Personalization remains a top reason to invest in marketing technology. Research indicates that personalization can improve response rates by 3-5 times over generic communication. However, many organizations seem to limit their personalization mainly to the salutation in emails. Personalization goes far beyond that: Increasing sales and customer retention depends on communications that are relevant for local target markets.
Typically, local store marketing tactics supplement a more comprehensive marketing initiative that is owned and managed by a corporate marketing function. While local marketers take on marketing efforts that target local prospects, corporate marketing ensures that many, even thousands of local marketing efforts are consistent with corporate branding standards.
Traditional marketing technologies (email solutions, campaign management, digital asset management, etc.) are not particularly good at meeting the needs of a regionally or globally distributed brand since they are designed for access by an individual group, department, or division. But in a distributed environment, brand communications are owned by corporate and local affiliates, channel partners, or local store owners. Onison provides solutions for regional or global initiatives, such as marketing asset management (MAM) and document localization through web-to-print, variable data printing (VDP), automated cataloguing, and a POS price label editor. Instead of working with rigid guidelines, Onison’s system works with templates that can be automatically tailored for localized marketing automation management (LMA). For example, products can be changed, which information will be automatically populated, and then edited by the local users within strict standards. For example, users cannot change elements that are part of the corporate brand standards. Thus, the local and regional resources have autonomy exactly where they need it while the brand consistency can be fully controlled.
Efforts to control brand consistency can inadvertently stifle or slow marketing innovation, causing eight out of ten local marketers to invest in their own agency relationships, marketing technologies, and resources. However, the old and slow working methods face a number of challenges:
Top performers show an affinity for engaging local target audiences via digital media as it is scalable, cost effective, and immediately measurable. They are eight times more likely to invest in localized marketing automation management (LMA) with campaign template capabilities. Top performers are also four times more likely to work with corporate approved templates for their marketing materials than everyone else. Almost all of the top performers (94%) allow their local marketers to adapt marketing materials using dynamic templates.
Since marketers need to find new ways to allocate their constrained marketing budgets more effectively, local marketing automation management (LMA) has very high rate of return. LMA can deliver a multiple of activities for customer acquisition and retention at the same cost, or it can drastically reduce cost by eliminating marketing duplications around the globe.
In order to improve personalization efforts, marketers can economically upgrade their technology infrastructure to Onison’s platform designed for distributed marketing initiatives without having to commit to upfront investments. This will help your organization to drive customer engagement strategies through local affiliates who know their target audiences. The distributed marketing environment will lead to an improvement in campaign cycle time and thus to a competitive advantage. Approvals through emails can be 9-10 times slower than utilizing Onison’s workflow tools.
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