example of a personalized strategy or thinking through your segmentation of who's more likely to do what based off of their user attributes or who they are as a customer and potential shopping habits. One thing that my mentors and advice that I've been given over the course of my career is really think through and go after the low hanging fruit first. That's like available to you. That's also Going to give you a high impact. Like if you're looking to just get started somewhere and really think through like what's going to move the needle in a significant way and that'll help you lay the groundwork for success and really prove to your leadership that yes, it's worth like investing in building out like the infrastructure that we need to be able to facilitate marketing personalization in a marketer friendly way. And another thing is just to like really, really be authentic to your brand and your customer. Like take a look at maybe audit like your entire customer journey and look through like, what are we missing? What would be an authentic experience or something that like makes sense for my customer to receive and really take a look at those like instances and opportunities and kind of like build a strategy around that. And it takes time, you know, like this isn't something that's gonna happen overnight. Like Rome wasn't built in a day and it's not like a race, it's kind of a process. So thinking through, if you start just like chipping away in smaller groves like at the strategy and maybe start adding like one to two things like on your roadmap each quarter, like eventually over time, like that impact will compound.
- [30:50]
Daniel Murray
Yeah, I love that. I used to create a, when I was a marketing ops, I used to create a chart of impact level and then effort level and kind of would chart them and say like, okay, this is low impact, low effort. This is low effort, medium impact. This is low effort, high impact. This is high effort, high impact. And then I would have this chart and then I can go to my managers and be like, here are all the things that are like we could do. Like I could spend my time here, my time here, my time here. Obviously you can always put like one or two of the low effort, high impact things in your chart because that's easier. And then you can say, oh, here's a high impact thing, high effort. Do you want me to do these things? But it's good to chart everything out and the way you think about that low hanging fruit and stuff like that. And also I think that people think that when you're doing personalization, you have to do this whole thing all at once. But you could do like a subset at first and say, I want to personalize for these customers first. Oh, this subset first. You don't have to personalize for everybody at once. You could launch that campaign and then go to the next one, and then go to the next one. It's still going to make impact. The impact that's not going to be made is if you're going to wait for all that personalization to happen at one. So just keep pushing away. So I love the low hanging fruit, chipping away on things, having that on your goals. And lastly, where could people find what you doing and you online?
- [32:26]
Dr. Karina Patterson
Yeah, definitely you can find me on LinkedIn. Karina Patterson that's probably the best place to find me. So yeah.
- [32:36]
Daniel Murray
Thank you so much for coming. Thank you for being our Doctor of the day. Solving the Problem of Personalization People have this problem all over. Data problems, technical problems, marketing automation problems, tools, roadblocks. But I think it was a great breakdown of how you can think about it. From problem to hear the symptoms of this problem, to diagnose them, and then the treatment to how to fix it. So thank you for coming on. I really appreciate it.
- [33:09]
Dr. Karina Patterson
Thank you so much for having me.
- [33:13]
Daniel Murray
Thanks so much for listening. Keep tuning in to hear more great insights from the coolest marketers from around the world. If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe and follow the Marketing Millennials podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. And if you like what you hear, I would greatly appreciate you giving us a five star rating. It helps bring more marketers into our.