Personalization is the process by which a software tool automatically edits a template to better suit the sender or recipient. Contacts are simply not going to open something that doesn't have their name on it but imagine how long it would take to create a unique template for every contact. One of the most common ways to do this includes personalizing the message to display the recipient's and sender's names. That being said, Personalization goes well beyond just switching a few names around. Personalization can be broadly classified into two kinds-
Partner marketing software with personalization tools can alter a marketing template in a wide variety of ways (from altering text and images, to inserting or deleting sections), based on a wide variety of factors (such as user profile data, contact information or recent activities, or branding guidelines). These sorts of tools have many creative applications when it comes to generating custom content, but the bottom line is: automatic personalization saves time, prevents errors, and improves consistency. Together with templates, they are essential tools for marketing effectively at scale.
Let's take a look at how Partner marketing software with personalization tools can benefit your channel ecosystem. Content personalization for channel sales has three main benefits:
In addition to being essential for managing day-to-day sales, marketing, and customer interactions, personalization plays a key role in co-branding. Co-branding is a joint marketing strategy wherein a company and its partners come together and integrate branding to promote a product or service.
For example in 2019, Cisco and Honeywell came together to create what they dubbed the "OneWireless Network", a collection of devices that would allow one to set up and operate wireless in rugged or hazardous conditions. But of course, creating a product was only half the battle. Once they had a suite of products to sell, they had to create sales and marketing collateral, such as brochures, web pages, and videos, that properly incorporated the branding and messaging of each party.
To make matters even more complex, Cisco maintains relationships with many partner companies that specialize in selling, installing, or maintaining their products and systems, as does Honeywell. This meant that marketing and sales collateral from partners would have to balance the branding and messaging needs of three different organizations. This is a situation where co-branded sales and marketing materials are particularly useful.
However, asset personalization poses an important question to partners and vendors alike,, which is, "to what extent should an organization personalize assets?" Partners typically prefer to function as an individual entity with little importance to individual brands in the house. This can be harmful to brands as it can lead to potential distortion of the brand identity. To avoid something like this to happen to your brand, you have to take the necessary steps to ensure that your channels personalize while maintaining your brand equity and standards. If partners have to create their own materials entirely from scratch, there is likely to be a gap between the corporate voice and the partner voice. While the partners may be authorized to use their vendor's logo or branding elements they may not be aware of all the nuances of the vendor's branding guidelines. This is especially if the channel partner doesn't have a dedicated marketing team or staff. This often results in partners inadvertently damaging the vendor's brand.
Good personalization tools allow a partner to quickly take a cobranded template and modify it to fit their branding and messaging needs without infringing on the branding guidelines of the parent vendor.
Companies and partners alike agree that personalized sales messaging plays a key role in buyer engagement. The benefits of personalized sales communication have been long proved. Personalized messages are better received by prospects.
However, for a corporate marketing division to cater to the sales team's demand for individualized sales and marketing materials on every front becomes challenging, making personalization tools a must-have for any business. Personalization tools with the capability to customize sales and marketing assets automatically, allowing the corporate marketing team to create standardized assets, which will be automatically personalized to reflect the preferences and sales cycle position of the prospect, are a necessity. They help manage lead and customer interactions effectively, at scale and for conducting joint channel marketing activities with one's partners.
Mindmatrix is a leading provider of PRM software, channel partner marketing software and sales ecosystems enablement solutions including partner portal software. Since its inception in 1998, Mindmatrix has been focused on helping companies sell more, faster. A pioneer of sales (direct & indirect) and marketing enablement technology, today Mindmatrix is the only company offering a fully unified platform (Bridge ™) that connects and enables sales (direct & indirect), marketing, alliances and partner ecosystems. Backed by Mindmatrix's innovation and expertise, Bridge expands sales ecosystem enablement beyond its traditional boundaries to cover not just Sales Ecosystem Enablement, but also Partner Marketing and Multi-vendor Solutions Management
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