An in-depth look at one-to-one marketing

Customer expectations have skyrocketed, and it’s become more important than ever for you to learn more about what your customers want so you can focus on meeting their needs. To do this well, there’s no stronger method than hyper-targeting and practicing one-to-one marketing. With one-to-one marketing, you can build trust with your customers and offer them better experiences.

In this article, we’ll cover:

• What is one-to-one marketing?
• The advantages of one-to-one marketing
• The components of a one-to-one marketing strategy
• How to do one-to-one marketing
• One-to-one marketing channels
• Examples of one-to-one marketing

What is one-to-one marketing?

One-to-one marketing is the practice of personalized marketing content, personalized attributes, and humanizing communications to create unique conversations with individual customers. It can be used to build customer relationships, promote loyalty, and increase sales and brand awareness.

One-to-one marketing can be done through various channels, including email, direct mail, social media, and online advertising. To succeed, it is important to have a well-defined target audience and to create messages that are relevant and engaging. Additionally, businesses need to track customer interactions and measure results to optimize their strategies.

For example, if a marketer is trying to acquire new customers, they’ll communicate with them differently than with someone who’s been a customer for 10 years. And new customer will be presented with content or calls to action designed to build trust.

The value of one-to-one marketing is that it can establish trust between a consumer and a brand. If a consumer is willingly participating in a one-to-one conversation, that can translate to an overall better relationship between a company and their buyers.

The advantages of one-to-one marketing

One-to-one marketing should be a part of any business’s strategies because it focuses on developing personalized relationships with individual customers. And since it tailors marketing efforts and messages to cater to specific customer needs, it’s vital for anyone seeking to truly connect with customers.

It also empowers businesses to think beyond mass marketing and generic messages. That way, they can create personalized experiences for their customers, which in turn leads to increased customer satisfaction, engagement, and higher revenues.

Still, even with those advantages, you need to be sure you apply one-to-one marketing correctly. For example, poor customer targeting can result in a negative customer experience. So it’s crucial to unify your customer data, find the right insights, and then build toward the experiences customers expect.

When you do get it right, one-to-one marketing has a host of benefits for your business.

• Reduced marketing costs. Because one-to-one marketing improves your targeting efforts, you’ll experience massive savings when it comes to resources. You won’t be wasting effort on big brand campaigns that don’t resonate with customers. Instead, you’ll optimize your marketing spend while also improving marketing efficiency overall.
• Increased customer retention. One-to-one marketing provides your customers with the kinds of personalized experiences they’re accustomed to. And when you meet their individual needs, wants, or preferences, you’ll boost their satisfaction — and your retention rates. This increase in customer loyalty means you won’t need to spend much on customer acquisition efforts.
• More cross-selling and upselling. With one-to-one marketing, you can tap into customer data to identify other products or services your customers might be interested in. That way, when you approach them with related products or higher value offerings, they’ll feel like it’s a natural next step, which can have a positive effect on your revenue — and customer lifetime value.
• Stronger customer satisfaction. Because one-to-one marketing is all about delivering custom-tailored experiences to everyone, you can easily personalize recommendations, offers, and content. As a result, you’ll prove to your customers that you value them, which will improve the chance that they’ll stay loyal.
• More referrals. P ersonalization powered by one-to-one marketing will help your satisfied customers feel more confident sharing their love of your brand with others. This turns brand loyalists into true advocates, and when you consistently deliver personalized experiences, you can build a constant referral pool through your current customers.

The components of a good one-to-one marketing strategy

With benefits in mind, you might be wondering what you’ll need to get started with one-to-one marketing. Fortunately, it comes down to three main components — segmentation, personalization, and customization.

Segmentation

Segmentation is crucial for any marketing strategy, but for one-to-one marketing you need to apply it at the individual level. As you do, you’re able to create highly targeted marketing experiences for each one of your customers. This is called hyper-segmentation. To achieve this, you need to divide your customer base into narrow, well-defined segments, based on individual behaviors, preferences, or other characteristics.

