Did you know that 72% of consumers will only engage with marketing that is customized to their specific interests?
Also, 80% of shoppers will buy from a brand that offers a personalized experience! Personalized marketing strategies are probably one of the most under-used tactics a brand uses to up their marketing game.
By injecting personalization into your marketing efforts, both inbound and outbound, you’ll inject personality into your brand and also promote loyalty with your customers.
Keep reading to find out how!
Understanding Personalized Marketing
Having a personalized marketing strategy means that marketers will use and leverage analytics and data. They will use this to create a more personal experience for prospects and customers.
Ultimately, you’ll use personalized marketing to engage and communicate with consumers on an individual level. You can speak directly to them and what their interests are.
Imagine, years ago when we started receiving emails with our name in the subject line, we were blown away by the sheer revolutionary feel of it. It made us feel like we weren’t simply a number to the brands that we engaged with.
Nowadays, personalized marketing takes that feeling to a whole new level.
Why Is Personalization Important?
Using personalization in your marketing means that you can create bespoke promotional messaging. What does this mean? Well, your messaging should be specifically for your prospects and customers. Do this, by identifying and speaking to their unique traits.
Personalized marketing is important because you can reach your prospects and customers on an individual level. This is better, as opposed to pushing one main message out to mass people and hoping the right people see it.
The most important part of personalization is that you can use almost any platform as part of your strategy. Personalization can be seen in website content and copy, email marketing, social media marketing, webinars, and much more.
Getting Started
Let’s get down to business. What do you need in order to get started with personalized marketing? What steps should you follow to ensure that you find success with your efforts? Let’s dive right in, shall we?
Step 1: Have a Strategy
No marketing campaign or strategy, personalized or not, can be successful without the right foundation to drive it. Here you need to have an understanding of both your brand and your desired target audience. Ask yourself the following questions:
- What message do I want my brand to send out to people?
- What type of behavior am I trying to initiate with my customer? Do I want increased sales, more physical visits to my store, or to drive loyalty?
- What resources do I have available to help me achieve my marketing goals? How much time can be set aside for the campaign tactics?
- Is my plan to implement personalization in the long-term or am I first opting for a short-term test?
By having the answers to these questions, you can begin to build a foundation to understand how you’re going to move forward.
Step 2: Gather Information
We know that personalized marketing requires data to be the building blocks upon which you construct your campaign. So, first and foremost, you need to know how you plan on gathering this information.
You can use things like small focus groups, social media, customer surveys, informal discussions, or even an anonymous feedback system. Put these on your website to gather information on both your prospects and your customers.
Try to stay away from systems that are too lengthy. Don’t ask these people to take too much time out of their day. Two or three short questions will probably be enough for you to start the building of your personalization strategy.
Step 3: Decide On Tactics
Once you have a wealth of information, you’re going to need ways that you’re going to disseminate your marketing message, this comes in the form of marketing tactics.
This step is all about the ‘how’!
Email Marketing
Your email marketing should come from a person, and not a company name. This helps people to think that they’re communicating with an actual human being, and not being mass-messaged by a marketing platform.
Also, it helps to tailor the design of your email marketing so that it doesn’t look like it came from a machine, and rather that it is authentic.
Marketing Automation
With personalized marketing, automation is your best friend.
The right marketing automation tools can help you nurture leads through the buyer journey without taking too much of your resources.
Database Segmentation
Definitely, 100%, you should make sure that your database is segmented correctly. This is so that the messaging you send out can be sent to the right groups of people.
Your database should be segmented by persona, which will allow you to personalize messages to different groups of people, instead of going down the mass communication route again.
Address People Directly
Use people’s names! Old email marketing that says, ‘Dear Customer’, is just not going to cut it for personalized marketing.
The whole point is that you’re able to communicate with these people on a friendly basis, ‘Hi Joe’ will go a long way.
Marketing Messages
Content is not a one-size-fits-all approach. Your marketing messages will need to built around the different types of marketing personas that you’ve identified within your database.
You can then truly customize the content that you distribute in a way that makes sense for your buyers and their journeys.
Engaging With Customers
Another great way to interact with your customers as well as engage in personalized marketing is to respond to them personally on social media platforms. We know that marketing automation is great and that the use of AI and chatbots are really trendy and useful.
But sometimes people simply want to talk to an actual human being, whether that be in a messaging platform or through a call centre. Ensure that you monitor the activity on your social media pages. Provide not only great content but be ready to respond as often as possible, it will go a long way.
Landing Pages
Landing pages are underestimated in the way that they can contribute to personalized marketing and achieving your goals. Here, you can also use your buyer and marketing personas to tailor your content and emails, which can, in turn, direct them to personalized landing pages that are really focused on them, and what they want to see.
Now that you know some of the great personalization tactics you can use, perhaps now you can take the time to understand how personalized marketing can benefit your brand and your business.
The Benefits Of Personalized Marketing
Apart from your client base no longer feeling like just a number to you, what are some of the other benefits that you’re bound to see when implementing personalized marketing strategies?
Better Experience for Your Customer
Personalization is one definite way to enhance your customer’s experience and how they interact with your brand.
Not only is the customization you can do with marketing going to be great for you to create and find customers, but having these ultra-personalized, ultra-customized marketing tactics will allow you to nurture and strengthen relationships with current customers.
Target Those That Matter
With personalized marketing and the groundwork that comes with it, particularly the work you have to put in on your database in order to get it ‘personalization-ready’, you’re going to be able to say that you’ve truly targeted your ideal market.
Through personalized marketing, you can really drill down into the demographics of the audience you want, and the one you’re talking to.
Higher ROI (Return On Investment)
Budgeting for personalized marketing can be pretty tough, considering that it’s a tough nut to crack.
When putting together your budget though, consider that consumers are more likely to engage with a brand that uses their history to create an experience for them.
By connecting on a deeper level with your customers, customizing their journey, and by honing your marketing message, you’ll see a direct positive impact on your ROI.
A Handyman Is as Good as the Tools He Uses
The tools and software are available to businesses that can help in implementing and monitoring personalized marketing efforts are varied.
There are tools, like Sitecore, that are highly involved in data processing and providing powerful analytics for all of your campaigns. What is Sitecore? There are two things when looking for your marketing personalization tools that you need to watch for! One, the importance placed on the data. Two, the ability to monitor and report on your performance.
Beauty in Personalization
Personalized marketing really leaves nothing to the imagination, the gist of it is that it gives you an avenue to make your customers and prospects feel important and valued.
If implemented correctly, with the right amount of preparation, personalized marketing can truly open up a whole new world of lead generation and nurturing.
Head on over to our business section if you’re looking for more truly great content for your brand.
