One to one marketing is a powerful strategy for cutting through the clutter of generalized marketing campaigns and speaking directly to your target audience. In an age of nonstop screen time and endless marketing messages, it can help brands break through the noise and capture the highly competitive attention of consumers.
Consumers delete marketing emails without reading to the end, scroll right past your carefully crafted social media ads, and even ignore your marketing texts. With countless messages to filter through, it’s hard to blame them. After all, it rarely feels like marketing messages are truly made for us – but what if they were?
One-to-one marketing makes this all possible. However, speaking to a segment of one and tailoring your message to a specific person might feel daunting, if not impossible! Fortunately, with the right marketing tools and software, one-to-one marketing techniques are accessible to many marketing teams.
In this article, we’ll review the definition of one-to-one marketing, discuss its benefits, and cover how to create an effective one-to-one marketing strategy.
What is One to One Marketing (1:1 Marketing)?
One-to-one marketing is a deeply personalized and humanized marketing approach in which a marketing team plans their communication strategies according to a segment of a single person. 1:1 marketing is the pinnacle of personalized marketing, and it reaches beyond simply talking to a target audience – it’s about engaging with an individual on a personal level.
Taking a 1:1 marketing approach might mean you add or remove standard steps from your usual marketing sequences, set up individualized calls, or send personalized videos based on specific feedback. In order to successfully implement a one-to-one marketing strategy, it’s critical to get to know each prospect and deeply understand their needs, their pain points, and their preferred communication styles and mediums.
While all one-to-one marketing is deeply personalized, it’s important to note that not all personalized marketing is one-to-one marketing. Simply adding a first name to your marketing emails doesn’t constitute one-to-one marketing. Rather, one-to-one marketing necessitates careful listening to identify and acknowledge an individual’s unique needs and preferences.
1:1 MarkSg Example
One-to-one marketing is all about returning to the human aspects of marketing and communication: face-to-face conversations, active listening, and personalized messages. As such, personalized videos customized to each recipient are a great one-to-one marketing example.
As powerful as 1:1 marketing is, many marketing teams don’t have the bandwidth to sit and record a unique video to email out to every person in their audience. This necessity for unique content is part of what makes one-to-one marketing stand out: not every brand is doing it, because it’s not as accessible as simply sending out a mass email.
However, with the right AI video generator, even small marketing teams can create personalized videos to include in their one-to-one marketing flows.
Enter Tavus. Tavus is a personalized video software that uses AI to create thousands or even millions of custom videos based on one video template. Within each set of videos, you can choose the customizable fields where you wish to personalize your message.
Do you want to address the recipient by name? Ask about a past purchase? Provide a custom offer? The customization opportunities are limitless.
The platform’s technology means you can quickly scale your video marketing strategy. User-friendly integrations with top marketing and sales software like Salesforce, Hubspot, Mailchimp, and more allow you to automate the entire process on your end while still creating a personalized, human experience for your prospects.
One-to-One Marketing Benefits
Engaging in one-to-one marketing offers unique benefits that are difficult to generate through generic marketing strategies. Some benefits of 1:1 marketing include the following:
Increased customer satisfaction and retention
When customers and leads feel seen and heard, they’re more likely to stick around. A whopping 90% of U.S. adults find personalized marketing appealing. Receiving 1:1 outreach can make a prospect feel like one in a million–instead of one of millions.
Higher engagement
It’s much less common to outright ignore someone when they reach out to speak with you one on one than to ignore a mass email in your inbox. One to one marketing opens the door to genuine conversation, and leads respond well to the invitation to share their thoughts and needs.
A study found that the majority of consumers are willing to share their information with brands in order to receive more relevant messages. Generate higher engagement from new and current customers with one-to-one marketing.
Boosted revenue
1:1 marketing allows marketing teams to directly address the pain points and needs of each customer. When customers can clearly see how your product can help solve their problems, they’re much more likely to make a purchase, leading to higher revenues for your business.
Efficient marketing spend
This highly-tailored approach means your marketing team can stop wasting time and money marketing the wrong message to the wrong target audience. Improved targeting efforts mean more efficient marketing spend and even reduced costs over time.
