Marketers have all heard the different stats and figures about the importance of personalisation at scale.
Accenture has found that 91 per cent of customers are more likely to shop with brands that provide offers and recommendations that are relevant to them, while Epsilon has reported
Despite these varying reports, actually delivering personalisation at scale remains a challenge for many marketers.
And according to HubSpot marketing director APAC Kat Warboys, this has created a perfect storm for the use of chatbots.
“When we think about how do we achieve really personal and authentic engagement at scale, I think of things like chatbots,” Warboys told B&T.
“When we’re able to connect them to our CRM, bots become very powerful in their ability to be extremely personalised.”
“From on-site chat, where you can identify if loyal customers has returned to the site and serve up recommendations based on their previous purchase, and even off-site, such as Facebook Messenger with retargeting.”
As well as providing a personalised response, the instantaneous nature of chatbots is also likely to be well-received among customers, said Warboys.
While chatbots use automation to drive customer engagement, Warboys also suggested marketers should be looking at how they can improve their internal workflows using this same technology.
“Out of all departments, marketers use the most automation, and they use it for task automation and content automation,” she said.
“I think we’ll continue to see that as businesses want to get more efficiencies out of their teams, and free people up to focus on more strategic work to find new avenues for growth.”
Social surpasses websites
Warboys was speaking upon the release of HubSpot’s latest State of Marketing report, which gathered data and trends from 1,500 marketers around the world.
Among the key findings was the revelation social media has now surpassed websites as the most widely used marketing channel.
For Warboys, this change showed reflected the improvements to discoverability engines on social media, as well as improved insights and reporting features.
But she also had some more anecdotal insights into why social media is proving so popular for brands at the moment.
“This is more of a personal observation, but during the pandemic when marketers really needed the ability to communicate very fast with their audience, social media was very attractive,” Warboys said.
“So if I myself was trying to find information from brands on their change of services or, how that was going to affect me as a customer, I would often find that social media they would have a post up almost immediately and it would take forever for the website to be updated.”
This is not only a reflection of the popularity of social media as a marketing channel, but also highlights some issues associated with websites.
“Many Content Management Systems (CMS) are still very clunky and quite possibly still require a lot of Dev help just to make simple updates,” Warboys said.
“I actually think that flags a little bit of a problem with most typical CMSs and how marketers still won’t really be able to use that in a way that they need to.”
