Personalization has completely changed how businesses market to customers. When done right, marketing personalization can drastically improve customer service and loyalty. Although implementing personalized marketing can be a challenge, it’s more than worth the ROI boost.
What is Personalized Marketing?
Personalized marketing is when a business or brand tailors its marketing based on individual customer data they’ve collected. These include shopping preferences, interests, and purchase history. For marketing departments, personalization can be used to increase engagement.
It’s estimated that the average American is exposed to 4,000 to 10,000 ads every day. Your customers are unlikely to pay attention to your marketing strategy unless they’re literally speaking to them. That’s because people don’t mind seeing ads they’re interested in.
How Can You Get Started With Personalized Marketing?
It’s not easy to determine the benefits customers are seeking from your brand. These benefits also change based on the person, business, or situation. Here’s how you can make sense of it.
Develop a Personalized Marketing Strategy
There are three ways to create a strong personalized marketing plan: know your customers’ needs, pull from their past experiences, and anticipate their future needs. You need to ask questions like, “what are my customers looking for when they’re looking for my products?”
This strategy has to think about the customer first and foremost. If your processes include siloed communication, repeated communication, or no communication after an initial sign-up, that leads to a bad user experience. Make it easy for your customers to get what they need.
Offer Benefits Without Coming Off as “Creepy”
Let’s say you want to add a personalized video to your website because you can use it to address your customers directly. While it’s true that videos are a great way to add human interaction to your brand, you need to know how to use this medium to maximize its benefits.
Remember that personalization skirts a fine line between being too personal and not personal enough. If you want to provide your customers with relevant content, offer reminders of past purchases, and provide valuable suggestions, you need to be subtle with how you ask for info.
Use Tools That Help With Personalized Marketing
A big problem with personalization is scaling. It’s easy to make personalized emails for 10 customers but harder for 1,000.
Here’s what you can use to make personalization easy.
- Use analytics platforms, like Google Analytics, to collect data for campaigns.
- Use a data management platform to hold campaign data and create user segments.
- Use CRMs to store customer information, find leads, and integrate with other software.
- Use post-click landing pages to capture prospect data as soon as it comes in.
- Use tag management platforms to collect data when customers land on your site.
- Use email marketing platforms to personalize and automate email campaigns.
- Use demand-side platforms to deliver ads to the right prospects and platforms.
With these tools, you can reduce bounce rates, optimize future campaigns, and increase ROI.
How Can You Personalize Your Marketing Message?
A McKinsey research study showed that personalization reduces customer acquisition costs by 50%. To capitalize on these financial gains, you need to create personalized content.
Using Personalized Video on Your Website
Video can seem like a medium that’s difficult to personalize, but it’s possible with a bit of effort. You should create a personalized video after you get to know the customer because you can use information, like the person’s name, business, and buying preferences, for your content.
Remember: you can’t come off as creepy. If the customer didn’t discuss with you directly what they want to see from you, they’ll know you used data to get that information.
Using Digital Advertising Off Your Website
When creating internet advertising campaigns, personalization has to take precedent. Don’t stop at targeting your customers via keywords or demographics because that won’t be personal enough. Instead, make a relevant ad based on the user’s preferences gained from analytic data.
To create relevance, the headline, logo, imagery, and brand colors have to change depending on your target. You also need to make these ads link to pages that match said preferences.
Using Email Campaigns and Automation
Even in modern advertising campaigns, email is still incredibly important for establishing trust in your consumer. Email also gives you a channel to speak with your subscribers after a sale. With dynamic content (messages based on behavioral triggers), you can truly customize your emails.
One common trigger used in email marketing is spending caps. For example, a company may send one email if a customer spends over $200 and another for customers who don’t.
Using Personalization on Social Media
Social media is still an underutilized marketing channel because it’s seen as a way to share personal photos with people you know. However, social media is one of the best places to implement personalization and sell to a younger customer base, like Millenials and Gen Z.
From Snapchat’s games and Geofilters to Instagram’s emoji slider to Twitter’s business customer support pages, there are so many ways you can use social media to sell.
