Personalize, or perish!
In this short article, I explore the symbiotic relationship between permission and personalization, two once-alien concepts now driving the current state of digital marketing.
In recent years, the concept of permission has risen prominently in the public imagination. In 2018, the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect, and companies worldwide scrambled to become compliant. This landmark set of regulations forced companies to be transparent in their use of personal data, but what changed digital marketing as we know it — was the rule of permission.
Permission-based marketing has since reformed the digital marketing landscape by thrusting autonomy and control back into our hands. At the same time, increasingly data-driven services have provided marketers with ever-more granular insights into the behavior of individuals and societies. These services have enabled them to serve hyper-personalized marketing initiatives at scale, like never before.
According to Accenture Interactive, 83% of us are willing to share data in exchange for a personalized experience. As gaining permission has become a prerequisite to marketing, sustained personalization is becoming a post-requisite to maintaining and growing that permission as part of a successful marketing strategy.
The proliferation of permission-based practices teamed with the need for personalization has given rise to new GDPR-compliant data services. One of them is Cognism, a B2B prospecting tool used by marketers to enrich contact and company records with data pulled from LinkedIn (!) and other publicly listed sources.
We can attribute the growth of Cognism and other enrichment services to a new focus on data quality from marketing teams. Enrichment ensures better, more consistent data enters the CRM, enabling marketers to develop personalized marketing initiatives with greater confidence and success.
Database enrichment also enables marketers to meet user expectations for a frictionless and uninterrupted experience. Conventional methods (used to capture the data required to enable personalization) increasingly do not meet those expectations.
An excellent example of a conventional route to personalization is progressive profiling, where user-submitted data is captured over time (after permission has been granted) through webinars, demos, or document downloads.
There are numerous issues associated with this approach.
- Prompts to engage further with an organization can be perceived as interruptive, motivating users to revoke permission by opting-out.
- Only a fraction of total users will engage with initiatives that require them to submit additional data.
- Users have little motivation to submit accurate information about themselves.
For all of these reasons, the case for achieving personalization at scale by relying on continuous user engagement is a weak one. The case for data enrichment, on the other hand, is a compelling one. Instead of relying on user-submitted data, enrichment enables marketers to source reliable, uniform data from LinkedIn and other publicly listed sources.
TrendWatching is a B2B trend and innovation insight provider, where I’ve worked for the last six years. Renowned for its email newsletter, TrendWatching strives to deliver insightful and inspirational content about emerging trends and associated opportunities into the inboxes of consumer-facing professionals worldwide.
During my time at TrendWatching, I witnessed a significant increase in the volume of subscriptions to their email newsletter as the number of fields on their email subscribe form was reduced.
As TrendWatching’s capacity grew, I also witnessed a shift towards targeted content marketing, an approach designed to serve specific subsets of their wider newsletter audience.
While TrendWatching has gradually requested less user information, they have employed strategies and tactics where success depends on an accurate, informed profile of the user to which they are marketing. This paradoxical approach to growth has been driven successfully by a marketing technology stack including HubSpot and Cognism. Both services have enabled TrendWatching to dynamically enrich their database as they shift towards deeply personalized, account-based marketing strategies.
With TrendWatching’s success in mind, I believe the widespread adoption of marketing technologies offering dynamic CRM enrichment will continue. At the same time, driven by the practices of TrendWatching and others, we will also see tighter integration between service providers like Cognism and HubSpot, as they work together to enable personalized, permission-based targeting at scale.
