My favourite brand is SuitSupply, because they provide me with a smart, personal and consistent experience, delivered via WhatsApp - my channel of choice. (You can view a short interview with their Marketing Director at the bottom of this article...) 

It takes the stress out of shopping, and I’ve yet to receive a recommendation that doesn’t fit my style. And as a CMO, I know that perrsonalised customer experience has never been more crucial for brand success. But today, many companies still rely on segmenting their customer base into different groups, rather than offering true personalisation. 

Segmentation on its own is static – it can’t address the changing needs and preferences of customers. As marketers we need to identify the evolving preferences and behaviours of our customers in order to continually provide them with the very best experiences and increase their engagement with our brand. However, this isn’t something the marketing department can typically achieve by itself: it needs to collaborate closely with the IT department and CIO. 

Here are two points for every business to consider:

Modern marketing campaigns are also tech campaigns

Today, marketing goes hand in hand with technology. Anyone who works in marketing can tell you how the marketing team relies on back-end, automated processes and data analysis to ensure a campaign runs smoothly and delivers maximum impact. What can sometimes be forgotten is that all of this technology is managed by the CIO. 

Having a single view of your customers is critical for achieving a personalised marketing campaign because only then can you offer the right promotion at the right time to the right person. Marketers need to integrate closely with the CIO’s team to connect customer data across all the different channels and devices they use.

Personalisation requires lots of data

Alongside the single view of the customer, you also need data to personalise and tailor your service and communications based on what you know about the end user. Fortunately this data is readily available thanks to social media, email, web searches, phone and in-store interactions. The volumes of data we’re creating and using now mean marketing and IT must integrate fully to make sure customer data is collected, analysed and distributed across relevant teams quickly and efficiently.

You can read more about how the CMO and CIO can collaborate to deliver personalisation in an article I wrote for The Drum. And below is the SuitSuply interview I mentioned at the start - a great example of a company getting personlisation right.