How to apply 1:1 personalization to the 4 Ps of marketing

The 4 Ps of marketing have been around for decades and are still relevant today. Product, place, price, and promotion provide a framework for marketers to build their strategies around. With the advancement of technology, it’s time to update your strategies and cash in on contemporary capabilities.

Automated 1:1 marketing personalization enables you to customize your messages and content to specific customer segments in real time. It presents growth opportunities that weren’t possible even 10 years ago. By combining the 4 Ps of marketing with automated marketing personalization, you can create more effective, targeted campaigns that resonate with your audience for a major positive impact on your bottom line.

Let’s learn how to organize today’s Martech capabilities within this classic paradigm.

4 Ps of marketing

In marketing, what are the four Ps?

• Product — The product is the offer — what a business produces or provides to satisfy customer needs. Product, as it applies here, includes both tangible and intangible items such as goods, services, experiences, activities, events, digital products, ideas, knowledge, and information.
• Place — As the distribution channels used to get a product or service to the consumer, place includes physical and digital locations, such as retail stores, websites, and marketplaces. Place also involves activities that make the product or service available for use or consumption by the end user.
• Price — As the cost of the offer, price is one of the most important elements of the marketing mix and can have a significant impact on a company’s profitability. Price is determined by the cost of production, competitors’ pricing, and the target market’s ability to pay, paired with their desire for the offer.
• Promotion — As the communication strategy that a business uses to reach the target audience, usually via advertising, promotion is how the company informs, persuades, and reminds potential customers of the offer. It helps to think of promotion as an invitation, either to an actual sales event or to the desired outcome of an offer.

Today, the 4 Ps framework gives you another way to think about automated 1:1 personalization.

1. Product

First, how does automated 1:1 personalization impact the product? Product falls into the personalization pool many times. To personalize marketing in its most fundamental form, you can either offer your market the opportunity to customize a product or you can tailor an offer.

For example, Mixtiles lets customers upload their own images and customize sizing and framing for photo products. You can also customize product options — countless products across various brands come with size, color, and or material variations, giving customers the option to make something their own, and all of this is 1:1 personalization. You can personalize product recommendations based on a shopper’s browsing or purchase history, or brand affinity (the shopper’s favorite brands). In fact, one of Cordial’s email marketing clients delivered two automated campaigns with brand affinity scoring alongside new arrivals and low-in-stock messaging to earn an additional $14.9 million in one year; these campaigns generated an average order value of $290.

In this way, you can apply personalization to recommendations, new arrivals, back-in-stock, low-in-stock, and buy-again orders, all focused on the product as it falls under the 4 Ps. In its simplest form, to apply 1:1 personalization, you could just give your customer the option to get a notification when an offer they are interested in is available.

Patagonia allows shoppers to request availability updates on their “out of stock” product pages. Those who opt-in enter into a list segment on a per-product basis. When the item becomes available again, it triggers a new email campaign and sends a message to the relevant list segment.

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You also could target “buy again” or “replenishment” campaigns to anyone who purchases an item or anyone who writes a 4 or 5-star review (depending on the technology available). These campaigns would either ask the customer to make a repeat purchase or buy a complementary item.

Automated 1:1 campaign types often related to product:

• Recommendations
• Brand affinity
• Back in stock
• Low in stock
• Buy again
• Review request
• Replenishment

2. Place

Next, automated personalization: How does it affect place as it applies to the 4 Ps? Really, you just have to think about where your customers receive their products. Let’s start with the fundamentals — delivery and shipping. After that, we’ll touch on a handful of others.

Personalized delivery automation is huge with offers like DoorDash. Modern delivery services involve personalized marketing 1:1 automation at several touch points. For one, the DoorDash app makes personalized recommendations based on the user’s location and establishments that offer the fastest delivery times. These touch points are most relevant to the place, but DoorDash also uses automation to deliver “buy it again” campaigns, coupons, and featured restaurants.

Where shipping is concerned, automated personalization can complete tasks like cost and service availability estimations based on the customers’ ZIP code. For example, the costs vary across shipping types such as standard, express, or overnight, and by the carrier. Today, a customer can enter their ZIP code in most online stores and instantly see which options are available, how much it will cost, and how many days it will take to receive their order for each option.

