What is Contextual Marketing: and Does It Work?

Have you ever felt like today's marketing messages - push notifications, emails, ads - feel really irrelevant and impersonal to you and your situation?

"Buy this product/service now"

"Come and visit us"

"For your everyday shopping"

"Sale ends soon - shop now"

"Everything you need, all in one place"

There's nothing wrong with it. It just feels generic. Impersonal.

Now try to think of times marketing messages felt a bit more relevant to you.

"Perfect for you and the kids"

"Spend some quality time with your partner"

"Memories for life, made with the family"

Does it help you picture a product or service more? Does the extra context to your situation engage you more? That extra bit of relevance has a name: contextual marketing.

While I can't tell you it will definitely improve conversion rates, I'll put my bet on it.

I've run countless A/B tests with contextual marketing and deep segmentation. Time and time again, the more context - that's relevant context - the more successful it is. Even small improvements (say, +0.02%) can amount to huge increases in revenue (or your target KPI) at scale.

Let's give an example of how it could be done well. Do you have the Steps app on your phone?

You get to the end of the day and get a notification:

"A brief 2 minute walk will mean you've hit your move goal."

It works, but there's nothing to relate it to.

How about if it said this instead?

"A slow walk to your local shop and back means you'll hit your move goal. You'll get that thing you've been putting off until tomorrow."

Which one is more likely to make you do that 2 minute walk? If you said the latter, you're with the majority of the population.

Now, doing this at scale - when you're branching into millions (highly visible ads or large databases)... that's another conversation. It's possible, but it needs carefully curated copy and creative that's personalised, yet generic enough to account for enough people. An oxymoron, in a way!

Want a quick case study of contextual marketing in action?

At a chicken brand with 900k people in the database at the time, I segmented the database into 12 segments based on how recently they'd purchased.

I then took some generic copy and personalised it - a bit like this, for the top and bottom segments:

"I know you've been recently and you're a fan, but chicken is waiting for you."

"It's been a while! We miss you. Come back for the chicken you know and love."

(Hint: the real copy was MUCH better than that - this is just to give you the idea.)

Conversion rates will typically be better for a more engaged, loyal audience, but the bottom six segments still saw improvements in excess of 0.15% in conversion rate. When you factor in how many people that was, that's a huge amount of revenue - which is what I was tracking at the time.

You don't need 900k customers or a data team to put this into practice. Even knowing one relevant detail about your customer, and using it, can move the needle more than any generic "shop now" ever will.