When looking for ways to market your MSP/IT business better, you might be coming across the term ‘personalization’, a lot. All that will have you believe it is a new concept, taking shape in today’s internet age, but, in reality, personalization, often called one-to-one marketing, isn’t exactly new. In a faraway time, before strip malls and big shopping centers, you would have gone to your local dress shop, men’s wear store, or local butcher. Since you shopped there routinely the owner got to know your preferences and tastes. If a special cut of meat came in that the butcher knew you often wanted, he’d let you know when you walked in the market. The local clothier might have seen something that was typical of your style and “set it aside in the back “ for you. This was personalization. We just didn’t “label” it as such.

Modern personalization is much the same, but driven no longer by close acquaintance, but by technology. The clearest example is Amazon. Once you have shopped on the site, “they” begin making suggestions for future purchases based on what you bought or browsed through on previous visit to the “store” –just like the local dress shop once did. The difference is that the old method was limited by the scope of the business. Once the store attracted a critical mass of customers, that individual knowledge of each customer was, inherently, lost.

Marketing automation has brought this notion back, in a way that is not limited by market size. There is no limit to size of a market base that can be catered to by automation.

How far have you gone to investigate this new technology? Here’s a glimpse of what’s out there.