Customers can also opt to buy online pickup in-store (BOPIS) and buy online return in-store (BORIS); these are both examples of place options in automated marketing personalization. Personalization enters these similarly to shipping: The customer enters their location or ZIP code and immediately sees where they can pick up or return an item.

Brands like Uber fully personalize the travel experience. Primarily, they offer instant price estimates for a ride from one place to another, based on the user’s current location, travel time, and size of vehicle needed for the commute. The options shown to users are also based on which drivers are available in the area in real time.

Using similar technology, geolocation campaigns can target people in a certain location to receive an offer. Some retailers have used in-app coupons that are triggered when an app user enters one of their stores. Local businesses use geolocation targeting to send ads to people in their region, city, or neighborhood all the time.

You can also personalize weather-based and localized campaigns based on location. This is an inherent feature with iOS and Android smart devices (iPhones seem to believe all new owners are in Cupertino before they configure their permissions). You might employ this type of tech when you want to update customers about poor road conditions, inclement weather, or other hazardous conditions in their area.

Automated 1:1 campaign types often related to place:

• BOPIS – buy online pickup in store
• BORIS – buy online return in store
• Delivery 
• Shipping – Delivery dates/costs based on zip code and rate 
• Travel – customer journey steps during travel
• Geolocation 
• Weather-based campaigns
• Localized campaigns

3. Price

Then, what is the outcome of automated personalization on price? As a rule, you won’t use personalization to change your actual pricing strategy, but you can use it to enhance your audience’s perceived value of an offer based on price changes and available discounts.

Price drop alerts are one example of how this works. Millions of consumers use apps like Honey exclusively for this feature, so there’s no doubt price drops are a factor in purchase decisions. If you can integrate price drop alerts into your marketing strategy, you’ll be one step closer to higher earnings.

Personalization can also strengthen your marketing through limited-time, personal, and upsell offers. If you deliver these types of campaigns with an air of exclusivity and base them on previous purchases and behaviors, they will have more impact. For instance, New York Times’ free, personalized subscribers are twice as likely to become paying subscribers.

Automated 1:1 campaign types often related to price:

• Price drop alerts
• Limited time offers
• Personal offers
• Coupon codes
• Upsell campaigns

4. Promotion

Finally, how is promotion influenced by automated personalization? Email and social media are two of the best channels for promotion. So, let’s talk about how successful brands use them for this purpose.

Welcome messages come in all flavors but are best served with a dash of personalization. Of course, if you know the target’s name or location, you can include these details in your communications — but today’s automation can go far beyond that. Amplify your welcome experience by tapping into whatever behaviors you’ve already learned from the customer, whether recommendations based on browsing history or, if they’ve made a first purchase, a personalized offer to incentivize their second purchase.

Customer loyalty and referral programs are other types of promotion that are more successful when personalized for the referrer. Enhance the personalization aspect of your programs with unique referral codes for each customer, different rewards based on the referrer’s purchase history, and discounts or cash bonuses to use toward their favorite products or brands.

Next, you must personalize milestones and personal event markers for them to be effective. So, step one is to track and understand your customers’ behavior. With the information you gather, you can get creative and implement milestone marketing beyond simple happy birthday messages (or you could play on that as Reddit does with their users’ “cake day”).

At long last, consider your win-back campaigns — do they include enough personalization? A tailored approach is crucial when you want to re-engage a customer who hasn’t taken action in a while. Always present offers that are likely to be relevant and appealing if you want to win someone back.

Automated 1:1 campaign types often related to promotion:

• Welcome
• Customer loyalty
• Milestones
• Personal event markers
• Referral program
• Win-back

Takeaway

Recently, automated personalization has improved customer experience in major ways, which has had a positive impact on ROI for many brands. Modern technology makes it possible to implement marketing tactics that were inconceivable even a decade ago. Meanwhile, the 4 Ps framework has been around at least since the 1950s. When united, automated personalization and the 4 Ps are an unstoppable force that you can leverage to power your marketing results.

To see how you can use Cordial to level up your personalized 1:1 messaging campaigns, schedule a demo today.