Updated on 07/11/2022
CCM personalized communications are undoubtedly one of the most interesting possibilities that companies can take advantage of to grow their business.
In fact, communication through a Customer Communications Management platform is not only an important element to leverage when it comes to growing the business, it is also a new approach that can be used to make the most of a company’s natural assets.
Regardless of the type of communication strategy you choose, two things are fundamental: perfect coordination between the various communication tools and the personalization of the communication itself. As it happens, to obtain both these results, the best solution is to adopt and implement a Customer Communications Management strategy.
The growing role of Customer Communications Management
It is for this very reason that CCM platforms are recognized for their importance by experts and operators in any sector, and increasingly so over the years.
In the beginning, CCM was only used for email and printed communications, or for projects that involved transactional company documents, such as bank statements and invoices, which were considered perfect tools to let consumers know about your products, since these documents are consulted by the vast majority of people and, therefore, can help any company stand out from the competition.
This function is all the more important today given two considerations.
The first is that a company can use many touchpoints to reach a customer (SMS, email, social, etc.) and, therefore, they need to be coordinated in order to ensure a satisfactory and high quality experience. The second is that it is increasingly difficult for a company to make its products known to consumers.
For this, let’s look at some email marketing data. Estimates say that there will be about 347 billion daily emails by 2022, many of which will be sent by companies to consumers.
In both cases, the intersection of these statistics says one thing: there are excellent prospects for email marketing, but we can’t ignore the fact that it’s a widely used tool and that leads to a certain inflation in its use. In other words, if so many companies use email marketing, it means that consumers are receiving an ever-increasing number of emails, and this means that they are inclined to pay less and less attention to the messages they receive, having to choose between what is relevant and what is not.
As the number of messages increases, on the other hand, there is the risk that their effectiveness is reduced, thus wasting both time and resources, as well as a precious opportunity to be relevant to the user. This is an even greater pity if you think that, when it is properly built and implemented, email communication to customers is a useful and effective resource for companies.
Once again, this is supported by the data. For example, according to Mailup’s Statistical Observatory 2021, compared to 2019, there was an increase – albeit slight – in opens and unique clicks (+11% and +13.2%, respectively) in 2020, although the total number of emails sent was about the same as the previous year.
Similarly, there was also an increase in the responsiveness rate, with a +2% change compared to 2019, as well as an increase in opens related to audience type, at an average of around 14%.
Email marketing, therefore, is not dead. Instead, it’s an indispensable tool for various kinds of business activities. The catch is that you need to know how to make the most of it in order to enhance its effectiveness and the potential for positive effects on business. One of these ways is undoubtedly through personalization.
Personalization: a growing trend
It’s been said that personalization is one of the most important factors to build a truly effective customer communication.
Not only that, customers expect personalization from brands and companies: often a customer leaves data and information, but in return he expects to receive a tailor-made experience, completely customized to his tastes, his needs, his requirements.
Similarly, companies must also move quickly towards personalization because the competitiveness of their business depends on it: suffice it to say that as many as 80% of consumers have declared that they are more inclined to buy from brands and companies that offer personalized experiences.
But of course, personalization is not a simple and obvious process. It’s not enough to change a phrase or just use the recipient’s name to ensure the right level of personalization; instead, it is necessary to extend personalization to other elements such as content, timing, design, suggestions, and more.
How can you achieve personalized communication with CCM?
The question is legitimate. Customer Communications Management systems lend themselves particularly well to making personalization more accessible thanks to two aspects.
The first is automation. CCM platforms make it possible for companies to have centralized control over all communications, regardless of the channel where it’s activated. Whether you’re using SMS, email, or other vehicles, the CCM can move autonomously, generating a large number of messages to be sent to different users at different times.
In the same way, the same platforms also guarantee an automated system of reception, collection, and archiving through which communications and documents can be managed more easily, as well as composing different messages that are adaptable to different formats in an original (and automatic) way.
