Mastering personalization: Best practices for effective high-velocity sales outreach with Regal.io
When trying to turn prospects into lifetime customers, online companies often forget the power of a personal touch. In this era when consumers are constantly bombarded with digital ads and emails, making a truly personal connection requires companies to go above and beyond spammy calls and generic texts. While most brands have moved to email platforms that allow personalization, they are still relying on sales systems that either treat all customers the same way or rely on the sales agent to spend the time to personalise outreach. How can your sales team reach out at exactly the right time with exactly the right message, and make millions of customers feel like one in a million?
Getting this done in the world of high-velocity outbound phone and SMS sales requires technology that leverages every interaction customers have with your brand to trigger and optimize meaningful real-time conversations. The goal is to deliver tailored calls and SMS conversations that meet customers where they are, ultimately increasing conversion rates and driving incremental sales.
Let’s dissect what that looks like — and why it’s been so hard to accomplish.
Source: Regal.io
Why do companies struggle to personalize their B2C phone and SMS sales outreach?
The problem typically lies with the technology, not the people. Sales teams conducting phone outreach often operate within strict time constraints and face pressure to meet quotas, leaving little room for customized interactions. And, they are typically stuck in an outdated “dialing for dollars” mode, where the strategy is simply to “call more” or “call faster.” While this approach sounds good in theory, in reality, it makes efficiency the main goal and relegates personalization to an after-thought.
As a result, brands are missing important opportunities to build a high-converting sales flow and ultimately, drive increased revenue. Indeed, a study by Mckinsey found that fast-growing companies drive 40 percent more of their revenue from personalization than their slower-growing counterparts.
For B2C sales outreach, the challenge often starts even before the customer has picked up the phone — if an unrecognized number appears on the screen, the recipient is highly likely to disregard it. According to a study from Baylor University, 72 percent of sales calls aren’t answered.
But this isn’t the only aspect that gets in the way of representatives being able to tailor — and automate — their interactions with potential customers. To achieve this, reps need access to a wealth of accurate and comprehensive customer data, including preferences, demographics, purchase history, and previous interactions. Collecting and analyzing this data properly can be arduous, particularly without a robust data management system to take on the lion’s share of the workload. But forgoing these potential customer insights results in poor customer experience and diminished conversion rates.
Accessing customer data in the first place can also be a struggle due to privacy and data challenges. Not only do brands need customer permission for SMS and calls, they also face internal steps such as unifying their website, app, email, CRM, and interaction data to get a holisitc view of the customer. This task load can deter managers from even trying to personalise any outreach.
Source: Regal.io
How can an outbound phone sales solution make personalization easier?
Overcoming the barriers to personalization is not impossible — in fact, it can start with swapping out a typical B2C call center platform with a more robust and targeted solution. For example, the outbound phone and SMS sales solution Regal.io offers a suite of products that drive personalized conversations and enable brands to hit their growth goals faster. Regal’s solution includes Branded Caller ID, available to all 400 million cell phones in the US. With Branded Caller ID, a company’s name, location, and logo will appear on the call recipient’s screen instead of an unknown number fraught with suspicion.
Branded Caller ID helps to create a professional look and increases trust and credibility, as the recipient knows the incoming call is genuine. Customers are 80 percent more likely to pick up the phone if they know who is calling, so adding a small personal touch like this can work wonders for pickup and conversion rates.
Regal’s platform also unifies rich customer data — such as every email a prospect opens or clicks, every article they view on a brand’s help center or content pages, and every action they take in the account-creation process — so managers can build specific journeys to ensure that each customer interaction is exactly right. Reaching customers and prospects at the right time in the customer journey is also essential to growing conversion rates. With Regal, users can orchestrate their outreach, so it triggers at key revenue-generating moments. This lets sales teams catch their prospects at just the right time, increasing their chances of driving both conversions and incremental revenue.
A unified agent desktop, like that from Regal, shows the CRM data, time-series product data, and contact center data for each customer in a single view. These insights can give the rep a rich context for their interactions, allowing them to deliver a tailor-made message while making the customer feel valued.
Your outbound phone sales solution should enable your business to prioritize providing customer experiences with a human touch. This approach has driven effective metrics for Regal customers such as 25% revenue growth, 20x ROI, and 4x team productivity. And, dog food delivery service The Farmer’s Dog saw a 58 percent lift in conversion rates after implementing Regal. To learn more about how Regal can help your business grow, request a demo of its platform here.
