While personalisation can be very effective with lead generation, over-personalisation can end up doing your campaigns more harm than good. Is it possible to over-personalise, though, and why is that such a bad thing? To understand why over-personalisation can drive leads away, it helps to remember that moving leads into and through the sales funnel is a process. Each step of the funnel is designed to take leads through to the next step. The idea is to nurture a relationship of sorts, helping leads connect to your brand and encouraging them to conversion at the bottom of the funnel.
With that in mind, it helps to think about relationships in the non-digital world. When salespeople get you on the phone and seem to know far too much about you, using your name in every sentence, it can very quickly seem creepy. Likewise, it is equally off-putting when you are at a networking event and you are given a very obvious sales pitch by someone you do not know who is focusing so hard on getting your details that they forget to be human. In lead generation, it is just the same – it comes down to HOW you reach leads.
Avoiding Over-Personalisation in Your Lead Generation Campaigns
Lead generation personalisation is a careful balancing act. Not personalising your campaigns at all can result in generic campaigns that are bland and far too catch-all to achieve much. Going to the other extreme can result in leads feeling pushed or talked into your sales funnel, without feeling a genuine connection to your brand. To strike the ideal balance, here’s what to do.
Keep it simple
Rather than going overboard with the {name} tag and trying to include every single detail you know about your leads, focus on the basics. Consider your target customer and their primary problem. Use buyer personas to personalise according to these problems along with behaviour, rather than focusing purely on demographics and overly specific details. A carefully structured campaign that makes leads feel like you understand their problem and have the solution will be far more effective than one that reads like a shady used car salesman pitch.
Think like a customer
Put yourself in your customer’s shoes for a moment. Using our used car sales example, which scenario would make you more likely to request information: a campaign that uses your name over and over again, shows you the exact cars you had been viewing, prompts you directly to financing enquiries, and uses language that seems overly personal or one that suggests similar cars within your selected price range, provides a side-by-side comparison of each car, gives some FAQ, provides contact information, and ends with a signed note from a specific salesperson? If the email in our second example was followed up a few days later with a message showcasing the latest specials or sharing some customer reviews/ratings/testimonials, you would likely feel a lot more willing to make contact than you would after receiving the more pushy message.
Stick to your brand voice
This is where tone becomes important. Lead nurturing content has traditionally been very sales-focused. The days of sales-speak have slowly come to an end, giving rise to multi-channel campaigns that speak directly to leads using language that fits your brand. Simply being yourself as a brand will work far more effectively than having a separate tone and language for your lead campaigns and your other digital marketing campaigns. Use the same voice consistently across all platforms, and you will come across as natural rather than forced. This will also increase your chance of sounding like you are having a conversation with potential leads, talking with them rather than at them.
Improve Lead Generation Personalisation
As we mentioned earlier, personalisation is all about balance. Once you get that balance right, you will start to find it easier to connect to leads on a more authentic level, without being too obvious and driving them away before you’ve had a chance to run your lead generation campaigns.