Obviously, the advantage of automation is that it makes personalization more “accessible” also to companies that do not have their own dedicated creative department or that cannot employ the IT team for the realization, refinement, and distribution of contents.
Customer Communications Management enhances data
The second aspect that makes Customer Communications Management platforms a key asset for personalizing customer communication is linked to data.
As already mentioned, every time a user moves on the internet or interacts with a company online, he leaves behind a long and very precious trail of information relating to what he loves, what he buys, how he navigates, what device he uses, and so on.
As the number of interaction channels increases, so does the amount of this data that is “scattered” across the channels and that tells the different characteristics of the users from different points of view. This information is an enormous asset for all companies, regardless of the channel from which it is collected, as it allows us to know the customer in a very precise and accurate way, even depending on the touch point from which it is extracted.
Customer Communications Management platforms can play a fundamental role in this sense, since, thanks to the automation systems they implement, it is possible to collect this data and make it orderly and intelligible.
By exploiting machine learning, CCM platforms can manage large amounts of data, organizing it according to parameters or categories that then become useful for building outbound communications.
Among other things, with a precise collection and cataloging phase, this allows you to have an accurate overview of your customers and allows the company to create communication that is perfectly personalized, if not actually tailored to the characteristics of each individual.
This is also possible because the data available is varied and can be used to get to know even secondary aspects of the consumer, but which can then become central at the time of personalization and relevant to stimulate a certain action.
What can be personalized through CCM?
As mentioned above, all user-related data that is collected online represents the basis on which to build a personalized communication campaign.
The types of personalization that can be done are very different, depending on what data you decide to use.
A first intervention is obviously related to the message: after having collected your customers in clusters, you can engage them by exploiting common interests or topics relevant to their age rather than to their profession, and so on. A second intervention can be based on timing. Each client is in a specific phase of their customer journey and consequently is sensitive to different types of communication.
If the consumer is in the awareness phase, he needs communication that shows him how the company can effectively respond to his specific needs.
On the other hand, if the customer is in a more advanced phase of the customer journey, such as the consideration phase where they are evaluating and comparing various choices, the communication must be personalized to leverage the non-directly functional elements that can make them decide, leveraging heritage, sustainability, reliability, or other intangible characteristics of the brand with high persuasive potential.
Obviously, when we talk about timing, we also mean literally the moment in which to send a certain message, for example just before the conclusion of a purchase or after a few days, in order to awaken the consumer’s interest and restart the experience.
Similarly, you can identify the best time to intercept the user also based on previous actions, building an automated retargeting system that reaches the user with specific communications that take into account what the consumer has previously seen so as to stimulate him to resume the customer journey.
It’s even possible to do a localized retargeting based on certain indicators, so as to create a communication that is integrated and phygital, where the stores or traditional channels acquire new value as tools to approach the customer in an unexpected way.
All of this can happen if there is a base technology that makes it possible to strategically exploit the available data (ordered and made understandable) and, it makes it possible to coordinate these different personalized communications. In other words, a Customer communications management platform that precisely encompasses all of these features makes it possible to build this type of content.
The advantages of personalized communication with CCM
A personalized approach, even in automated communication, has extraordinary advantages for companies. First of all, it has a very positive impact on the business and its development.
Suffice it to say that companies that use a CCM platform register on average an annual growth in turnover of more than 60% and detect a level of customer loyalty that is five times higher than companies that do not use Customer Communications Management.
And, as is well known, a loyal customer is a more enthusiastic consumer, who is inclined to spend more and more often and who, above all, is not “tempted” to go to the competition.
In addition, greater personalization also has a direct impact on the quality of the customer experience offered and, as a result, improves the consideration that the customer has of the brand, which is perceived as closer and more interested in placing the relationship at the center and not just the sale.
This aspect is anything but underestimated, considering how marketing has evolved (digital and otherwise) towards a particularly anthropocentric way of communicating, producing, and selling.