Better customer data
The two-way conversation made possible by the one to one marketing approach means that your team can collect much more in-depth customer data at every step. Improved customer understanding and more robust data about your prospects will facilitate meaningful cross-selling, upselling, and retargeting efforts for the future.
Tapping into the data you collect through one-to-one marketing can make it easier to sell your high-ticket products and increase customer lifetime value.
Loyal customer base
One to one marketing doesn’t only benefit you and your bottom line, it also benefits your customers. When you deliver tailored experiences and solutions that respond directly to their needs, your customers will see you as the powerful solution you are.
Highly personalized and humanized content, recommendations, and promotions will bring your brand to life and make your customers feel as though they’re communicating with a friend, not a faceless business. This feeling of connection will make it easier for them to keep coming back, referring you to others, and leaving those coveted positive reviews.
In fact, video marketing statistics suggest that seeing a friendly face goes a long way in customer retention and loyalty: personalized videos are 35% more likely to retain viewers.
Although there’s extra effort involved in formulating a 1:1 marketing strategy, this approach is well worth the work.
How to Create an Effective One on One Marketing Strategy
Enhancing the human connection in marketing is a powerful strategy, but creating a 1:1 marketing strategy also requires careful planning so you can find exactly the right approach for every member of your audience.
1. Research and Gather Customer Data
In order to properly execute an effective one on one marketing strategy, you need data and lots of it. Getting to know your customers and your marketing audience thoroughly is the only way to tailor your marketing choices to them in a meaningful way.
Consider the following methods for conducting audience research and gathering customer data:
- Send questionnaires and surveys to current customers with an incentive like a discount code to generate responses. Include questions about what they value about your products or services, how they prefer to communicate, and what they’d like to see more of.
- Ask for feedback in an anonymous format through a web form you can send via email or post on your website.
- Drill into the data on your social media followers and viewers, collecting demographic information and key audience metrics.
- Conduct informal discussions with current customers whenever possible, such as at the end of process calls or customer service interactions.
- Facilitate formal focus groups.
- Post polls on social media.
The more you know about your customers, the better you can cater to their individual needs. Remember that research and data collection is an ongoing effort, and you can and should revisit this step even after you’ve begun to implement this marketing strategy.
2. Create Customer Profiles
The more detailed you can make your customer profiles, the better. This profile will shine a light on the best next moves in your marketing strategy. Especially as you integrate tools that can predict user intent, categorize short-term behavior, and personalize your messaging for each customer profile, these buckets become extremely valuable.
3. Customize Your Content
This is the time to customize your content and approach to best fit the needs of each audience member. From custom offers to specific mediums, customizing your content to each prospect or customer goes a long way.
For example, if you collected feedback about a product via survey, you could send a thank-you video message to everyone who filled out the survey, addressing them by name and the issues they called out. Then, you could address the overall survey findings and state your action plan for meeting customer needs.
In the Tavus platform, you can generate thousands of personalized videos with multiple variable fields after recording just one version of the video. Use these customizable fields to address your customers by name, state their top concerns from the survey, and outline your service plan for their specific concerns.
4. Analyze & Adjust
Just like any other interpersonal relationship, one to one marketing relationships will grow, change, and evolve. Making time to analyze outcomes and adjust your approach periodically is crucial for ensuring an organic and meaningful customer experience at every step of the way.
Even with every new tool on your side, you can’t always predict the way a customer will respond to a message or engage with a campaign. Effective one-to-one marketing involves listening and pivoting when necessary. Through consistent adaptation, you can create a marketing strategy that feels responsive and human, strengthening relationships with your audience and building a loyal customer base.
Improve Your One-on-One Marketing Strategy
Though it requires ongoing testing, careful planning, and a thorough understanding of your audience, one-to-one marketing is certainly worth the extra effort. By humanizing and personalizing your marketing efforts and speaking directly to your audience members, you can transform your marketing results and your entire business.
Plus, with a one-to-one marketing tool like Tavus, all this effort is significantly reduced. With AI lip-syncing and voice cloning technology, Tavus can take one recorded video and personalize it for thousands (or millions) of audience members.
Put a friendly face behind your messaging and watch what one-on-one marketing can do for your bottom line.