For example, a retail company could collect customer data like browsing behavior or purchase history, which they can then analyze to identify specific patterns. Then, with the right tools, they can define more narrow segments, which will help them tailor more relevant marketing campaigns to each customer.

Personalization

To create personalized experiences that resonate with your customers on more meaningful levels, you need to understand and relate to the individual needs of your target audiences. This means you’ll need to go beyond demographics and psychographics, digging into their pain points, challenges, goals, and more.

When you interact with them directly — whether through surveys, interviews, reviews, or social media — you can uncover this kind of information. By doing this, you can start to uncover the insights that will help you shape your products or offerings to better serve your customers.

Say there’s a tech company selling software for small businesses. The company’s team would want to understand the challenges small business owners are up against — like managing cash flow or finding qualified employees — so they can then create relevant content that speaks directly to their needs. That could take the shape of a blog post about improving cash flow or maybe a one-page guide about attracting qualified employees.

Customization

On the surface, personalization and customization might seem like the same thing, but although they’re related, they’re two different ideas. Personalization is about tailoring experiences to meet unique customer needs, while customization is about letting customers make specific choices or adjustments to a set number of options. Personalization is led by the company, while customization is led by the customer.

With customization, customers can tell you what they actually want, which in turn helps you adjust your products or services to each person’s specific needs.

The same tech company from our personalization example would release regular updates based on customer feedback. This would let them address requests for new features and usability improvements. In turn, their customers will feel supported and seen, and they’ll be more likely to stay with that company.

How to do one-to-one marketing

With these components of one-to-one marketing in mind, let’s take a closer look at how to get your strategy going. While plans might differ between companies or industries, there are a few general steps you can take to get started:

1. Decide on your goals.
2. Collect customer data.
3. Create customer profiles.
4. Interact with customers.
5. Determine your customers’ needs.

1. Decide on your goals

As with any marketing plan, it’s crucial that you outline clear goals that align with your overarching business objectives. Think about what you want to achieve with one-to-one marketing. Do you want to boost sales? Improve customer retention? Increase brand awareness? Build stronger brand loyalty?

Whatever your goals are, make sure they’re both clear and attainable. That way, as you start building your overall marketing strategy, you’ll have a clear roadmap to guide you. Plus, the more specific your goals are, the better they’ll inform your experiences.

2. Collect customer data

With your goals in place, you now need the fuel for any great experience — customer data. From demographics and purchase history to website activity and feedback, you’ll need to collect all the data you can from your customers.

But it’s not enough to just collect it. You also need to organize and analyze it to uncover the key insights that will drive your strategy forward. Once you’ve done this, you can start to craft messaging and create content that will resonate with your target audiences. If your experiences aren’t informed by data, they’re much less likely to be effective.

3. Create customer profiles

One major output of strong customer data is detailed customer profiles. These profiles equip you with robust representations of individual customers, all based on their data and the way they interact with your brand. You can use them to collect all the key information, preferences, and characteristics of each customer.

You can also use them to start segmenting your customers into different groups for targeting across your marketing efforts, whether you’re sending a tailored offer, email, or recommendation. These profiles will become especially useful considering one customer will have very different interests from another — but your they’ll help make sure each customer feels just as valued as the next.

4. Interact with your customers

With your customer profiles ready for action, you can start interacting with customers. This is an obviously crucial step for several reasons. First, if you don’t deliver great experiences, your brand will start to wither away. But more specifically, interacting with your customers helps you maintain the cycle of customer insights, while also helping you build relationships and continue personalizing experiences.

Engage with your customers across multiple channels, including email, surveys, social media, customer support, live chat, and more. You'll get even more insights into their needs, preferences, and behaviors, which can help you understand their expectations. You can use this information to continually foster loyalty.

5. Determine your customers’ needs

At this point, you’ll be sitting on a veritable treasure trove of customer information, giving you clear picture of what your customers are telling you they expect.

