Personalization Pitfall 3: Customer Message Overload

In this series, we cover the common pitfalls all marketers face at some point when scaling personalization in their triggered marketing. From emails to mobile push notifications to SMS to display retargeting, the common platforms used today to market across channels begin to lose efficacy when organizations try to personalize their communications to an ever more complex and growing customer base.

Overcoming the Message Overload Pitfall

Watch this video to learn more about this subject from Brian Monahan, former CMO of Walmart.com 

When you build out your company’s personalized marketing landscape you soon find your volume of messages increasing exponentially. As you set up re-engagement campaigns along the customer journey, the volume of messages across all channels can quickly add up to 10 or 15 different messages. Of course, that doesn’t mean you send them all 10 of these messages in one day or even a week. Customers feel overwhelmed if their inbox is flooded with one particular company emailing them again and again. Message overload is a sure way of ending up in your customer’s spam folder or worse, unsubscribing from all your communications. This rapid deluge of communications to your customers is our pitfall #3.

Don’t Be Annoying…

Finding the balance between quality and quantity will save marketers from those dreaded mistakes of sending a customer too many messages in a day. But how do you make sure you aren’t sending to many messages across all your channels?

The way to achieve message zen is by smart segmentation of customers who fit a certain criteria based on their attributes and behavior on site. Behavior-based marketing resonates better than single trigger marketing because it tends to be more accurate rather than an in-the-moment action or even sloppy demographic focused bucketing. Grouping together customers who have shown similar behavior and sending a set of targeted messages that are personalized to their persona is a controlled way of using triggers on your site.

Think Beyond the Inbox…

“don’t simply focus on the amount of messages you send per channel, look at the aggregate of ALL of your messages sent through all of your channels”

Another way of working around the message overload problem is to build and monitor multi channel campaigns. Marketers constantly compete for inbox space along with numerous other brands. When’s the last time you looked at your inbox and didn’t feel like you were being yelled at by dozens of brands? A quick reminder to complete your purchase and checkout can easily be done via text message or push notification – abandoned cart campaigns are not simply just an email tactic. Dividing your messages across different channels can keep your brand name top of mind and limit annoying your customers. And remember, don’t simply focus on the amount of messages you send per channel, look at the aggregate of ALL of your messages sent through all of your channels. Otherwise, you still run the likely risk of annoying your customers with message overload.