Personalized marketing is the process of interacting with customers and prospects with a granular understanding of who they are and what they need.
When marketing to customers, it's important to respond to their specific interests and needs. But when your target audience is made up of thousands of people or more, this approach can only get you so far. Your content, by definition, should be quite generic. You'll hit the mark with some people, but miss it completely with others.
Personalized marketing is the process of interacting with customers and prospects with a granular understanding of who they are and what they need. This highly specific form of marketing is made possible with modern data analytics, which can incorporate a customer's past purchases, location, age, occupation, and other factors to create campaigns tailored precisely to them.
With this form of marketing, you are much more likely to entice customers to make a purchase. It's different than what you're used to, so here we explain why it's worth it and offer specific steps you can take to make personalized marketing work for your business.
Benefits of personalized marketing
Personalized marketing can help build your business in several important ways.
- Greater consistency across channels. Customer demands are evolving and one of the things they want now is the ability to pick up on one channel (like your website) where they left off in another (like your physical store). This fluidity allows them to find you exactly where and when they need you.
- Better customer experience. Based on this consistency in messaging, along with targeted product recommendations and excellent customer service, customers will maintain a positive impression of your brand.
- Greater loyalty. This positive impression will keep them coming back, possibly for the rest of their lives. They will also tell other people about you and may even become brand advocates – those who publicly praise you without any prompting from you.
- Decrease in the sales cycle. When you make it easier for customers to buy, help them find what they need, treat them with care, and earn their trust, it takes less time to make sales, which means you can focus less on the arduous task of convincing them. to engage with you and more time to improve the customer experience.
- Increased revenue. Loyal customers spend more each time they make a purchase and buy more frequently. They also send more new customers your way. All of these factors add up to an increase in revenue.
The importance of data
The key to unlocking these benefits is data, as it informs the content you will use in personalized marketing campaigns. Data can come from a variety of sources, including CRM, email marketing tools, or other channels inside and outside your company.
Data analysis is a complex topic that is beyond the scope of this post. But it's important to remember that the quality of your data will have a big impact on the quality of the analysis. Consult your company's IT specialist or hire a consultant to ensure you're getting this part of the process right.
Segment your customers
Armed with granular data, you can segment your customers into very small groups who are likely to respond to certain messages, based on similar interests and preferences. Personalized marketing emails, for example, receive considerably higher open and click rates than those that don't contain targeted content.
Consider, for example, an email sent to all customers with the subject “Sweaters on Sale!” instead of a more personalized one with the subject line “On Sale! Lightweight sweaters in your favorite earthy tones!” By sending the second message instead of the first, you have instantly increased the interest factor for those who have already purchased similar items. By incorporating weather data from specific zip codes, you can even customize conditions in real time, like “Looking for the perfect jacket for today’s clouds and rain?”
One way to create permanent segments is to develop personas, which are composite characters based on subsets of customers. For example, you might create Gina, a 40-something professional who loves cats and crafts, or James, a 30-something father of three who loves fishing. As a retailer, you would create very different campaigns for customers who fit Gina's personality versus James' personality. B2B companies can do the same thing with specific types of businesses they want to sell to.
Save time with automation
Once you've used analytics software to classify your target groups, you can use another powerful modern technology, automation, to help you send the right messages to the right people. But what is this operation like? It can be any one or more of the following strategies:
- Email. You can set up a marketing platform to start an email flow when someone signs up for your newsletter. The first will be general, pointing to different sections of your website, for example. The next one will depend on what each client does. Selecting a specific link will put them on track to receive a new, more targeted stream that will offer even more link options and so on.
The following video explains more about personalized email marketing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlExCQnwk5Y
- Product recommendations. Within your website, you can create a feature to generate product recommendations based on browsing and purchasing history. You can also provide a “did you forget” function that presents regular purchases that are not in the current basket or items normally purchased with items in the current basket. Amazon is a good example of a company that successfully implements both of these functions.
- Blog Topics. You can automatically organize your blog posts by topic according to your personas or other groups. For example, a foodie commerce site might want to categorize its blog according to dinners, weeknight dinners, cocktails, and other categories that customers are likely to return to, based on past purchases and other information.
- Discount codes. A discount code delivered at the right time could be exactly what drives the customer to buy. You can set up an automated process to determine typical shopping times and other habits, and base delivery of discount codes on those factors.
Make personalized marketing work for your business
There is no magic formula to make personalized marketing work for every business. You'll need to experiment to find out what works for your customers, and you may even initially receive complaints about privacy issues. But continuing to make your marketing more personal will ultimately help you gain more sales and a reputation as a company that offers customers a frictionless experience.
