Marketers address you by your first name because they know that it is your sweetest sound to you. Promotional emails utilize personalization knowing well that it is a powerful tool to motivate you to take action. Target audiences click on emails that are personalized 40% more than they do to ordinary ones.
Personalized marketing goes beyond the mention of a person’s name. It now involves creating mobile and web experiences for individual customers. You can incorporate it in the marketing mediums like email, blogs, social media, and any other of your choice to reach your prospects. Doing personalized marketing without a clear picture of what a prospect needs or wants, your technique will fail. Fortunately, insights from marketing experts are available to help you transform how you do your personalized marketing.
Personalized Marketing Has a Foundation on Data
Your strategy in personalized marketing is derived from data. Therefore, how well you collect, analyze, measure, and interpret data is what will determine the milestone you achieve. So, your first concern should be collecting data in order to understand your typical customer, and afterward create a proper campaign.
While marketing departments are adopting personalized messages to reach their audience, the challenge is that there is still struggle to scale personalization —particularly where there are a huge number of customers to address. Here are things to consider to segment and personalize your marketing.
Customer Segmentation
Once you have accumulated data that you can analyze, it presents an opportunity to segment them according to gender, location, income, age, pain points, and interests. This way, the marketer can decide on a suitable language to address a particular audience and recommend appropriate products.
If you sell retail products to a wide range of audience, you will be selective in finding which messages reach certain customers. This segmentation requires the company to have a significant content library to distribute accordingly. The content should contain messages that meet specific needs to lead the customer to the next stage of the funnel.
Be Relevant and Build Trust
It can be detractive for a brand if you use personalization the wrong way. For instance, using predictive measures based on shopping preferences of the customer, as we see on social media, often comes across as spying on personal life and even creepy to some people. So, it is essential to do personalized marketing by understanding the customer journey first.
Understanding a client’s journey means knowing the customer from the interaction series you have with them. From the moment they first visit your brand, their queries, purchases, to their buying patterns, you will need to know it all so as to personalize your marketing effectively. Besides the journey patterns and buying habits, a marketer can invest in real-time artificial intelligence tools to understand intentions the customer might be having.
Content Creation
Personalization offers an opportunity for a business to create content for the target user and leave an extra-special memory for the user. When the prospective consumer encounters unique content that answers their needs and gratifies them, it creates an opportunity for the business to sell.
A great example of content creation strategy is the Coke campaign which entailed printing names on the bottles in order to attract the young generation. This marketing project helped the company in growing sales than they had done it in 10 years. The key is to help the buyer find what relates closely to them. Just like it would wow a potential customer to find their name on a coke bottle, you want to create content that will motivate your customers to buy your products even when they don’t need it.
Showing the Human Side of a Brand
Personalization succeeds when the business shows their audience that they are interacting with fellow humans on the other end. This strategy includes allowing your customers to ask questions, leave feedback, and get responses in time. It also includes adding the faces of the staff on the company website and putting names of customer care personnel in the chats. The customers need to know that humans are behind the business operations, and not robots.
Businesses now use names of department heads to enhance accountability and friendly experiences.
Personalized Marketing Recommends Better Products
By knowing the customer habits, a business can suggest products to their buyers. That is what Amazon and E-bay do. Their suggestions happen when the customers are presently searching for them, or through emails to remind the consumers to make their unfinished purchases.
For instance, a bookselling business can suggest appropriate books for their audience depending on their previous reads or any subject they presently have an interest in. This saves the customer the time they might use asking around from friends or searching the web.
Personalization is More than Connecting With the Audience
Personalization in marketing goes beyond connecting with the possible clientele base. It is an avenue to help both your prospect and present customers to get relevant and helpful information, and at the same time result in conversions and boost sales. By giving a suggestion or recommending products according to customer trends, the business can increase sales and revenue.
Choosing the Appropriate Technology
Shrewd marketers leverage artificial intelligence, customized content, machine learning, and other forms of marketing technology in one way or another to reach their target consumers. These tools can help a business track customer behavior. Using the correct tools make interesting ads, use proper language, make the tasks simpler to stay relevant and increase engagement.
Personalization is definitely taking over marketing because people want brands that relate to them on a personal level, understands their needs, provide relevant feedback, and information. The motivation behind personalization should be serving the customer interests first.
After collecting the required data, you need to put yourself in the shoes of the customer to see stuff in their perspective so as to effectively personalize their message. Adopting personalization in your marketing strategy will bolster your return on investment and strengthen the relationship you have with your customer. The relevancy of your brand highly depends on how well you execute your marketing strategy, so take it seriously.