With all this information, it’s vital that you analyze it all to start pinpointing specific areas where your product or service might be falling short. Then, you can plan ways to adapt or customize your service so that it’s better suited to meet individual customer needs.

6. Adapt and customize your product or service

Let’s get a bit more into the details of adapting your product or service. Using customer feedback to do so is crucial, because if you fail to meet customer needs, they’ll be looking for other products — usually from competitors.

To adapt your product or service, you may consider adding new features, improving existing capabilities, creating personalized options, changing your pricing approach, or continuing to adjust your marketing messages. Ultimately, the goal here is to create a product or service that meets the needs of your customers, so that they’ll always keep coming back for more.

Channels to use in one-to-one marketing

As you build out your one-to-one marketing approach, it’s important to keep some key channels in mind:

• Customer relationship management (CRM). You can use CRM systems to track customer interactions, preferences, and purchase history. This helps you build targeted communications, tailored offers, and proactive customer support, which can improve the overall customer experience and build stronger relationships.
• Website. You can use your website to collect customer data through surveys, forms, cookies, browsing history, and more. You can then personalize the website experience, like adding product recommendations. This improves engagement, conversion rates, and overall satisfaction.
• Live chat. You can use live chat to interact with customers in real time. It’s a great way to answer questions, resolve issues, and build stronger relationships with your customers, which helps customers feel valued, as each interaction has the potential to feel highly personalized.
• Email. You can use marketing automation tools to send personalized emails that include relevant offers, tailored customer support, or personalized content that’s based on a given customer segment’s interests.
• Social media. Use social media to interact directly with customers, answer questions, provide customer service, and showcase your brand. You can also utilize most social media platforms’ ad capabilities to create customized campaigns and personalized advertisements.
• Personal interactions. Personal interactions like phone calls, in-store visits, interviews, or face-to-face meetings can be highly useful in building strong relationships. By equipping your customer service reps with comprehensive customer profiles, they’ll be able to address specific concerns, provide personalized recommendations, and offer custom solutions to each customer.

Good examples of one-to-one marketing

Here are a few good examples of companies putting one-to-one marketing to work.

Loyalty program

Sephora’s Beauty Insider loyalty program is a stellar example. It implements a three-tier structure, which encourage shoppers to spend money to earn points. The program is free to join, but shoppers can earn more rewards as they shop more at Sephora. As part of the loyalty program, Sephora will also send personalized offers to customers, as well as end-of-year discounts, Beauty Insider Cash, exclusive gifts, and more.

Recommended products

Ecommerce giant Amazon has recommended products down to a science. Whatever product you might be considering on Amazon.com, you’ll come across other products related to the one you’re looking at as you scroll down the page. And often, Amazon will use the data you’ve provided to surface products you would be more likely to buy.

Personalized email

Spotify is globally famous for its year-end Wrapped experience. Each year, the streaming giant essentially regifts its customer data back to users, sending out emails that highlight how many minutes each person used Spotify, who their top artists were, and more. This makes each experience feel extra special.

Get started with one-to-one marketing

At this point, you should be all set to get started with a strong one-to-one marketing strategy. With one-to-one marketing, you’ll be able to build stronger, longer lasting relationships with your customers by using your knowledge of their individual needs to personalize every moment.

When you’re ready to get started, we’ve got you covered with both Adobe Audience Manager and Adobe Journey Optimizer.

Audience Manager turns insights into action. It helps you collect and merge information from practically anywhere, so that you can build intelligent audience segments — to take charge of your experiences and extend your reach further than ever before.

Watch our two-minute product tour or check out our website to learn more about Adobe Audience Manager.

And with Journey Optimizer, you can manage scheduled campaigns and one-to-one moments for millions of customers — across all channels. Journey Optimizer helps you intelligently and quickly determine the next best interaction, so that you can create and deliver both scheduled marketing campaigns and tailored individual communications. All within the same application.

Get a free demo to learn more about what Adobe Journey Optimizer has to offer.